Itako

Itako is a city in Ibaraki Prefecture situated among the lakes and waterways of the Suigo wetland region, historically dependent on canal transport and known for its iris gardens planted along the water's edge. Hasui's composition likely places the viewer at the water's edge, looking along a canal lined with willows, iris, or traditional wooden houses reflecting in the still surface below. The flat water of Itako's canals was ideal for the reflection compositions that recur throughout Hasui's work — doubled images of sky, architecture, and vegetation organized into a bilateral symmetry that his printers achieved through precise registration. Itako belonged to a cluster of canal towns in the Kanto Plain that Hasui documented during his regional travels, including Sawara and the Tone River basin. The low horizon typical of wetland landscapes allowed Hasui to devote a large proportion of the composition to sky and its mirror image in the water below.