Tomonotsu- Benten Island Bingo

Tomonotsu, a historically prosperous merchant port in the old Bingo Province (eastern Hiroshima Prefecture), is depicted with particular focus on Benten Island, a small offshore formation housing a shrine to Benzaiten, the Buddhist deity of water, music, and fortune. Benzaiten shrines located on coastal islands and promontories appear throughout Hasui's landscape documentation of port towns, their distinctive shrine architecture and torii gates providing compositional focal points within harbor scenes. Tomonotsu retains much of its Edo-period merchant townscape, and Hasui's composition likely shows traditional buildings and fishing vessels in the foreground with the island shrine in the middle distance. The calm harbor water provides opportunity for the reflected-sky gradations that Hasui employed with particular refinement in port settings, the double image of sky and shore creating the symmetrical depth associated with his most technically accomplished landscape prints.