Yumoto spa, Nikkô

Yumoto is the highest of the Nikko hot-spring settlements, set on the shore of Lake Yunoko above Lake Chuzenji and surrounded by the volcanic terrain of the Nikko National Park. As an onsen village, it offered Hasui the architectural subject of low wooden ryokan with steam rising from bath buildings, set against forested mountain slopes. Hasui made Nikko a sustained focus from the early 1920s onward, and his Yumoto designs would draw on the same compositional tools as his other mountain-village prints: a foreground band of buildings or a roadway, a middle ground of water or open meadow, and a layered mountain backdrop modelled with bokashi. Steam and mist at a sulphur spa allowed the printer to use very pale grey impressions and soft gradations to suggest vapour against darker conifer foliage. Within the wider shin-hanga effort to document modern Japanese landscape, Hasui's Yumoto prints record a specific mountain-resort culture in the same factual, atmospheric register he applied to coastal and urban meisho.