YAMAMOTO Shōun • Playing Battledore at New Year • 1909 Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - Taishō period (1912-1926)

Artist: Yamamoto Shōun (山本昇雲, 1870–1965), also known as Matsutani
Title: Hane-asobi (羽子あそび) — "Playing Battledore,"
Series: Imasugata (今すがた) — "Beauties of the Present Day," No. 29 of the series of 48 designs published 1906–1909

Date: 1909 (Meiji 42)
Publisher: Matsuki Heikichi V (松木平吉, Daikokuya), Nihonbashi, Tokyo
Technique: Colour woodblock print (mokuhanga), nishiki-e
Format: Ōban tate-e, full sheet with margins, approx. 38 × 26 cm (15 × 10.2 inches)
Signature: Signed Shōun (昇雲) with the artist's seal at lower left of the image
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Impression & Colours: Very good. A well-registered impression with the fine keyblock detail of the hair, the actor's face on the battledore, and the intricate shibori-and-crane textile pattern all crisply preserved. The colours are very well preserved throughout: the kimono's turquoise, lavender, pink, and persimmon remain fresh, and the deep plum-grey ground — printed to show the natural woodgrain of the block — retains its full, velvety depth.

Paper: Very good. Full margins on all sides. The orange pigment has oxidised in places — a common trait of Meiji-era orange-red pigments — producing light staining in the margins and a few small areas within the image. The sheet is complete and presents very well overall. Woodgrain visible!
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The Scene — A Kabuki Hero on a Battledore

A young girl in her New Year finery leans back, battledore raised, eyes fixed on the shuttlecock spinning down through the darkness at upper right. She is playing hanetsuki, the badminton-like game played by girls in the first days of the year, and Shōun has caught her at the most alive instant of it — mouth open, hair ornaments trembling, the whole body twisting up toward the falling hane. Her kimono is a tour de force of textile printing: a shibori-patterned ground scattered with folded origami cranes in pink, turquoise, and gold, set against a plum-dark background printed to show the grain of the woodblock itself.

The wittiest detail is the battledore. Painted on its face is a glowering kabuki actor in red kumadori makeup — a miniature yakusha-e inside a bijin-ga, ukiyo-e quoting its own history. Decorated hagoita of exactly this kind, bearing padded portraits of the season's favourite actors, were sold each December at the battledore fairs (hagoita-ichi) still held at Sensō-ji today, and were given to girls as auspicious talismans: the shuttlecock's flight was said to drive away evil, and a battledore protected the child who owned it. Shōun folds the whole custom into a single joyful image.
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The Series — Imasugata: The Last Flowering of Meiji Ukiyo-e

The Imasugata ("Beauties of the Present Day") series, published by Matsuki Heikichi in four installments between 1906 and 1909, is Shōun's masterwork and one of the most highly regarded print series of the late Meiji era. Across its 48 designs, Shōun recorded the women and children of his own moment — bathing, sewing, telephoning, visiting the zoo, playing at New Year — with a documentary affection that preserves the fashions and daily rituals of a Japan in transition, still touched everywhere by the mood of old Edo. The complete series is documented in the digitized collection of the National Diet Library, Tokyo.

This sheet, No. 29, belongs to the final 1909 installment. Historically the series occupies a pivotal place: produced by the traditional publisher–carver–printer system in the years when single-sheet ukiyo-e was dying, it looks directly forward to the shin-hanga bijin-ga of Hashiguchi Goyō and Itō Shinsui a decade later. Collectors of the genre often treat Shōun as the essential bridge between the two eras.
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Yamamoto Shōun — Reporter, Painter, Chronicler of the Everyday

Born in Kōchi on Shikoku in 1870, Shōun (given name Mosaburō, also called Matsutani) trained under the literati painter Taki Katei before joining the Tokyo publisher Tōyōdō, where he became one of the leading illustrator-reporters of the magazine Fūzoku Gahō — covering disasters, wars, and street life issue after issue. That reporter's eye for the telling everyday moment is exactly what animates his prints. Alongside his illustration work he exhibited paintings of beauties and bird-and-flower subjects at the official Bunten and Teiten salons throughout his long career.

His woodblock series for Matsuki Heikichi — Imasugata and the companion Kodomo asobi ("Children at Play") — are today considered his defining achievement and rank among the representative works of modern Japanese printmaking. He died in 1965 at the age of ninety-five, one of the last living links to the Meiji print world.