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 (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 in the 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.