| |
 Sketch-tour books and prints of the early twentieth century [continued]
Scott Johnson
There is no text accompanying the prints, but a printed label attached to the
folder acts not only as a colophon but as an advertisement. The four prints of
the Shin Ryôdo Miyage series announce the future publication of a
Bun'endô book to be called Shin Nihon Kembutsu (Sights of the New Japan).
This remarkable book will be discussed later. The second landscape print series
to be completed in 1917 was Bun'endô's Hanshin Meishô Zue (Pictures of
Famous Places in the Hanshin Area), an affectionate look at the Osaka-Kobe
(Hanshin) area in no less than 30 vertical ô-ban prints. The five artists are
Akamatsu Rinsaku (1878-1953), Noda Kyuhô (1879-1971), Hata Tsuneharu(1883-? ),
Mizushima Nihou (or Nihofu) (1884-1958) and Nagai Hyosai (1882-1945).
As with Shin Ryôdo Miyage, the prints were first published in folders,
in this case six folders of five prints each, with an additional map and
contents page in the first folder. The first folder of Hanshin Meishô Zue
prints came out in May, one week before the Shin Ryôdo Miyage prints. The
Hanshin prints came out at fairlv regular intervals, and the series was
completed by August 1917.The link connecting the five artists was their
employment as illustrators for the Osaka Asahi News. Their artistic styles are
strikingly different. The blockcutter, Ôkura Hambei, and the printer, Nishimura
Kumakichi, convey such contrasts as Nihou's fondness for fine lines and subdued
color and the sketch-like style and bright splashes of color of Rinsaku and
Kyûhô. The variety is appealing, and the print series is a remarkably
accomplished first for publisher Kanao Tanejirô, his artists, and indeed, for
the developing shin-hanga movement.
Hanshin Meishô Zue was not, however, a financial success. The artists
were little-known in Tôkyô, and perhaps more importantly, the Ôsaka-Kôbe area
was considered by many Tôkyô residents to be a remote and merely commercial
center. Unsold print sets and the blocks themselves were destroyed in the fires
that swept Tôkyô following the Great Kantô Earthquake in 1923.
The remaining two shin-hanga landscape series that began publication in 1917
were the eight prints of Itô Shinsui's Ô mi Hakkei, published by Watanabe
Shôsaburô, and Nihon Fûkei Hanga, published by Nakajima Jûtarô. Nihon
Fûkei Hanga (A collection of Japanese landscape prints) was initially
published in ten series of five prints each. Each series had stylistic unity
because the five prints are by one artist. In this sense, Nakajima's approach is
similar to Watanabe's, but considerable variety is achieved by using six artists
for the series as a whole. In this, Nakajima's approach is similar to Kanao's.
The six artists are: Ishii Hakutei, his younger brother Ishii Tsuruzô
(1887-1973), Hirafuku Hyakusui, Morita Tsunetomo(1881-1933), Sakamoto Hanjirô
(1882-1969) and Kosugi Misei . As we have seen, Hirafuku Hyakusui and Kosugi
Misei had been active in the world of sketch-tour books from the earliest years
of the genre.
Although sometimes considered a sôsaku hanga series, the blocks for Nihon
Fûkei Hanga were cut by Igami Bonkotsu, another veteran of the sketch-tour
book world. The initial series appeared at intervals from 1917 to 1920; it was
revived again some years later in the same format but with other artists.
As mentioned previously, sales of the Hanshin series were disappointing.
Shinsui's Ô mi Hakkei (Eight Views of Lake Biwa) prints seem to have been
more successful, but nevertheless Shinsui turned away from landscape themes to
his forte, paintings and prints of beautiful women. For Kanao Tanejirô and
Watanabe Shôsaburô, 1917 must have been a time for reflection on the future
course of graphic art devoted to scenery.
Watanabe's response was to seek out other artists for single-sheet prints. In
1918 Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) made his first prints for Watanabe followed by
Yoshida Hiroshi in 1920. Watanabe, always a shrewd and perceptive businessman,
recognised one of the important advantages of publishing landscape and genre
prints as opposed to book illustrations: the interest of foreign customers.
Books with many pages of Japanese text seemed repellant to many foreigners, even
if the graphic art was of high quality. Contemporary landscape prints, however,
met with immediate success. Watanabe anticipated this, and his business
flourished.
Kanao Tanejirô's response was quite different. He had always been a bookman,
and his next projects were not prints but books. San'yô Angya, a somewhat
different travel book, was published by Bun'endô in 1917. San'yô Angya
(An Introduction to the Sanyô Area), is based on serialised features from the
Osaka Asahi News by the American anthropologist Fredrick Starr. Starr has been
vividly introduced to contemporary readers by Oliver Statler in his 1986 A
Japanese Pilgrimuge. As an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago,
Starr began to visit Japan to arrange an Ainu village for the 1904 St. Louis
World's Fair. He became an avid and tireless traveler in Japan, visiting at
frequent intervals. Within Japan he always wore formal Japanese clothing, and
this, along with his outspoken opinions, made him a favorite with newsmen. For
several years his speeches and travel impressions had a following in Japan. Some
of these articles appealed so much to Kanao Tanejirô that he sought book
publication rights. Starr's first book in Japanese was San'yô Angya. As
mentioned earlier, the five artists of the Hanshin Meishô Zue were all
associated with the Ôsaka Asahi News where Starr's travel columns originated.
