Nanbanesque behaviour

The fifth print in a series Kawakami worked on across decades depicting nanban — the Portuguese and Spanish merchants and missionaries who reached Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The image shows foreigners in pantaloons, ruff collars, and tall hats engaged in some everyday activity — drinking, conversing, or gesturing — rendered with the flat, wide-eyed directness Kawakami took from folk woodblock and karuta playing cards. His nanban prints draw on the historical nanban byobu screens but strip away their gold-ground refinement, replacing it with a deliberately childlike line and a small palette of saturated colors. The mokuhanga technique, with its visible carving marks and uneven inking, reinforces the folk-art register. Within the sosaku-hanga movement, where many artists followed Onchi toward lyrical abstraction, Kawakami's nanban work staked out a separate territory rooted in Edo-period print conventions and his own cosmopolitan biography.