Wakura in Noto

Wakura in Noto depicts Wakura Onsen on the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture, a hot-spring resort on Nanao Bay whose seawater-fed baths have been in use for over a millennium. Hakutei's view would likely have shown the bay, the small islands offshore, and the cluster of inns that line the coast, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation across water and sky to capture the soft maritime light of the Sea of Japan coast. The Noto Peninsula was a relatively rural, less-traveled part of Japan in the early twentieth century, and Hakutei's choice of subject reflects his project of documenting provincial Japan beyond the tourist meisho already canonized in nineteenth-century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The flat planes of color, restrained palette, and quiet composition show how mokuhanga in Hakutei's hands could produce a register of observation closer to Western landscape watercolor than to the bold flat-color tradition of the Edo period. The print sits among Hakutei's regional landscape work of the 1910s and 1920s.