Tree That Children Can Climb (Kodomo ni noborareru ki)

Tree That Children Can Climb (Kodomo ni noborareru ki) by Hatsuyama Shigeru, made in the mid-1950s and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/honolulu/7646), is one of the most quietly poetic prints in the artist's mature catalogue. The composition centers on a single tree with branches deliberately arranged to invite climbing, its rounded leaf masses and curving limbs organized into a flat decorative pattern that recalls Hatsuyama's picture-book idiom. Children — when they appear in the print or in its imagined extension — are not so much depicted as anticipated: the tree is drawn for them, with footholds and resting places implied by the placement of every branch. The title, with its phrasing of permission rather than description, is characteristic of Hatsuyama's lifelong sympathy for the imaginative world of children; rather than illustrate a specific story, he constructs a quiet visual proposition, a piece of furniture for the imagination. Trained in yamato-e under Araki Tanrei and later in bijinga under Ikawa Sengai, Hatsuyama had become one of Japan's leading illustrators of the prewar period before stepping back from magazine work in the militarized 1930s and devoting himself increasingly to independent sōsaku-hanga (creative prints). Tree That Children Can Climb belongs to the postwar wave of that work, in which he combined the warmth and accessibility of children's literature with the formal discipline of artist-designed, artist-carved, artist-printed sheets. For students of Hatsuyama Shigeru, the print is a particularly gentle example of how he made the woodblock a place where adult viewers and the children they once were could meet.