Sarusawa Pond

Sarusawa Pond, dated 1949, is preserved in the holdings represented by the Ohmi Gallery and made viewable through ukiyo-e.org (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/artelino/16657g1). The subject, Sarusawa-ike, is the small tree-fringed pond at the foot of the great hill on which Kofuku-ji rises in Nara, framed for centuries by the silhouette of the temple's five-story pagoda reflecting in its still water. The pond has been a touchstone of Nara landscape since the Heian period and was repeatedly treated by Edo-period print designers and by shin-hanga successors such as Kawase Hasui, who produced his own celebrated Sarusawa view. Asano Takeji (1900-1999), trained at the Kyoto City School of Fine Arts and Crafts and active across the long arc of the shin-hanga era, brings to the motif the muted Kyoto-school palette and the carefully built reflections that distinguish his landscape practice. The 1949 date is significant: Asano had returned to printmaking after the wartime interruption and was once again producing landscape designs for Kyoto publishers including Uchida Bijutsu Shoshi, who issued many of his postwar Nara, Kyoto, and Biwa views. The shin-hanga collaborative system, in which a designer worked alongside specialist carvers and printers under a publisher's coordination, remained the operative production model for these immediate postwar designs, even as the sosaku-hanga ('creative prints') movement increasingly redefined the wider field. The view's quiet tonality, with the pagoda registered as a vertical against horizontal bands of water and overhanging foliage, exemplifies Asano's preferred register of contemplative stillness rather than dramatic incident. The Ohmi Gallery record provides a useful aggregation of his postwar Nara subjects, and the ukiyo-e.org source link gives researchers a starting point for further documentation of publisher, edition, and series context.