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](/glossary/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](/glossary/baren) on washi using carved cherry blocks, but Hakutei's color registers and use of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) to render sea haze and sky often read closer to plein-air watercolor than the saturated [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) palette of the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition. The work fits within his interest in regional Japanese seascapes outside the Tokyo–Kyoto–Osaka corridor.