Contest in Pinching Noses

Contest in Pinching Noses, made by Hatsuyama Shigeru around 1956 and held in the Honolulu Museum of Art's collection (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/honolulu/7648), is one of the artist's most engagingly humorous prints, drawn directly from the world of children's games. The composition shows figures gathered for a friendly contest, their faces and gestures rendered with the simplified clarity and gentle caricature that Hatsuyama had perfected across decades of magazine illustration. Color is used in flat, lightly textured passages, and the figures are organized within the picture plane so that the eye reads the scene almost as a small narrative tableau. The print embodies the artist's career-long commitment to childhood subjects: having quietly withdrawn from commercial children's magazine work in the increasingly militarized 1930s — in part to avoid producing propaganda imagery for young readers — Hatsuyama redirected his energies in the postwar years into independent prints that nevertheless drew on the imaginative world of children. The work is fully embedded in the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) tradition; as a member of both Onchi Kōshirō's Ichimokukai (First Thursday Society) and the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai, Hatsuyama designed, carved, and printed each impression himself. For collectors of Hatsuyama Shigeru, Contest in Pinching Noses offers a particularly warm example of how he treated even the smallest moments of play with the same compositional rigor he brought to his more formally ambitious prints.