The Moon from Suma Beach — 須磨海岸の月

A second recorded impression of Ishiwata's Suma Beach moonlight design, one of multiple variants of a single composition that subtle differences in inking and registration distinguish from the others. Suma's coastline and its Genji-era literary memory made it standard subject matter for shin-hanga landscape designers seeking the union of poetic association and identifiable topography. A night scene of this kind required careful work from the printer: registering successive impressions of gradated colour blocks, with baren pressure determining whether moonlit water reads as cool silver or as deeper blue, and how sharply the pines hold their silhouette. Within Ishiwata's small surviving catalogue, repeated treatments of named meisho such as Suma reflect the commercial logic of shin-hanga publishing — collectors expected recognisable views, and a successful design could be reissued with minor variants across the run of an edition or in later strikes from the original key block.