Star Spangled Night in Harbin - China

Star Spangled Night in Harbin, China depicts an evening view of Harbin, the Manchurian railway city in northeastern China that grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a hub of Russian and then Japanese colonial activity. The title's reference to a star-filled sky over the city situates the design in the small but identifiable genre of Japanese travel and military prints that took the Manchurian frontier as their subject during the 1930s and early 1940s, when Japan controlled the puppet state of Manchukuo. This Japanese woodblock print is catalogued in the Hanga database under Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, but the source URL on ukiyo-e.org explicitly attributes the image to Kobayakawa Shusei, a separate artist whose name shares the Kobayakawa surname but who is not Kobayakawa Kiyoshi. The two designers appear to have been collapsed in the database listing because of the matching surname; the present print should be read as the work of Shusei rather than Kiyoshi. As a mid-twentieth-century Japanese print of a Chinese subject, the design belongs to a transitional moment when shin-hanga conventions of atmospheric nocturne were being applied to wartime and colonial topography, often through the same publisher networks that handled landscape prints. The Japanese Art Open Database (JAODB) record indexed by ukiyo-e.org is the principal documentation for the impression and its attribution.