Nagasaki Kujûkushima, Shôwa period, dated 1949

Nagasaki Kujukushima, dated 1949, is a Showa-period Japanese woodblock print by Gihachiro Okuyama that depicts the celebrated archipelago of small islands scattered along the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture. The name Kujukushima translates literally as "99 islands," a poetic shorthand for the dense cluster of pine-clad islets that punctuate the bays of western Kyushu. Okuyama frames the scene as a panoramic landscape in which the rounded silhouettes of the islands recede across calm water toward a softly modulated horizon, balancing graphic clarity with atmospheric quiet. The print is preserved in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, which holds it as part of their broader holdings of twentieth-century Japanese woodblock prints (accession record HUAM-CARP07905), making it a documented museum-held example of Okuyama's postwar landscape work. Coming just four years after the end of the Pacific War, the 1949 date places the print in a moment when many Japanese printmakers were turning back to the country's scenic and historic sites as subjects, reaffirming a sense of cultural continuity through landscape. Stylistically, the work sits comfortably within the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), or "creative prints," movement, in which artists like Okuyama designed, carved, and printed their own blocks rather than working through the traditional publisher-led division of labor associated with earlier Japanese woodblock production. The result is a more personal, painterly handling of line and color than was typical of commercial [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), with carefully judged tonal layers used to suggest mist, water reflections, and the soft greens of pine cover. For collectors and students of Japanese woodblock printmaking, this view of Nagasaki Kujukushima offers an accessible entry point into Gihachiro Okuyama's regional landscape vocabulary and into the broader sosaku-hanga interest in documenting Japan's coastal and rural scenery during the early Showa postwar years.