Shinkawabata at Handa, Owari Province (Bishu Handa Shinkawabata), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)"

Shinkawabata at Handa, Owari Province (Bishu Handa Shinkawabata) is part of Kawase Hasui's 1935 series Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu), held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The woodblock print shows a canal embankment in the merchant town of Handa, in former Owari Province on the Chita Peninsula, with rows of wooden warehouses and houses lining the water and small boats moored along the bank. Kawase Hasui composes the view from a low angle that emphasizes both the long horizontal of the canal and the working architecture of the riverside, conveying the daily rhythms of a port that thrived on sake and vinegar production. The Selection of Views of the Tokaido updated the celebrated Edo-period theme of the Tokaido highway from Edo to Kyoto for the twentieth century, with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo placing Kawase Hasui in dialogue with the great Edo landscape designers whose Tokaido prints had defined the genre. Through Watanabe Shozaburo's Tokyo workshop, the shin-hanga, or new prints, movement adapted ukiyo-e techniques to modern artistic standards while preserving the collaborative production model of designer, carver, and printer. In this Handa view, Kawase Hasui's interest in actual working towns rather than tourist set pieces is on full display: the print catalogues warehouse facades, tiled roofs, and waterway traffic with documentary attention, while still organizing the elements into the balanced, atmospheric composition expected of a shin-hanga landscape under Watanabe Shozaburo's imprint.