Fuji with swans

Mount Fuji paired with swans, almost certainly drawn from one of the lakes at the mountain's base — Lake Yamanaka or Lake Kawaguchi, both wintering grounds for whooper swans and long-standing vantage points for Fuji views in the Japanese print tradition. Kitaoka's Fuji compositions follow the modern [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) reading of the subject rather than the Hokusai or Hiroshige model: the cone is treated as a broad, flat silhouette, often with a single [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation across its slope, and foreground water as an unbroken plane of blue or pale green. The swans would be carved as small white reserves against this water, their forms reduced to a few decisive curves rather than feathered detail. The print sits within Kitaoka's lifelong engagement with Japanese landscape iconography reconsidered through mid-century pictorial economy, and reflects the broader postwar return of mokuhanga artists to Fuji as a subject divested of nationalist rhetoric and approached as a purely formal problem of mass, silhouette, and atmosphere.