Enoshima Island at Kamakura

Enoshima is a small island in Sagami Bay off the Shōnan coast at Kamakura, joined to the mainland by a tidal sandbar (tombolo). The location has been a fixture of meisho-e since the Edo period — Hokusai included it in his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and Hiroshige treated it repeatedly in his Tōkaidō and provincial series. A mid-twentieth-century print of this subject typically presents the island's wooded silhouette rising from the water, with the dark mass of foliage implying the tori-lined approach to Enoshima Shrine, and may include Mount Fuji as a distant cone on the western horizon. The mokuhanga technique here would rely on several color blocks for sea, sky, and landmass, with bokashi gradations along water and atmosphere to register depth and time of day. Within Konishi Seiichiro's recorded output — small in number and unassociated with a documented publisher — Enoshima views align with the persistent shin-hanga and post-shin-hanga interest in Kanagawa coastal scenery, produced for domestic and tourist markets in the decades after the second world war.