Kanita, Aomori Prefecture, from the series "Collection of Scenic Views of Japan, Eastern Japan Edition" (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen, Aomori ken Kanita)

Kanita, Aomori Prefecture (Aomori ken Kanita), from Kawase Hasui's Collection of Scenic Views of Japan, Eastern Japan Edition (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen) of 1933, depicts the small coastal community of Kanita facing Mutsu Bay in northern Honshu. Kanita was, and largely remains, a fishing town in the cold waters of the northern Tsugaru region, and Hasui's print emphasizes its quiet shoreline, modest timber buildings, and the broad expanse of bay and sky. The composition is built from balanced horizontal bands, in which the printers in publisher Watanabe Shozaburo's Tokyo workshop modulated the water and atmosphere through layered bokashi gradations. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, identifies the print as part of Hasui's 1933 northern campaign for the Eastern Japan Edition, which carried the shin-hanga landscape vocabulary into regions of Tohoku and Hokkaido that had been largely neglected by earlier ukiyo-e. Aomori Prefecture was relatively remote in the early Shōwa period and was associated in the popular imagination with snow, fishing, and folk culture rather than with the historic temples and castles that dominated the canonical landscape repertoire. By depicting Kanita as a calm, unhurried place rather than as picturesque hardship, Hasui aligns the village with the broader shin-hanga preference for observation over narrative. The print continues to be valued for its restraint, its tonal subtlety, and its insistence that the woodblock landscape tradition could meaningfully accommodate small, working communities of the Japanese periphery alongside the celebrated views of Edo, Kyoto, and the Tokaidō.