#47 Komagata Bridge & the steamship port

#47 Komagata Bridge and the Steamship Port is a sheet from Kishio Koizumi's One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era (Showa dai Tokyo fukei hyaku zue hanga), a sosaku-hanga series he pursued through the 1930s into the early 1940s. As its serial number indicates, this is the forty-seventh image in his cycle of one hundred views, surveying the modern capital as he found it. The print, recorded via ukiyo-e.org, depicts the Komagata-bashi crossing of the Sumida River — a steel-arch bridge connecting the Asakusa and Honjo districts — together with the busy steamship landing that operated below it. Steam launches were a popular form of urban transit on the Sumida in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Koizumi places one prominently in the foreground, smoke trailing from its stack, with passengers visible along the gangways. The bridge itself, an early-Showa engineering work, arcs across the upper half of the composition, framing the view of the opposite bank. As a sosaku-hanga artist, Koizumi designed, carved, and printed the block himself; rather than idealising the riverside, he treats the steamship port as a candidly modern subject worth a numbered place among Tokyo's hundred views. The print exemplifies the project's documentary character, recording a transit infrastructure that wartime damage and later urban redevelopment would substantially alter. In doing so it places Koizumi within the wider community of inter-war sosaku-hanga printmakers who used the medium to map the changing topography of the Japanese city.