Cherry Tree in Autumn Colors at Joshoko Temple (Sakura momiji Joshokoji)

Cherry Tree in Autumn Colors at Joshoko Temple (Sakura momiji Joshokoji), made by Shiro Kasamatsu in 1967, is a late-career shin-hanga design that turns on a deliberate seasonal inversion. In Japanese aesthetic convention, cherry trees are emblems of spring, viewed and celebrated for their brief flowering; Kasamatsu instead depicts a cherry tree at Joshokoji, a temple, in its autumn coloration, when its leaves have turned to reds and ochres. By selecting this off-season state, he draws attention to the same tree as a year-round presence and to the slower beauty of foliage rather than blossom. The composition centres the tree against the temple's wooden structure, with controlled use of complementary green and grey tones to keep the warm leaves from becoming overpowering. By 1967 the original shin-hanga publishing structure under Watanabe Shozaburo had passed to the second-generation Watanabe firm, but the workshop continued to produce prints under that lineage; Kasamatsu's late work belongs to that continuation of the tradition. The technical execution remains characteristic of shin-hanga at its mature stage: a carved keyblock for fine branch and architectural lines, multiple colour blocks for foliage, and graded bokashi printing for atmospheric depth. The print is held in the Art Institute of Chicago and illustrates how the shin-hanga vocabulary developed in the 1920s remained productive well into the postwar decades.