Scenery of Tokyo
About This Series
Scenery of Tokyo is one of Oda Kazuma's general designations for his Tokyo cityscape projects, the title circulating in English alongside Views of Tokyo (Tokyo fukei) and other variants under which his observational records of the capital were published across the 1920s and 1930s. The title designates a body of related sheets rather than a single fixed canonical set, and its meaning overlaps with the various Tokyo fukei and Tokyo fukei hangashu cycles by which Oda treated the city across his career. As an early-Showa Tokyo cycle the series participates in the broader interwar interest in townscape that emerged across both shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga circles, capturing the city during the decades of greatest transformation, the rebuilding after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the rise of steel-frame and reinforced-concrete construction across Ginza, Nihonbashi, and Marunouchi, the spread of department stores, cinemas, and electric advertising, and the persistence of older residential districts in the shitamachi neighborhoods east of the Sumida. Oda, who had trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and who maintained a productive parallel career as a graphic designer for the early-Showa press, brought to these cityscapes a documentary register distinct from the atmospheric lyricism of his Watanabe Shozaburo contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi. The compositions favor architectural silhouette, crisp outline, and restrained palette, with figures reduced to small staffage that registers human scale and the social use of each location without disrupting the geometry of the urban scene. The series belongs to Oda's Osaka and post-Osaka years, the period from his 1922 relocation to Osaka through his later return to Tokyo, during which his sustained engagement with the modern metropolis produced the body of urban work for which he is now best known. Impressions are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scenery of Tokyo is one of Oda Kazuma's general designations for his Tokyo cityscape projects, the title circulating in English alongside Views of Tokyo (Tokyo fukei) and other variants under which his observational records of the capital were published across the 1920s and 1930s. The title designates a body of related sheets rather than a single fixed canonical set, and its meaning overlaps with the various Tokyo fukei and Tokyo fukei hangashu cycles by which Oda treated the city across his career. As an early-Showa Tokyo cycle the series participates in the broader interwar interest in townscape that emerged across both shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga circles, capturing the city during the decades of greatest transformation, the rebuilding after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the rise of steel-frame and reinforced-concrete construction across Ginza, Nihonbashi, and Marunouchi, the spread of department stores, cinemas, and electric advertising, and the persistence of older residential districts in the shitamachi neighborhoods east of the Sumida. Oda, who had trained as a lithographer at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko and who maintained a productive parallel career as a graphic designer for the early-Showa press, brought to these cityscapes a documentary register distinct from the atmospheric lyricism of his Watanabe Shozaburo contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi. The compositions favor architectural silhouette, crisp outline, and restrained palette, with figures reduced to small staffage that registers human scale and the social use of each location without disrupting the geometry of the urban scene. The series belongs to Oda's Osaka and post-Osaka years, the period from his 1922 relocation to Osaka through his later return to Tokyo, during which his sustained engagement with the modern metropolis produced the body of urban work for which he is now best known. Impressions are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art.
The Scenery of Tokyo series contains 1 prints, created by Oda Kazuma.
The Scenery of Tokyo series was created by Oda Kazuma (織田一磨).
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