Kyongju Village

Kyongju (Gyeongju), the ancient Silla capital in southeastern Korea, became a destination for Japanese artists during the colonial period (1910–1945), when rail and steamer routes made travel from the home islands routine. Nakazawa was among numerous yoga painters and printmakers who produced Korean subjects in these decades, often emphasizing thatched-roof rural architecture and figures in white hanbok against open landscape. The print likely shows a village street or grouping of houses with the rolling tumuli or pine-covered hills characteristic of the Kyongju basin. Nakazawa's approach treats Korean scenery with the same painterly observation he applied to Japanese landscapes — tonal massing, atmospheric handling, restrained palette — without the documentary stylization that some contemporaries adopted. The print also reflects how the Pan-Asian travel of early-twentieth-century Japanese artists expanded the geographic range of meisho-e beyond classical Japanese sites, incorporating Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria into the printmaking repertoire of the period.