Futami Bay in Ise Province (Seishu futami ga ura), from an untitled series of western style landscapes

Futami Bay in Ise Province, drawn from the untitled series of western-style landscapes by Takahashi Shotei, is preserved in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The bay of Futami on the Ise coast was already a charged site in Japanese visual culture thanks to the Meoto Iwa, the joined 'wedded rocks' linked by a sacred shimenawa rope, and to its proximity to the Ise Grand Shrine. Shotei, signing as Hiroaki, brings the place into his series of westernized views by foregrounding atmospheric depth, a coherent single-perspective recession and a soft palette of greys, blues and warm pinks rather than the brighter, flatter color blocks of earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The [chuban](/glossary/chuban) landscape format chosen by the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo gives the design an intimate scale that suits collectors looking for a compact memento of a famous coastal site. The series was an early experiment in the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) effort to graft European pictorial conventions onto Japanese subjects, and Futami Bay is one of its most legible examples because the rocks and shrine architecture are immediately recognizable to anyone who already knew the standard tourist iconography of Ise. As with many of Shotei's pre-1923 designs, the original blocks were among the casualties of the Great Kanto earthquake that destroyed much of Watanabe Shozaburo's stock, so the impressions surviving in collections such as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are important records of the publisher's early western-style program. The print sits at a productive intersection of religious meisho, modern tourism and the shin-hanga revival.