Chôshi

Chōshi is a coastal city at the mouth of the Tone River in Chiba Prefecture, known for the Pacific cliffs at Inubōsaki, its working fishing harbor, and a long history as a port supplying Edo with sardines and shōyu. A print of this subject likely centers on the harbor with fishing boats, the cliffs and breaking surf, or an elevated meisho-e view of town and sea. Hakutei's coastal scenes characteristically use a restrained palette and broad, planar compositions — a sensibility shaped by his yoga (Western-style) painting training under Kuroda Seiki and his time studying in Europe in the 1910s. The mokuhanga is printed with baren on washi using carved cherry blocks, but Hakutei's color registers and use of bokashi to render sea haze and sky often read closer to plein-air watercolor than the saturated nishiki-e palette of the ukiyo-e tradition. The work fits within his interest in regional Japanese seascapes outside the Tokyo–Kyoto–Osaka corridor.