OKUYAMA • View of Sakurabashi from Shirauobashi • 1942 Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - 20th century

Artist: Okuyama Gihachirō (奥山儀八郎, 1907–1981)
Title: Shirauobashi kara Sakurabashi o miru (白魚橋から櫻橋を見る) — "View of Sakurabashi from Shirauobashi"

Subject: View eastward from Shirauobashi along the Sakuragawa canal toward the steel span of Sakurabashi, in the Kyōbashi–Hatchōbori district of central Tokyo — a waterway that no longer exists
Technique: Nishiki-e, woodblock print in colours on paper
Date: 1942 (Shōwa 17)
Publisher: Ibaya Senzaburō (Ibasen)
Format: Horizontal (yoko-e), sheet approx. 37 × 24 cm (14.6 × 9.4 inches)
Signature: Block-printed signature of the artist at lower left; block-printed title at upper right in the pre-war form 櫻橋
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Impression & Colours: Excellent. A crisp, well-registered impression with the keyblock sharp throughout — note the fine hatched carving in the canal water and stone embankments, which gives the lower half of the composition its shimmering texture. Colours are fresh and strong: the brick reds and teal greens of the canal-side buildings, the warm ochre of the masonry, and the soft bokashi passages of the clouded sky are all beautifully preserved.

Paper: The paper is firm and supple. Light soiling in the central area of the sheet, and minor even toning. Overall an excellent example.
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The Scene — A Quiet Morning on the Kyōbashi Canals

From the parapet of Shirauobashi — the "Whitefish Bridge," named for the shirauo once presented from this stretch of water to the shōgun's table — Okuyama looks east down the Sakuragawa canal. The steel arch of Sakurabashi spans the water at centre; barges lie moored beneath it. On either bank, the working architecture of pre-war Tokyo crowds the stone embankments: corrugated warehouses, timber merchants' houses, tiled roofs in brick red, teal, and ochre, a willow trailing at lower left, telegraph poles against a softly clouded sky.

The manner is unmistakably modern — flattened planes of colour, a poster-designer's eye for silhouette and pattern — yet the mood belongs to the topographical tradition of Edo: an ordinary corner of the city, observed with affection and recorded with care. It is closer in spirit to Hiroshige's quiet canal views than to any heroic panorama, filtered through the graphic sensibility of a 1930s advertising artist.
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Okuyama Gihachirō — Between Sōsaku-Hanga and the Old Masters
Okuyama Gihachirō occupies a fascinating position between the two great camps of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. Born in Yamagata in 1907 and essentially self-taught, he debuted at the Japan Creative Print Association (Nihon Sōsaku Hanga Kyōkai) exhibition in 1928 — the heart of the sōsaku-hanga movement — and in the same year became Japan's pioneering designer of woodblock advertising art, producing celebrated poster campaigns for Nihon Keori (Nikke) and later the famous Nikka Whisky labels and posters, work now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Then, remarkably, he crossed the aisle. From 1936, under the guidance of the great ukiyo-e scholar Ishii Kendō, Okuyama devoted himself to the revival of traditional Japanese printmaking, and by 1941 had begun working in the classical collaborative manner with professional carvers and printers — the production model of shin-hanga. This print of 1942 belongs precisely to that moment: a modernist's design realised with traditional craft discipline. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo holds a substantial group of his woodblock prints from these same years, 1941–1943, including a closely related 1942 Tokyo townscape of Keiō University in Mita. After the war he ran the Nihon Hanga Kenkyūjo in Kanda, producing ukiyo-e recuts and his own shin-hanga-style designs, and from 1954 operated his own print workshop in Matsudo, which his son continued after his death in 1981.