Jokata Kaiseki

Jokata Kaiseki (1882–1966) was a Japanese woodblock print artist associated with the shin-hanga ('new print') movement, working in landscape and street subjects during the 1920s and early 1930s. His work survives above all through the series Twenty-Five Views of Fuji in the Four Seasons, which depicts Mount Fuji from a range of vantage points across the changing seasons and places him within the long lineage of artists — reaching back through Hiroshige and Hokusai to the earliest landscape printmakers — who took the iconic mountain as their central subject.

The Fuji series is generally dated to around 1929–1931. Unusually for the period, Kaiseki appears to have financed and published it himself, without a commercial publisher or patron behind him; despite that independence, his compositions were admired by artists associated with the Imperial Art Academy. Beyond his activity as a printmaker in these years, comparatively little is firmly documented about his training or regional origins in the standard English-language references.

What the surviving prints demonstrate is an artist with a systematic eye for topography, capturing the mountain from a sequence of established viewpoints — among them Enoshima, the Ōigawa Bridge, the plum orchard at Shimosoga, and the cherry blossoms of Asuka Hill — each composition adjusting palette and atmosphere to reflect the season.