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 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. 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.