Great Buddha at Nofuku Temple, Kobe

This print depicts the Hyogo Daibutsu at Nofukuji, a Pure Land Buddhist temple in the Hyogo Ward of Kobe whose bronze seated Buddha — first cast in the late nineteenth century, lost during wartime metal requisition, and later rebuilt — is a recognized landmark of the city. The subject sits within Kawanishi's lifelong project of recording Kobe's distinctive places. Compositionally, prints of this type typically silhouette the dark mass of the seated Buddha against architectural elements of the temple precinct, with Kawanishi using flat color planes to register the figure's outline and surface highlights rather than tonal modeling. The image fits the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition of place pictures while transposing it into [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga)'s first-person, artist-printed idiom. Within his oeuvre, the Daibutsu joins Minatogawa Shrine, the harbor, the Suma coast, and the foreign settlement as another node in a Kobe topography assembled across decades. Religious iconography is treated less as devotional image than as civic landmark, consistent with sosaku-hanga's secular, observational stance toward subject matter inherited from older traditions.