Distant View of Mt. Tateyama from Mt. Hakuba

Created in 1932, this color woodblock print presents the Tateyama mountain range as seen from a vantage point on Mt. Hakuba in the Japanese Northern Alps. The distant peaks rise in layered ridgelines against the sky, with snow cover creating a pattern of white crests and dark exposed rock. Ito Takashi exploits the oban format's horizontal expanse to convey the panoramic sweep of high alpine scenery, a subject that tested the woodblock medium's capacity for rendering atmospheric depth across great distances. The 1932 date places this print during the shin-hanga movement's interwar peak, when publishers and artists were actively expanding the genre's geographic range beyond the Tokaido and Kyoto subjects that dominated earlier landscape prints. Hakuba and Tateyama, popular with mountaineers since the Meiji period, offered Ito dramatic terrain untouched by the nostalgia that colored many urban shin-hanga scenes.