Mt. Hodaka at Daybreak

Mt. Hodaka at Daybreak, a 1955 color woodblock print held at the Honolulu Museum of Art, is one of the central Northern Japan Alps compositions of Yamaguchi Susumu's mature postwar career. Mount Hodaka, second-highest peak in Japan after Mount Fuji, dominated the landscape vocabulary to which Yamaguchi returned across decades, and the daybreak treatment here places the mountain at its most luminous moment, with the early light catching the high ridge against a still cool sky. By 1955 Yamaguchi was fifty eight and had been working in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) medium for over three decades, ever since his 1934 Paris exhibition success convinced him to commit fully to the woodblock. The print exemplifies the signature style he had developed and that he continued to refine through the postwar Showa decades: 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 that he characteristically set against warm earth tones, and the contours retain the bold cloisonné quality that contemporary critics likened to Georges Rouault. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds this sheet as part of its postwar Japanese print collection, and the impression preserves the saturated chromatic registration and the exposed woodgrain that distinguish Yamaguchi's strongest Japan Alps landscape work of the mid 1950s.