Torii of Kudan

The torii at Kudan stands at Yasukuni Shrine, on the slope above the Imperial Palace's northern moat in Tokyo, and Kawakami's print joins the long tradition of [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) (famous-place pictures) treating the location. The subject is striking for an artist more often identified with foreign figures, and Kawakami brings the same flat, signboard sensibility to the architecture: the torii is reduced to its essential silhouette of two pillars and a horizontal lintel, set against a field of color rather than developed atmospheric space. The carving is deliberately graphic, with the woodgrain often allowed to read through the printed surface. Self-carved and self-printed on [washi](/glossary/washi) in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) manner, the print shows Kawakami applying his Nanban-derived idiom to a thoroughly Japanese subject, treating the shrine gate less as a place than as a graphic motif. The numeral in the slug suggests this is one of several impressions or variants in a series Kawakami developed around the Kudan motif.