Cormorant Fishing

Cormorant Fishing (Ukai) by Kondō Kōichirō, in ink on paper and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, depicts the centuries-old Japanese practice of ukai — night fishing in which trained cormorants, controlled by fishermen on long leashes from torch-lit boats, dive for sweetfish in summer river shallows. Ukai is most famously associated with the Nagara River at Gifu and the Uji River near Kyoto, where it has been practiced since at least the Heian period as both a working fishery and a courtly spectacle. The subject is a staple of Japanese painting and printmaking, treated by Edo painters and Meiji nihonga masters alike, and it suits Kondō's mature ink idiom particularly well: the night setting and the firelit boats give him scope to exploit the full range of his ink palette, from the dense black of the cormorants and the boat hulls to the soft graduated washes that suggest river mist, rising smoke, and the indistinct riverbank in the dark. The composition descends from East Asian classical landscape conventions, with high horizon and managed negative space, but the handling of light — the way the torch flame illuminates a small zone of water and bodies while everything beyond dissolves into atmosphere — reflects Kondō's earlier training in Western academic painting under Kuroda Seiki. The work is a representative example of the suiboku sansui-ga (ink-wash landscape) practice that Kondō developed from the late 1910s onward and exhibited regularly at the Japan Art Institute (Inten) exhibitions.