Chuzenji-ko (Lake Chuzenji), from Ichimoku-shu (First Thursday Collection), Vol. 2

Chuzenji-ko (Lake Chuzenji), a 1946 color woodblock print, is the sheet that Yamaguchi Susumu contributed to volume 2 of the Ichimoku-shu (First Thursday Collection), the hand-assembled portfolio that the Ichimokukai produced in the years immediately after the war. The Ichimokukai had been founded in 1939 by Onchi Koshiro as a small private gathering of creative print artists who met monthly at Onchi's Tokyo home, and through the 1940s the group produced the Ichimoku-shu portfolios in which each member contributed an original print to be circulated among the others. The British Museum holds the present sheet, and the impression is consulted here through the museum's holdings of postwar Japanese prints. Chuzenji-ko shows Yamaguchi extending the disciplined landscape vocabulary he had developed before the war into one of the iconic Japanese mountain lakes, treated through the saturated water-based pigment, the dampened torinoko paper, and the grain-exposed blocks that defined his signature style. The Ichimoku-shu sheets are among the most important documents of postwar Showa [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), recording the creative print movement's communal survival through the difficult late 1940s, and Yamaguchi's contribution to volume 2 places him within the Onchi circle alongside Sekino Junichiro, Yamaguchi Gen, and Maekawa Sempan. The British Museum impression preserves the layered chromatic registration and exposed woodgrain that distinguish his best postwar landscape work.