Each of these artists contributed a color woodcut to San'yô Angya; Nagai
Hyosai's woodcut is a portrait of Starr in formal attire, with a star motif as
his family crest.
The next year, Bunendô brought out Shin Nihon Kembutsu, one of the
most visually arresting of the sketch-tour books. The title means 'Scenes of the
New Japan'. By 1918, when the book was published, the Japanese Empire had
already grown impressively, but the grim push toward all-out war in the Pacific
was still years away. It seemed at the time, at least to Japanese eyes, that
Japan might actually succeed in benevolently leading the rest of Asia into new
political and economic development. Shin Nihon Kembutsu reflects this
optimism. The book is divided into sections corresponding to parts of the 'New
Japanese Empire': Taiwan, Karafuto (Sakhalin), Chôsen (the Korean peninsula),
Manshû (Manchuria) and Seitô (Tsingtao). The artists are Ishikawa Toraji, Yasuda
Minoru, Nakazawa Hiromitsu and Nakagawa Hachirô, who traveled through Korea to
Manchuria and then Tsingtao.
This is the book announced on the publication label of the 1917 print series
Shin Ryôdo Miyage. Curiosity aroused by that publication announcement was
amply satisfied by the numerous illustrations and lengthy text of Shin Nihon
Kembutsu.
Ishikawa Toraji uses gaudy, tropical colors for his Taiwan woodcuts. Yasuda
Minoru has the freshest vision of any of the artists in the book. Using pale
washes and the white of the paper itself to suggest the snows of Sakhalin, his
figures are clothed in bold, primarycolors. The effect is to contrast the
dynamic activity of the people with the starkly beautiful landscape. Hiromitsu
and Hachirô offer numerous appealing views. Hiromitsu's most surprising
illustration is a stunning, exquisitely printed portrait of a Korean woman.
Shin Nihon Kembutsu contains 60 woodcuts and numerous halftone
illustrations.The text is lengthy, 456 pages, and was written by the artists. Of
the woodcuts, twenty-two are single-color prints, and several of the others are
restricted to two or three colors. The impetus was doubtless to economise on
blockcutting and printing fees, but the juxtaposition of these prints with those
more lavishly produced creates an impression of rich variety. The full-color
woodcuts reveal new artistic palettes, especially for Toraji and Yasuda Minoru.
The blockcutter was Okada Seijirô and the printer was Nishimura Kumakichi, the
same artisans who produced the Shina Taikan woodcuts.
In 1919 Bun'endô brought out two books similar in appearance to San'yô
Angya. The first was Kinai Angya (An Introduction to the Inner
Provinces). There are color woodcuts by Hiromitsu and Nihou, both familiar
Bun'endô illustrators, but also by Nabei Katsuyuki (1888-1969), Katô Seiji
(1887-1942), Shima Seien (1893-1970) and Yamaguchi Sohei (1882-1961). The
authors include such major figures as Yosano Akiko, Kambara Ariake, Takahama
Kyoshi, Katô Hekigodô and Aoki Gettô.
The second book was Ofuda Angya (An Introduction to ofuda) by
Frederick Starr. Ofuda are woodcut name labels, sometimes quite large and
attractive, which were pasted by travelers to shrine and temple gates. In the
Taishô period ofuda were often illustrated; collecting them became popular, and
Frederick Starr himself was a discerning collector. The book outlines his
pilgrimages to various temples and shrines, and the ofuda seen or affixed there.
There are ten color woodcuts by Hiromitsu and numerous line illustrations by
Nihou.
By 1920 the Tôkaidô Highway had changed greatly. Railway lines had replaced
much of the old road, and horse-drawn omnibuses carried tourists down some of
the more attractive remaining sections. People walking the Tôkaidô diminished
yearly, but its romantic appeal was still strong.
Mizushima Nihou was involved in two Tôkaidô projects in 1920. He had become
an active artist for Bun'endô publications, most notably Hanshin Meishô
Zue. By profession he was a cartoonist, known especially for his baseball
cartoons for the Osaka Asahi News. Cartooning was in a golden age at that time,
and in 1920 a group of cartoonists, including Nihou, Maekawa Sempan ( 1888-1960)
and Okamoto Ippei (1886-1948), painted a series of 55 paintings mounted as
handscrolls, known as the Tôkaidô Gojûsantsugi Manga E-maki (A Cartoon
Handscroll of the 53 Stations of the Tôkaidô).
