Kobe minato 神戸港 (Kobe Port) / Shin Nihon hyakkei 新日本百景 (One Hundred New Views of Japan, No. 27)

Published as No. 27 in the series Shin Nihon hyakkei (One Hundred New Views of Japan), this oban-format sosaku-hanga print depicts Kobe's harbor — the subject most central to Kawanishi's identity as a printmaker. The composition almost certainly shows the inner port crowded with oceangoing vessels, the cranes and breakwaters of one of Meiji- and Showa-era Japan's most active commercial shipping hubs, with the Rokko mountain range providing a backdrop. The series title invokes the meisho-e tradition of famous-place imagery associated with Hiroshige, here updated for mid-twentieth-century Japan. Kawanishi's handling of water and sky through bokashi gradation — warm to cool, or light to deep — contrasts with the hard industrial geometry of ship hulls and dock infrastructure. As both the artist and printer of this work, his control over ink saturation and registration is direct.