Cryptomeria Avenue

The cryptomeria — Japan's towering native cedar, sugi, planted in long formal avenues approaching shrines and along historic highways — provides the subject for this 1937 print, which captures the cathedral-like corridor of a cryptomeria avenue in full, mature growth. These trees, which can live for a thousand years and reach heights of fifty meters, create an almost architectural enclosure of trunk and canopy that Yoshida renders with dramatic recession into depth. The famous cryptomeria avenue at Nikko — planted in the seventeenth century to line the approach to the Toshogu Shrine — is a likely subject, though Yoshida depicted similar avenues at Takinoura and other sites. The verticality of the composition is rare in his landscape work.