Views of Osaka: Kyomachi Canal

Views of Osaka: Kyomachi Canal, dated 1919, is one of the foundational sheets in Oda Kazuma's early Osaka-themed series, produced just after the First World War as the artist was establishing the regional landscape program that would occupy the rest of his career. The print is documented on Artsy at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/kazuma-oda-views-of-osaka-kyomachi-canal. The Kyomachi-bori canal in Osaka was one of the historic waterways of the Senba merchant district, a stretch of the city in which the older Edo-period commercial fabric was still readable into the modern era, with stone-lined banks and the back walls of wholesale houses giving the scene a quietness rare in other quarters of the city. Oda Kazuma (1882-1956), born in Tokyo as Oda Iwajiro, trained under the Western-style painter Yamamoto Hosui before working as a draftsman and lithographer at the Ministry of Finance Insatsu Kyoku printing bureau, the government office that produced banknotes and official documents. Through the 1910s and 1920s he developed a parallel practice in watercolor sketching across Japan and in woodblock landscape printmaking that placed him at the intersection of [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) and [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) rather than at the center of either movement. He was an active member of the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai, the Japan Creative Print Society, founded in 1918 by Yamamoto Kanae and other artist-printmakers committed to the single-handed authorship of the print, and his prints are typically self-carved or executed in close collaboration with carvers and printers rather than handed to a publisher in the Watanabe Shozaburo model. The Kyomachi Canal plate is characteristic of his early landscape voice: a quiet stretch of water, a working figure or moored boat, the surrounding city implied rather than dramatized, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation across sky and reflection doing the atmospheric work of hour and season. The Osaka series of 1919 set the template for Oda's subsequent regional cycles, and impressions of the body of work are preserved at the Tokyo National Museum, the Kobe City Museum, the British Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress, the principal institutional holdings through which the artist's regional project is now studied.