Kyoto Sarugatsuji

Kyoto Sarugatsuji is another of Hamada Josen's contributions to the Tokyo illustrated magazine Fuzoku Gaho (Customs Illustrated), catalogued under his alternate reading Hamada Nyosen and preserved through the Japanese Art Open Database from the Ohmi Gallery research files. The composition depicts the Sarugatsuji area at the northeast corner of the Kyoto Imperial Palace enclosure, a site historically associated with a stone marker bearing a relief carving of a monkey (saru) installed as a guardian against the supernatural northeast direction — the demon's gate (kimon) of classical Japanese cosmology. The image shows a small group of figures in a quiet street near the palace wall, rendered in the gently observational mode that characterized Fuzoku Gaho's project of documenting Kyoto and Tokyo neighborhoods as both topographical record and ethnographic genre scene. Josen organizes the scene with the long horizontal stretch of the palace wall running across the upper half of the image and the figures positioned at the lower edge as small notes within a larger architectural composition. The palette is muted, dominated by the soft ochre of the wall and the cool grey of the paving, with small accents of color in the figures' clothing. The Japanese title 京都猿ヶ辻 — Kyoto Sarugatsuji — appears beside the image. The design represents Josen's continued engagement with site-specific topographical subjects alongside his better-known kuchi-e and bijin-ga production of the same period.