Morning at Tsutanuma Pond — Tsutanuma no asa

Tsutanuma Pond, set in the mountainous interior of Akita Prefecture, offered Hasui the kind of quiet, unhurried landscape he repeatedly sought on his sketching journeys through northern Japan. This print presents an early morning scene in which low mist hovers over the pond surface, a condition Hasui captured with the graduated bokashi technique that became a hallmark of Watanabe Shozaburo's shin-hanga production. The still water acts as a mirror for the pale sky above, with emergent grasses or shoreline vegetation providing a foreground anchor. Compositionally, the image belongs to the broad meisho-e tradition of depicting named places, though Hasui's approach strips away the narrative incident common in Edo-period landscape prints in favor of pure atmospheric observation. The cool morning palette — milky whites, soft blues, and muted greens — required careful alignment of multiple woodblocks to achieve the seamless tonal transitions that give the surface its characteristic luminosity.