Mastumoto Castle, Shinshu

Matsumoto Castle, Shinshu, designed by Shiro Kasamatsu in 1934, captures one of Japan's most distinctive surviving castles in a quiet, atmosphere-led [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) treatment. Matsumoto-jo, located in present-day Nagano Prefecture (historically Shinshu), is a flatland castle whose black weatherboarded keep, completed in the late sixteenth century, earned it the nickname Karasu-jo, the Crow Castle. Kasamatsu profiles its tiered roofs against a softly graduated sky and reflects the structure in the surrounding moat, where the dark silhouette doubles into a near-symmetrical inverted image. The composition is restrained: a few pines, the curving line of the moat, a band of stone walls, and the castle itself, with little incidental detail to distract from the monument. As a shin-hanga print, the work belongs to the modern movement that revived [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) production methods under publishers such as Watanabe Shozaburo, with whom Kasamatsu had been associated since the late 1910s. Watanabe's workshop, with its specialised carvers and printers, was suited to exactly this kind of subject: the deep blacks of the castle keep required careful pigment selection and even pressure across the block, while the muted greys and ochres of stone, water, and sky depend on graded [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) printing. Produced during a period of intense national interest in Japan's castles as cultural heritage, the print operates both as a [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) (famous-place image) and as a quiet statement about continuity. The print is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.