Short Hair (Tanpotsu)- Oban

Short Hair (Tanpotsu) in the oban format presents a female figure defined as much by her unconventionally brief coiffure as by any other quality. The short-haired woman was a somewhat modern subject in mid-century Japanese art, associated with the new postwar freedoms of Japanese women and a loosening of traditional associations between long hair and feminine virtue. Kawano renders the figure with his characteristic bold outline, and the tanpotsu designation may indicate the print's elongated compositional format.