Yuki no nihonbashi (Nihonbashi under snow)

Bannai Kōkan (1900-1963) was a Tokyo painter and printmaker who studied painting under Bannai Seran (1881-1936), and inherited his name (he had previously been known as Sakauchi Hiroshi). As a print designer, he was one of the artists in the stable of the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō, and was part of the shin-hanga (modern print) movement that gave a highly successful lease of life to Japanese prints in the early to mid-20th century, perhaps even more to overseas markets than to Japan herself. This work was originally proposed for the series Fifty-three Modern Views of the Tokaido, but in the event, only three of them were published, including this delightful print, which would not look out of place reproduced on the cover of the New Yorker.

Drawing on precedents in Kiyochika Kobayashi’s (1847-1915) kōsen-ga ‘light-pictures’, Kōkan combined the effects of perspectival space with those of light and atmosphere in images that reflect Western sources in an impressionistic haze of veils of snow. The composition emphatically reflects the modern character of a reconstructed Tokyo in the years after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. This view juxtaposes something of the old, in the Nihonbashi fish-markets at lower right, with the overwhelming presence of the new, evident in the green streetcar crossing the bridge, and Japan’s first department store, the striking Mitsukoshi building towering above it.

Source:  David Bell, 'A new vision: modern Japanese prints from the Heriot Collection', Tuhinga, 31 (2020), forthcoming.

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art    May 2019