Ine Port 4

The fourth plate in Tanaka's series on Ine, a fishing village on the Tango Peninsula in northern Kyoto Prefecture famous for its funaya — distinctive two-story boathouses that line the bay with their lower floors built directly over the water to shelter fishing vessels. The etching captures the close ranking of these timber structures along the shoreline, with Tanaka's controlled hatching describing weathered cladding, sloping tiled roofs, and the reflective surface of the harbor. The medium of etching, with its capacity for fine descriptive line, suits the architectural specificity of Ine, where every funaya is a slight variant on a shared vernacular template. Ine occupied a place in Tanaka's oeuvre parallel to his more numerous Kyoto-countryside minka prints: it offered another tradition of pre-modern Japanese building tied to a working livelihood and slowly eroding under postwar change. The series's serial format echoes earlier Japanese landscape conventions of returning to a single site through multiple views.