After the Bath (Tokyo) / Nihon jozoku sen (Woman's Customs in Japan)

After the Bath (Tokyo), from the series Nihon jozoku sen (Women's Customs in Japan), is a print by Onchi Koshiro held in the British Museum and accessible through ukiyo-e.org. Onchi, the central sosaku-hanga pioneer of twentieth-century Japan, contributed to the Nihon jozoku sen series alongside other sosaku-hanga artists; the project surveyed modern women's daily life in different regions of Japan and gave each contributor latitude to bring a personal style to a shared theme. The bijin-ga, or pictures of beautiful women, was a defining genre of Edo-period ukiyo-e, and twentieth-century printmakers returned to it repeatedly as a way of measuring contemporary life against tradition. Onchi's contribution treats the bathing motif with the restraint typical of his mature work. The figure is set within a tightly organized composition of flat color areas and economical line, and the print withholds the elaborate detail of kimono pattern and accessories that defined the genre in Edo and Meiji. Where his contemporaries such as Hashiguchi Goyo and later shin-hanga artists pursued highly finished, often erotic refinement, Onchi pushed bijin-ga toward modernist abstraction, treating the body as one shape among others within the picture rectangle. The British Museum impression preserves this comparatively rare figural work and helps document the range of Onchi's practice: even when he engaged a traditional subject and a collaborative series, he carried the formal habits of abstract woodblock into the encounter and helped reframe what a postwar Japanese print could be.