Hibiya Ongaku-do 日比谷音楽堂 (Hibiya Concert Hall) / Shin Tokyo hyakkei 新東京百景 (One Hundred Views of New Tokyo)

Hibiya Ongaku-do (Hibiya Concert Hall) is a print by Onchi Koshiro from Shin Tokyo hyakkei (One Hundred Views of New Tokyo), a major collaborative sosaku-hanga series published in the 1928-1932 period. The British Museum impression is documented through ukiyo-e.org. The series gathered eight sosaku-hanga artists, with Onchi as the leading organizing presence, to record the rebuilt metropolis of Tokyo in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. Each contributor designed, carved, and printed his own subjects, in contrast to the publisher-controlled production of shin-hanga, and the series became one of the defining statements of creative-print ambition in the prewar decade. Onchi's view of the Hibiya Concert Hall, an open-air music venue built in central Tokyo's Hibiya Park, treats the new civic architecture of the modern city as a worthy subject for the woodblock. The composition reduces the building and its surroundings to disciplined planes of color and silhouette in a manner already moving toward the abstract woodblock language of his later career. Shin Tokyo hyakkei stands as a counterpart to Edo-period hundred-views series such as Hiroshige's Meisho Edo hyakkei, but where the earlier works documented famous places of a Tokugawa city, Onchi and his colleagues recorded a self-consciously modern Tokyo of concrete, electricity, and Western-influenced public space. The British Museum's holdings of Shin Tokyo hyakkei sheets, accessible through ukiyo-e.org, allow direct comparison among the contributing artists and document Onchi's central role in shaping the modern Japanese print.