One Hundred Views of New Tokyo
新東京百景
About This Series
One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo hyakkei) is a cycle of metropolitan views to which Kawase Hasui contributed designs in the years from 1936 forward, addressing the reconstructed and modernized capital that had been rebuilt over the two decades since the catastrophic 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of central Tokyo. The Shin Tokyo hyakkei project belongs to the body of shin-hanga and adjacent print cycles that responded to the modernization of the city across the 1920s and 1930s, when concrete office buildings, elevated railways, broadened boulevards, and rebuilt public spaces transformed the urban fabric that Hiroshige and his Edo successors had recorded into a recognizably twentieth-century metropolis. The hundred-view scheme, inherited from the great late-Edo Hyakkei tradition that culminated in Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858, supplied Hasui with a structural format through which to organize the new city as a serial roster of districts, landmarks, and characteristic urban scenes, and the project's title positioned it as a deliberate modern successor to the Edo Hyakkei lineage. Hasui, working under the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo or in related shin-hanga distribution channels depending on individual designs, applied the place-portrait vocabulary that he had developed across his earlier landscape and Tokyo cycles to the subject of the reconstructed capital, treating the new buildings, parks, and waterfront with the same atmospheric refinement that he brought to his rural and traditional subjects. The cycle accordingly stands as one of the principal shin-hanga responses to the urban modernization of the late 1930s and as evidence of how the shin-hanga vocabulary, often associated with traditional landscape, could be adapted to contemporary urban subjects when its artists turned to them. Within Hasui's career the Shin Tokyo hyakkei contributions belong to the middle interwar period in which he was at his most productive as Watanabe's principal landscape artist, and modern scholarship treats the cycle as a documentary witness to interwar Tokyo and as evidence of the genre flexibility of the shin-hanga movement. Surviving impressions are valued for the record they preserve of buildings and street scenes that were subsequently destroyed in the wartime bombing of 1944 and 1945, and representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Frequently Asked Questions
One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo hyakkei) is a cycle of metropolitan views to which Kawase Hasui contributed designs in the years from 1936 forward, addressing the reconstructed and modernized capital that had been rebuilt over the two decades since the catastrophic 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of central Tokyo. The Shin Tokyo hyakkei project belongs to the body of shin-hanga and adjacent print cycles that responded to the modernization of the city across the 1920s and 1930s, when concrete office buildings, elevated railways, broadened boulevards, and rebuilt public spaces transformed the urban fabric that Hiroshige and his Edo successors had recorded into a recognizably twentieth-century metropolis. The hundred-view scheme, inherited from the great late-Edo Hyakkei tradition that culminated in Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858, supplied Hasui with a structural format through which to organize the new city as a serial roster of districts, landmarks, and characteristic urban scenes, and the project's title positioned it as a deliberate modern successor to the Edo Hyakkei lineage. Hasui, working under the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo or in related shin-hanga distribution channels depending on individual designs, applied the place-portrait vocabulary that he had developed across his earlier landscape and Tokyo cycles to the subject of the reconstructed capital, treating the new buildings, parks, and waterfront with the same atmospheric refinement that he brought to his rural and traditional subjects. The cycle accordingly stands as one of the principal shin-hanga responses to the urban modernization of the late 1930s and as evidence of how the shin-hanga vocabulary, often associated with traditional landscape, could be adapted to contemporary urban subjects when its artists turned to them. Within Hasui's career the Shin Tokyo hyakkei contributions belong to the middle interwar period in which he was at his most productive as Watanabe's principal landscape artist, and modern scholarship treats the cycle as a documentary witness to interwar Tokyo and as evidence of the genre flexibility of the shin-hanga movement. Surviving impressions are valued for the record they preserve of buildings and street scenes that were subsequently destroyed in the wartime bombing of 1944 and 1945, and representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The One Hundred Views of New Tokyo series was created by Kawase Hasui (川瀬巴水), produced between 1936–1940.
Want to rate prints from One Hundred Views of New Tokyo?
Sign up to start rating