New Year's Greetings

New Year's Greetings, dating to approximately 1900 to 1920, belongs to Hamada Josen's body of kuchi-e and small-format figural designs and is preserved in the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 2014-21-77), home to the third-largest collection of Japanese woodblock prints in the United States. The composition shows the celebration of shogatsu, the New Year — the most important holiday in the Japanese calendar — likely through a figural arrangement of women or children in formal attire, with seasonal motifs of pine, plum, bamboo, or kadomatsu decorations indicating the auspicious occasion. The print belongs to Josen's broader output of magazine and book frontispiece work designed for romance novels and literary journals from the late 1890s through the 1910s, a body of work he produced primarily under the tutelage of his teacher Tomioka Eisen, the leading kuchi-e specialist of the Meiji period who gave Josen his name in 1901. The kuchi-e idiom — narrow vertical compositions of bijin or genre scenes bound into book spines or inserted as foldouts in literary magazines — required a compositional economy quite different from the print designer's standard oban format, and Josen mastered the genre during the brief moment when kuchi-e was the dominant pictorial idiom for fiction publishing in Tokyo. The Honolulu impression survives in the museum's broader collection of Meiji-period prints and represents the best-documented Josen kuchi-e in a public American collection outside the Lavenberg Collection at the University of Oregon.