Ine No1

The opening plate in Tanaka's Ine series, depicting the Tango Peninsula fishing village whose funaya — boathouses built with their ground floors on stilts over the water of Ine Bay — constitute one of the few surviving traditional working harbors of its kind in Japan. As the first print in the sequence, it likely establishes the broader compositional view of the village before later plates move closer to individual structures. Tanaka renders the cluster of funaya through patient intaglio hatching, building the weight of overlapping tile roofs and timber-framed second stories against the flatter tonal field of the bay. The serial treatment, with its numbered plates returning to a single subject from successive vantages, reflects an approach Tanaka used elsewhere — in his Kyoto and minka prints — to record a vernacular Japanese landscape comprehensively rather than monumentally. The print treats Ine as architecture and livelihood inseparable: the buildings exist because of the boats they shelter.