Gihachiro Okuyama

Gihachiro Okuyama (奥山儀八郎, 1907–1981) was a prolific and versatile Japanese printmaker, commercial artist, and chronicler of the history of coffee in Japan, associated with both the shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga movements. He was born on February 17, 1907, in Sagae, Yamagata Prefecture, in the Tohoku region of northern Japan. He began studying printmaking with Gajin Kosaka in 1923 and later trained under Kendo Ishii, and from 1927 he exhibited with the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Association, aligning himself with the creative-print movement that held the artist should design, carve, and print the block himself rather than treat it as a purely reproductive medium.

Okuyama was equally at home in the commercial world. In 1931 he established his own advertising firm and became a leading figure in Japanese advertisement art, helping to organise the Tokyo Advertisement Art Association and producing campaigns for clients including the Japan Wool Company and Nikka Whiskey. This grounding in graphic design informed the bold, simplified forms and strong tonal contrasts that mark much of his print work, in which he carved with a directness that preserved the evidence of the gouge and knife rather than disguising it.

An extremely productive artist credited with well over a thousand works, Okuyama ranged widely in subject and manner. He made landscape prints in both colour and black-and-white, including deliberately rustic sosaku-hanga scenes of the northern countryside — farmhouses, mountain roads, and villages of the Tohoku region he came from — often set against modern intrusions such as metal truss bridges and electric transmission towers, blending signs of Westernization into otherwise traditional Japanese views. He is especially remembered as a devoted student of the history of coffee in Japan: he published the book Coffee Itinerary in 1957 and produced numerous prints tracing the beverage's arrival through Dutch and Dutch East India Company (VOC) traders at the Dejima trading post in Nagasaki.

Okuyama died on October 1, 1981, at the age of seventy-four. His son, Gijin Okuyama (born 1934), took over the family's woodblock-printing enterprise and carried his father's coffee-history theme forward in his own later print series.