Shinkubo, Hachinohe, from the series “Collection of Scenic Views of Japan, Easter Japan Edition” (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen, Hachinohe Shinkubo)

Shinkubo, Hachinohe (Hachinohe Shinkubo), from Kawase Hasui's Collection of Scenic Views of Japan, Eastern Japan Edition (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen) of 1933, depicts a stretch of coastal landscape near the port city of Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture in northern Honshu. Hachinohe had developed as a major fishing port and regional commercial center on the Pacific coast of Tohoku, and Hasui's view at Shinkubo records a quieter portion of its shoreline rather than its busy harbor. The composition is built from layered horizontal masses of water, beach, and low hills, with bokashi gradations modulating the broad areas of sea and sky. The print was produced in publisher Watanabe Shozaburo's Tokyo workshop, where carvers and printers together translated Hasui's preliminary studies into the multi-block color print typical of the shin-hanga method. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, situates the print within the 1933 Tohoku and Hokkaido campaigns that produced many of the Eastern Japan Edition's most distinctive designs. Hasui's interest in the under-recorded Pacific coast of Tohoku reflects the broader ambition of the series to extend Japanese landscape iconography beyond the routes of classical poetry and earlier ukiyo-e. The print's restraint, balanced color organization, and careful registration exemplify the technical and conceptual maturity that the Hasui-Watanabe partnership had reached by the early 1930s, in which provincial subjects could be produced to the same high workshop standards as celebrated landmarks elsewhere in Japan.