Ozawa Nankoku

Ozawa Nankoku (小沢南谷) was a Meiji-era Japanese illustrator and draughtsman active in Tokyo in the 1870s and 1880s. His biographical dates are not securely established in the Western literature on Japanese prints, and he does not appear in the standard authority files of the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, or the Honolulu Museum of Art. He is securely identifiable, however, from a single major commission that survives in well-documented form: he was the principal illustrator of William Elliot Griffis's 'Japanese Fairy World: Stories from the Wonder-lore of Japan', the first widely circulated English-language anthology of Japanese folktales, published in Schenectady, New York by James H. Barhyte in 1880 and reissued in London by Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, in 1887.

The attribution to Ozawa Nankoku is made explicit in the preface to the Trübner edition. Griffis, an American educator who had taught chemistry and physics at the Daigaku Nankō (the predecessor to the University of Tokyo) and at the Fukui Domain school in the early 1870s, writes that 'the illustrations and cover-stamp, though engraved in New York by Mr. Henry W. Troy, were, with one exception, drawn especially for this work, by my artist-friend, Ozawa Nankoku, of Tokio.' The exception is the plate of Yorimasa and the night-beast on page 176, which Griffis credits to one of his Japanese students. The remaining eleven plates and the frontispiece are therefore drawings made in Tokyo by Ozawa Nankoku, posted to New York, and cut on wood by the American engraver Henry W. Troy. This places the original drawings firmly in the late 1870s, contemporary with the careers of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Kobayashi Kiyochika, and the emerging shinbun-nishikie newspaper-illustration tradition, and roughly a generation before the kuchi-e frontispiece flowering of the 1890s and 1900s.

The surviving illustrations show Ozawa Nankoku working in the brush-and-line idiom of late-Edo book illustration adapted to Western publishing conventions. His drawings rely on a confident calligraphic outline rather than the colour blocks of nishikie, and the compositions are organized for the rectangular format of an English octavo rather than the vertical ōban sheet. He moves comfortably between mythological subjects (the Sun-Goddess at the mouth of the Heavenly Cave, the Tanabata star-lovers crossing the bridge of magpies, the Dragon King presenting the tide jewels, the Sorceress melting the bell at Dōjō-ji), fairy-tale scenes (the egg, wasp and mortar attacking the monkey from Saru kani gassen, the oni submitting to Momotarō, the carp ascending the Dragon Gate), and street observations (the Fish Stall in Tokio, a sniff-jingle vignette). The breadth of subject suggests an artist with the standard library of Edo-period source images at his fingertips, capable of producing presentable scenes across the entire range of Japanese folk material that Griffis wished to translate.

What is less clear is where Ozawa Nankoku trained, what other commissions he undertook, and how his career ended. His name does not appear in the Newland 2005 'Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock Prints' as a signed designer of multi-block colour prints, and ukiyo-e.org returns no images attributed to him; the Ronin Gallery in New York maintains an artist authority entry under the slug 'ozawa-nankoku' but currently lists no inventory. The art-poster reseller AllPosters has marketed a print under the title 'Japanese Story-Telling' credited to 'Nankoku Ozawa', and the image reproduced in their catalogue is recognisably one of the Griffis plates rather than an independent woodblock-print design. The likely conclusion is that Ozawa Nankoku belonged to the substantial population of Tokyo-trained brush draughtsmen who supplied illustrations to publishers, newspapers, and foreign-commissioned books during the early Meiji period without ever signing the woodblock-printed designs that would later have made them collectable to Western print specialists. His association with Griffis, and Griffis's careful crediting of him by name in the front matter of one of the best-known late-nineteenth-century English books on Japan, has preserved his work in a way that many of his peers' has not.