Café Orient

Café Orient (カフェ・オリエント) is a 53 × 73 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1928, the second year of his exhibition career at the Nikakai. The Café Orient was a Tokyo café of the late-1920s Taishō-Shōwa moga (modern girl) culture, of the kind that proliferated in Ginza, Kanda, and Asakusa in the late 1920s — modeled loosely on European cafés but staffed by Japanese waitresses in Western dress, and serving as social and erotic gathering places for younger Tokyo men. The painting shows the interior at close range, with figures massed around a table in the foreground and the wall, mirrors, and electric lights of the rear room rendered in heavy paint behind them. The palette is unusually dark for Hasegawa — a deep brown-red and slate ground with bright accents of vermilion and chrome yellow at the lights and the women's clothing — and the composition is densely worked, with the swift, almost gestural brushwork that he had developed in the bar paintings of the previous year. Café Orient belongs to the long cycle of café and bar interiors (Café Entrance, Café Waitress, Café Noa Noa, Café Sankyō-Tei) that maps the topography of Hasegawa's nocturnal Tokyo, and that constitutes one of the principal visual records of the urban café culture of the late 1920s. The painting is now in a private collection.