Nihou's other 1920 project was a sketch-tour book for Bunendô, Tôkaidô
Gojûsantsugi Fu Setonaikai (53 Stations of the Tôkaidô. Supplement: Seto
Inland Sea). The hard-backed book contains twenty-nine color woodcuts and
forty-nine line illustrations. Nihou's travel journal text is further
embellished with cartoons and light-hearted dialogue. Nihou was capable of
creating powerful compositions on the post-card sized pages of this book.
Perhaps because cartooning trained him to make the most of small areas, some of
Nihou's woodcuts and line illustrations create muscular, nearly monumental
effects by modest means.
As a phenomenon of graphic art in book form, the sketch-tour book finished
with Nihou's 1920 Tôkaidô Gojûsantsugi Fu Setonaikai fifteen years after
Hiromitsu had started it with his pioneering Gojûsantsugi Suketchi. In
1921 Bunendô published Gozan Sosui, an appealing album of thirty color
woodcut scenes of China by Ôtani Sonyû(1887-1940). Sonyû was a recognised
Nihonga artist, a pupil of Takeuchi Seihô, but he was also a priest at the
Nishihongan-ji temple complex in Kyôto. His older brother, Ôtani Kôtan, was
abbot of Nishihongan-ji. The two of them traveled together to China to visit
temples. Sonyû made sketches which resulted in the colorful woodcut folding
album that is the high-light of Gozan Sosui. Otani Kôtan kept a diary, a
facsimile of which makes up a smaller companion volume, the two originally sold
as a boxed set. The folding album format for Sonyû's woodcuts is a hybrid, at
the same time a book and a series of prints. Kanao Tanejirô had taken another
step away from the standard bookformat, and into the world of prints.
In 1922 Bun'endô published Nihon Taikan, a series of fifty
single-sheet prints by Nakazawa Hiromitsu. Kanao was responding strongly to the
challenge of rival landscape prints. Fifty color woodcuts was a financial as
well as aesthetic challenge. The title, 'A Compendium of Japan', reflects the
earlier Bun'endô book Shina Taikan. There are prints of Miyajima, Nagoya,
the then new sumô arena in Tokyo and so on; but most of the prints center on the
Kansai area, especially Kyoto and Nara. As with the book illustrations for
Shina Taikan and Shin Nihon Kembutsu, the blocks for the Nihon
Taikan prints were cut by Okada Seijiro and printed by Nishimura Kumakichi.
On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kantô Earthquake, and
the fires that followed it. The print studios of Watanabe Shôsaburô, Kanao
Tanejirô and others were destroyed. Watanabe was offered immediate financial
assistance by several loyal foreign collectors and dealers, and quickly
reestablished his studio. Kanao Tanejiro had not cultivated foreign clientele
and his situation was more desperate. Unsold prints and books, along with their
woodblocks, were lost. Eventually Kanao was forced to move back to Osaka where
he scaled down his involvement in the increasingly expensive business of
publishing woodblock prints and book illustrations. He did publish another print
series by Hiromitsu, and in fact died just after proofing his final publication,
the 1947 Osaka Sanjûrokkei (36 Views of Osaka), a nostalgic look at
pre-war Osaka by his lifelong friend Akamatsu Rinsaku. In the wake of the 1923
earthquake, the sketch-tour genre moved exclusively into the world of prints,
exemplified by the works of Yoshida Hiroshi and Watanabe's prolific artist
Kawase Hasui.
Kanao Tanejiro's Bun'endô imprint publications have been featured in this
essay because he became the most active and innovative publisher in the
sketch-tour genre. Although aware of other graphic media, Kanao had a personal
affection for the woodcut medium, and persisted in its use in book illustration
long after other media had become fashionable.
Looking at his publications now, and the fresh colors of the hundreds of
woodcuts he fostered, it is clear that his stubborn loyalty to the woodcut
medium has given us an irreplacable legacy. His loyalty to books over prints
cost him dearly in economic terms, but as scholars begin to assess the texts by
the artists of the sketch-tour books, that decision, too, may be vindicated.
Yoshida Hiroshi and Watanabe Shôsaburô became the most widely known
publishers of the landscape prints which continued the sketch-tour tradition.
Their accomplishments are well documented and rightly praised. But a close look
at the sketch-tour books of 1905-1920 reveals a wide range of major artists
producing graphic art of stylistic and thematic variety which is vastly greater
than the print images of Yoshida or Hasui. The fifteen years of sketch-tour book
publishing outlined in this essay reveal the foundation upon which the
shin-hanga landscape print world was built. To my eyes, at least, the aesthetic
advances of the sketch-tour genre are to be found in the fresh, innovative
sketch-tour books published by Kanao Tanejirô and others, and in the early print
series. Artists rose to the challenge of new formats and media: artisans
developed new ways to reveal changing palettes and styles: publishers sought out
young artists and succeeded in finding enthusiastic public support. This shared
sense of discovery animates the graphic art with a lasting appeal.
© Boston Book
Co. 2001
|
|