Year of the Tiger — 寅年の切手

This small-format woodblock print was produced by Kawase Hasui as a New Year's commemorative design for the Year of the Tiger (寅年), one of several zodiac compositions Hasui created across his career. New Year's prints of this type typically feature the subject animal rendered with the atmospheric restraint characteristic of the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) style — clean contours, selective [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) for sky or ground gradation, and an emphasis on mood over narrative. Hasui's zodiac designs generally depict their subjects in naturalistic outdoor settings consistent with his landscape sensibility rather than in purely decorative arrangements. The intimate scale and likely use as a postal stamp or greeting card (切手) reflects the tradition of artists contributing designs to seasonal correspondence, and the limited production requirements of stamp-format work still demanded the precise multi-block registration for which Hasui's principal publisher Watanabe Shozaburo's atelier was known.