New Town (411)

New Town — danchi or nyū taun in Japanese — refers to the planned residential developments that spread across the suburbs of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto from the 1960s onward, replacing former farmland with apartment blocks and standardized housing. The title carries unmistakable irony in the context of Tanaka's wider work, which is otherwise devoted to the very rural landscapes such developments displaced. The print likely depicts the rectilinear forms of new concrete housing, perhaps still set against remnants of older fields or vegetation, recording the transition rather than condemning it. With its low catalogue number (411), this is an earlier work, made when the postwar transformation of the Japanese landscape was still actively underway and the contrast between old and new was visible at every urban edge. The print stands as a counterweight within his oeuvre — the modern condition his minka prints were always implicitly defined against.