Spring in Sanroku — 山麓の春

Spring in Sanroku (山麓の春, Sanroku no haru) is a Kasamatsu Mihoko F12 woodblock landscape catalogued by ukiyo-e.org through a participating dealer. The title sanroku (山麓) refers to the foot or base of a mountain, the cultivated zone where rice paddies, villages, and orchards spread outward from the steeper forested slopes. In Japanese landscape painting and printmaking, sanroku is the classic transitional ground: neither the towering pictorial drama of the high peaks nor the urban world of the plain, but the inhabited rural slope where seasonal change is most legible in the work of farmers and the bloom of fruit trees.

Spring in this zone carries a specific visual vocabulary: the still-bare branches of trees beginning to flush with pink and white blossom, the first new green of paddies preparing to be flooded, the warming greys and browns of recently turned earth. Generations of Japanese landscape artists have worked this material, and in the woodblock medium the subject has been treated by Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Tokuriki Tomikichirō, and indeed Kasamatsu Shirō. Mihoko's F12 print extends that lineage into the late twentieth century.

The larger F12 format makes room for a more developed compositional structure than her smaller still-life prints — likely a layered landscape with foreground fields, a middle ground of village rooftops or fruit trees, and a far distance of mountainside softened by spring haze. Mokuhanga is a forgiving medium for such atmospheric subjects, since multiple light overprintings can build up the chalky pinks and greens of early spring without flattening the underlying tonal structure. As a record of postwar sōsaku-hanga's continued engagement with the seasonal Japanese countryside, the print is a useful example of how the studio tradition of landscape woodblock continued to find subject matter in the same rural motifs that had sustained the medium for two centuries.