Water in the shade of the trees - Inokashira pond

Inokashira-ike is the spring-fed pond at the heart of Inokashira Park in western Tokyo, a place where shin-hanga artists found the kind of suburban Tokyo motif their public preferred to the modernizing city center. This print isolates a passage of water lying under tree cover—the keyblock used sparingly along the bank, the canopy printed in successive flat green and gray blocks, and the pond surface carrying the tonal range through bokashi gradation rather than line. The title's emphasis on shade points to a specific workshop challenge: rendering filtered light without resorting to white highlights, instead reserving the washi at strategic points and letting the printer's baren work modulate ink density. Kasamatsu produced a number of Tokyo-vicinity views across his career, and Inokashira sits within a small group of pond and stream subjects that demonstrate his preference for enclosed, shaded locations over open vistas. The print belongs to the meisho-e tradition adapted to a twentieth-century, recreational-park sense of place.