Tornado At

The truncated title suggests a depiction of one of the fire whirls (hi no tatsumaki) that swept through Tokyo during the conflagrations following the September 1, 1923 earthquake, the most infamous occurring at the Honjo Hifukusho former army clothing depot where tens of thousands perished in a single afternoon. Print designers working in the disaster reportage mode often resolved such atmospheric subjects through layered keyblock outlines and graduated bokashi printing, building columns of smoke and flame from successive impressions on absorbent washi. Sengai's facility with figure drawing, honed in newspaper illustration, lent itself to crowd scenes in which small running figures register the scale of the vortex above them. Within his wider body of work, this print sits alongside other Taisho documentary subjects that bridge the older meisho-e tradition of recording specific Edo and Tokyo locations and the new twentieth-century practice of treating contemporary events as serious printmaking material.