Tabata Substation

Tabata Substation (田端変電所) is a small 23.8 × 32.6 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1923, the year of the Great Kantō Earthquake and the artist's debut as a serious painter. The composition shows the rectangular brick volume of the Tabata electrical substation — one of the new transformer stations built by the Tokyo Electric Light Company in the early 1920s to distribute power to the rapidly industrializing northern wards — set among the low wooden houses of the Tabata district in north Tokyo. The substation is rendered in a saturated ochre-red against a viridian and slate sky, with the working-class houses of the foreground in lower-key browns and grays; the heavy power-line poles and the cluster of insulators on the roof of the substation provide the linear armature of the composition. The painting was accepted at the 4th Shinkō Yōga (Emerging Western Painting) Exhibition in 1923 and was Hasegawa's first significant public showing. It belongs to a series of industrial and infrastructural paintings — gas tanks, viaducts, freight yards, substations — that occupied him throughout the 1920s and that placed him within the broader European interwar tendency of treating modern industrial subjects as serious motifs for painting. The canvas is now in the collection of the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum.