One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era

Kishio Koizumi's One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era (Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue) is the artist's central project and one of the most ambitious solo cityscape cycles of the interwar Japanese print. Koizumi (1893-1945) had moved from his birthplace in Shizuoka to Tokyo in the 1910s and had taken up self-carved and self-printed woodblock practice within the sosaku-hanga movement, exhibiting with the Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai through the late Taisho and early Showa years and supporting himself principally through his print work. The Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue was issued between 1928 and 1940, the years immediately following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and during the rebuilding of the city into the modern metropolis that the Showa government promoted as the new capital, and the cycle gathers one hundred views of the rebuilt city across its districts, monuments, infrastructure, and quotidian street scenes. The project belongs alongside the contemporary Shin Tokyo hyakkei (1928-1932) of the eight-artist sosaku-hanga collaborative as the principal pictorial archive of the post-earthquake metropolis, but distinguishes itself by being a single-author undertaking in which Koizumi himself carved and printed each of the hundred plates in the working method that the sosaku-hanga movement had codified. The sheets are issued in oban yoko-e format with the firm contour and selective graduated color characteristic of Koizumi's mature graphic practice, and each is identified by a numbered cartouche giving the location and the date of the original sketch. The series operates simultaneously as a documentary record of late-1920s and 1930s Tokyo, as a sustained demonstration of the sosaku-hanga method, and as a personal artistic statement of a print career carried on largely without commercial publication. Impressions are catalogued in the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds the most complete Western run of the project, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Edo-Tokyo Museum, where the cycle figures among the central documents of pre-war Tokyo cityscape practice.

The One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era series contains 1 prints, created by Kishio Koizumi.

The One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era series was created by Kishio Koizumi (小泉癸巳男).

We currently have 6 of 1 known prints from the One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.