There are thirty people in total in the three boats of The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The print shows three oshiokuri-bune, and each boat has eight visible rowers holding oars. At the front of each boat are two additional relief crew members, producing a total of ten men per boat and thirty men represented overall.
The count is easy to misread because the boats are tiny, crowded, and partly hidden by the wave and their own sides. Only twenty-two of the thirty men are visibly depicted in the print, according to analysis discussed in the artwork’s documentation. That distinction explains why some viewers count fewer people when inspecting the image.
Another common mistake is to multiply the three boats by eight and answer twenty-four. That calculation includes only the rowers and leaves out the two additional crew members assigned to each boat. The answer “thirty” refers to the total represented crew, not merely the figures whose bodies are easiest to see.