Morning Of New Year's day in Ginza

A cityscape of Tokyo's Ginza district at dawn on New Year's Day, when shops are shuttered and the normally crowded shopping avenue is unusually quiet. The subject places the print in the Yoshida studio's tradition of modern urban scenes, a thread Hiroshi Yoshida had developed in his Tokyo prints of the 1920s and 1930s. Toshi's treatment likely employs [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) for the morning sky and a receding perspective down the avenue, with multi-block impressions rendering the geometry of the buildings and the signage that distinguishes Ginza from older Tokyo districts. Pulled from cherry-wood blocks on [washi](/glossary/washi), the print continues the studio's project of recording modernized Japan in the medium previously used to depict pre-industrial life. Shogatsu, the New Year holiday, is the most observed date in the Japanese calendar, which accounts for Ginza's specific quiet at this hour — a [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) of a familiar place rendered at an unfamiliar moment of stillness.