Japan Alps (Chuo Arupusu), Yamaguchi yakedake

Japan Alps (Chuo Arupusu), a 1958 color woodblock print held at the Harvard Art Museums, depicts the Central Japan Alps (Chuo Arupusu) that ran south of Yamaguchi Susumu's native Ina valley in Nagano prefecture and that, alongside the Northern Alps at Kamikochi, formed the principal subject of his entire mature [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) career. By 1958 Yamaguchi was sixty one and at the peak of his postwar visibility, with Oliver Statler's 1956 Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn having brought his work to a wider American audience and his Japan Alps compositions actively entering American and European public collections. The print exemplifies the signature style he had built across more than three decades of practice: thick saturated layers of water-based pigment on dampened torinoko paper, printed from grain-exposed blocks so that the wood itself contributes texture to the image. The palette favors the deep blues and greens characteristic of his alpine work, set against warm earth tones, and the contours retain the bold cloisonné quality that contemporary critics likened to the French painter Georges Rouault. Yamaguchi's position within the sosaku-hanga canon is specific: where Onchi Koshiro and Hiratsuka Un'ichi pushed the movement toward abstraction, Yamaguchi held to landscape and returned across forty years to the same mountains under disciplined technical means. The Harvard impression preserves the saturated chromatic registration and exposed woodgrain that distinguish his strongest Japan Alps landscape prints.