Calendar sheet for April 1942 (Showa 17)

April in Japan corresponds to the late cherry blossom season, and Kawanishi's calendar sheet for this month likely centers on [sakura](/glossary/sakura) imagery — perhaps a flowering branch, a petal-strewn garden, or figures gathered for hanami. Calendar prints (koyomi) were a small-format tradition that [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists embraced as a way to circulate work in serial form, with each month allowing experimentation in palette and motif. As a self-carved, self-printed (jihanga) work made under wartime restrictions on paper and pigment, this sheet would have been produced in limited numbers and on the simpler [washi](/glossary/washi) available in Showa 17. Kawanishi worked from his Kobe studio throughout the 1940s, and his calendar sheets from this period fold the flat color planes characteristic of his urban scenes into the compressed seasonal vignettes the format demanded. The print belongs to a broader Showa-era practice of serial calendar projects pursued by artists associated with the creative print movement.