Kiyomizu temple, Kyoto

Kiyomizu-dera, perched on the wooded slopes of Higashiyama in eastern Kyoto, is among the most depicted temples in Japanese art, and Hasui returned to it on several occasions. The temple's distinctive feature — the broad wooden veranda projecting from the main hall on tall keyaki pillars over the hillside — gives any print of the site a strong architectural diagonal, which Hasui typically balances against the surrounding cedar and maple foliage. Compositions of Kiyomizu in shin-hanga often place the viewer either looking up at the stage from the ravine below or out from the veranda toward the city, with cherry or maple colour establishing the season. The print would have required careful registration across multiple cherrywood blocks to render the dark beam structure of the hall against lighter sky and foliage, with bokashi used to model the wooded slope. Within Hasui's work, his Kyoto temple subjects sit alongside his Tokyo and Nikko series as part of a sustained twentieth-century mapping of Japanese religious sites in the meisho-e idiom.