The Prewar Shinjuku Station Yard (Senzen no Shinjuku-eki kōnai)

The Prewar Shinjuku Station Yard (Senzen no Shinjuku-eki kōnai), painted by Kimura Shōhachi in 1938 and now held in the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, is one of the most important documents in his late-1930s sequence of Tokyo cityscape paintings. Shinjuku Station had been a major terminus since its 1885 opening on the Yamanote line, and by the 1930s it had become the principal western gateway of the city, the focal point of a rapidly developing entertainment and commercial district that would emerge after the war as the largest train station in the world by passenger volume. Kimura's composition depicts the station yard as it appeared in the prewar moment, the platforms, signals, gantries, and rolling stock arranged in a deep perspectival recession rendered in his mature manner of confident drawing and slightly muted, atmospheric tonal color. The painting belongs to a broader 1930s tendency in Japanese yōga to take the railway terminus as an emblem of urban modernity — comparable to the prewar railway compositions of Saeki Yūzō, Matsumoto Shunsuke, and Migishi Kōtarō — but Kimura's Shinjuku is distinct for its intimate ethnographic attention to the working life of the yard rather than its monumental architectural form. As a document of a city that would be radically transformed by the firebombings of 1945, the work is among the most historically significant survivors of his prewar Tokyo painting. The Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art example is widely reproduced as the definitive Kimura cityscape of the late 1930s.