Mt Fuji seen from Izumo

Meisho-e composition of Mount Fuji viewed across distance from Izumo, the province on the Japan Sea coast in present-day Shimane prefecture. The juxtaposition is geographically improbable — Izumo and Fuji lie on opposite sides of Honshū at a distance of several hundred kilometres — and the print operates within the imaginative tradition of meisho compositions established by Hokusai and Hiroshige, in which the cone of Fuji is granted symbolic visibility in the Japanese landscape regardless of literal sightline. Yamamura's landscape sheets, fewer in number than his yakusha-e, work in flat tonal areas with bokashi gradients in the sky and water and a distant, simplified silhouette of Fuji floating above the horizon. The print would have been produced as shin-hanga: keyblock cut from Yamamura's drawing, color blocks registered in nishiki-e polychrome on hōsho washi, with bokashi worked into individual passages by hand pressure on the baren. It belongs to the body of landscape work that Yamamura produced alongside his theatrical portraits.