The Moon from Suma Beach — 須磨海岸の月

A meisho-e of Suma Beach, the coastal stretch in present-day Kobe associated through classical literature with Hikaru Genji's exile in the Tale of Genji. Ishiwata's nocturne likely places the moon over the Inland Sea, with the pine-lined shore — the Suma pines being a long-standing poetic convention — silhouetted against a graduated sky. The composition would employ bokashi, the wiped tonal gradation worked across the colour block, to model the transition from deep indigo at the zenith to paler tones near the horizon, with the moon's disc reserved as unprinted washi or printed with a thin warm tint. This treatment of moonlit coastline belongs to a vein of shin-hanga landscape developed by Kawase Hasui and worked in parallel by Tsuchiya Koitsu, a strain that Ishiwata followed across his 1930s output during the period of greatest commercial demand for atmospheric Japanese landscape prints among Japanese and Western collectors.