Lake Towada

Lake Towada is a caldera lake in northern Honshu, on the border between Aomori and Akita prefectures, known for its still surface and surrounding cedar slopes. Hasui produced several lake views over his career, treating still water as a mirror surface that doubles the surrounding landscape. Such reflective compositions allowed the printer to use closely matched ink tones above and below the waterline, with subtle variation in saturation indicating the boundary. The print likely relies on bokashi gradation in both sky and water, with the keyblock carrying the silhouettes of trees, peaks, and any small boats or shore detail. The Towada subject belongs to Hasui's broader corpus of provincial Japanese landscapes published through the Watanabe studio, part of the shin-hanga movement's project of cataloging regions of the country in modern print form for both domestic collectors and the export market that had developed by the late 1920s.