Mountain Temple at Sendai (Sendai yamanodera), from the series "Collection of Scenic Views of Japan, Eastern Japan Edition (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen)"

Mountain Temple at Sendai (Sendai yamanodera), from Kawase Hasui's Collection of Scenic Views of Japan, Eastern Japan Edition (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen) of 1933, depicts a temple complex set into the wooded hills near the city of Sendai in northern Honshu. Hasui treats the temple as part of its mountain setting rather than as an isolated architectural subject, organizing the composition around the contrast between built structures and the surrounding forest. The print was produced in publisher Watanabe Shozaburo's Tokyo workshop, where the carvers translated Hasui's sketches into the multiple blocks required to register the temple's architectural details against the broader masses of foliage and stone, and the printers used bokashi gradations to model the depth of the forested hillside. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, includes the print within the Eastern Japan Edition's portrait of Tohoku temples, shrines, and natural landmarks. Sendai had been an important Tokugawa-era castle town and continued to function as the dominant city of northern Honshu, and the surrounding mountain temples constituted a network of devotional sites long appreciated by local pilgrims. Hasui's restrained treatment of the mountain temple, without figures and at a calm time of day, exemplifies the shin-hanga preference for atmospheric observation over narrative incident. By incorporating such temples into a major shin-hanga series, Hasui and Watanabe extended the woodblock landscape tradition beyond the established centers of Kyoto, Edo, and the Tokaidō and continued the workshop practice of multi-block color printing inherited from the Edo period.