Kaga Yamanaka onsen

This print depicts Yamanaka onsen, a hot spring village in former Kaga Province (modern Ishikawa Prefecture) recorded by Bashō during his stay there in Oku no Hosomichi. As a meisho-e of a noted resort town, the composition typically features the wooden ryokan architecture along the Kakusenkei gorge, the Daishōji River cutting through, or bathers and visitors in the village setting. Hakutei's mokuhanga consistently registers the influence of his yoga training under Kuroda Seiki at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, often using bokashi gradations in sky and water that read closer to watercolor wash than the flat color planes of traditional nishiki-e. As a founding member of the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai (1918) who also worked within the shin-hanga collaborative model, Hakutei produced landscape series that approach regional Japan with a European-modernist sensibility distinct from the decorative meisho tradition of Hiroshige and Hokusai before him.