Misty Evening on the Shore of Shinobazu Pond (Kasumu yube, Shinobazu ikehata)

Misty Evening on the Shore of Shinobazu Pond (Kasumu yube, Shinobazu ikehata), produced by Shiro Kasamatsu in 1932, is one of his most often-cited [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) views of Tokyo. Shinobazu Pond, set within Ueno Park, has been a recurring motif in Japanese print since the Edo period; its lotus beds, its small island shrine to Benten, and the surrounding district of Ikenohata were already familiar to viewers from earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). Kasamatsu chooses an evening hour and a low key, building the image around a single lantern or window light reflected on still water through a veil of mist. The figures, if present, are small and silhouetted; the architecture is reduced to a few dark masses. The technical demands of this kind of design were considerable: the workshop had to register multiple closely related grey and blue tones, manage long [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations in both sky and water, and preserve clean reservations for the reflected light without losing the softness of the mist. This control was made possible by Kasamatsu's collaboration with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, whose carvers and printers were among the most skilled of the shin-hanga era. The print captures a Tokyo that still retained traces of its older, lower-rise cityscape less than a decade after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake had destroyed much of the city. The work is held in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection of twentieth-century Japanese prints.