Small woodblock print, page 69 from Shin Nihon kenbutsu

Shin Nihon kenbutsu (New Sightseeing of Japan) was a bound book of small-format prints rather than loose oban sheets, and the page-69 designation marks a particular landscape view embedded within that publication. The book format placed Ishikawa's work directly in the meisho-e lineage of place pictures, a tradition stretching from Hokusai's Thirty-six Views and Hiroshige's Tokaido stations into shin-hanga. The reduced page size required him to compress depth, atmosphere, and place into a compact pictorial field, usually through a single dominant motif — a coastline, a temple roof, a stand of trees — set against bokashi-graded sky or water. Compared with the wall-format landscape oban produced by Hasui and Hiroshi Yoshida in the same decade, the Shin Nihon kenbutsu plates are intimate objects intended for handheld viewing within a book. They form a quieter counterweight in Ishikawa's print output to the figure work that draws much of the collector attention today.