Burnt forest Taisho Pond in Kamikochi

Burnt forest Taisho Pond in Kamikochi is a Japanese woodblock print by Aoyama Masaharu that turns its gaze on one of the most distinctive landscapes in the Japanese Alps: Taisho Pond, formed in 1915 when an eruption of Mount Yake dammed the Azusa River and drowned a stand of conifers in the resulting still water. The bleached, skeletal trunks that remained standing in the pond became a celebrated motif for early twentieth-century Japanese landscape artists, and Aoyama makes them the structural backbone of this composition, anchoring the foreground and middle distance against the broader sweep of the Kamikochi valley.

Aoyama Masaharu worked in the lineage of Japanese woodblock landscape printmaking that overlapped with both [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) and [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) sensibilities, and the print reflects the modern landscape vocabulary that emerged in the Taisho and early Showa periods. Rather than the bustling tourist Kamikochi familiar today, the scene emphasizes the austere afterlife of the forest: drowned and burnt trunks rising from the water, the dark surface of the pond holding their reflections, and a band of surviving woodland and mountain ridge closing the view behind them. The palette favors muted earth tones, slate blues, and the pale grey of weathered wood, with the woodblock medium suited to the flat planes of water and sky and the linear emphasis of the standing trunks.