Distant View of Mitsukoshi Movie Theater in Shinjuku from the Sixth Floor of Hoteiya (Hoteiya rokkai kara Shinjuku Mitsukoshi Musashi no kan enbo zu), no. 1 from the series "Scenery of Shinjuku (Gashu Shinjuku fukei)"

Distant View of Mitsukoshi Movie Theater in Shinjuku from the Sixth Floor of Hoteiya, dated 1930, opens Kazuma Oda's series Scenery of Shinjuku (Gashu Shinjuku fukei). The unwieldy title is itself characteristic of the artist's approach: a documentary precision about exactly where the viewer is standing and what they are looking at. Here, Oda situates the viewer high above the street, on the sixth floor of the Hoteiya department store, gazing across the rooftops of Shinjuku toward the Mitsukoshi Movie Theater (Musashino-kan), one of the marquee entertainment venues that helped turn Shinjuku from a sleepy post-station into the modern leisure district it became in the late 1920s. As a Japanese woodblock print in the shin-hanga tradition, the work participates in the movement's growing fascination with the cityscape as a subject worthy of the same care once lavished on famous places and seasonal motifs. Yet Oda's vision is distinctly of his own decade: power lines stretch across the foreground, low rooftops give way to taller commercial blocks, and the eye is drawn to the cinema's facade as a beacon of new urban culture. Trained originally as a lithographer, Oda brought a graphic designer's sensibility to the woodcut, favoring crisp outlines, restrained palettes, and architectural composition over the lyrical atmospherics of contemporaries like Hasui or Yoshida. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, preserves an unusually full run of Oda's urban series, making the museum a key resource for understanding shin-hanga's engagement with Tokyo's modernization. Distant View of Mitsukoshi Movie Theater remains a valuable primary source on early Showa Shinjuku.