Former Foreign Settlement

The Former Foreign Settlement (Kyu-kyoryuchi) was the rectangular district east of Motomachi where Western residents lived and worked between Kobe's opening as a treaty port in 1868 and the settlement's reversion to Japanese jurisdiction in 1899. Its grid of brick and stone buildings — banks, trading houses, consulates, and clubs — survived in altered form through Kawanishi's lifetime and provided a recurring subject for his Kobe prints. The image likely emphasizes the European architectural vocabulary of the district: arched windows, cornices, gas lamps, perhaps a tram line, set against the harbor or Rokko Mountains visible behind. Kawanishi favored frontal or near-frontal views that flattened buildings into geometric color fields, an approach that echoes his interest in Fauve and post-Impressionist composition while remaining grounded in the mokuhanga vocabulary of carved line and layered impressions. As a sosaku-hanga artist working largely outside Tokyo, he made the cosmopolitan textures of his home city — the meeting of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and European communities — central to his regional contribution to the movement.