New ukiyo-e for a new Japan

There is something slyly tender about shin-hanga: the West fell in love with Japan so deeply that it began to crave her “oldness” like a talisman—and Japan, already racing toward modernity, answered with images that look like memory. Yet these were not postcards from a land of eternal Edo, but elegantly camouflaged essays about a country on the border of eras: a place where photography and cinema take over the role of witnesses, and the woodblock print—old as dust on temple beams—suddenly discovers that its true strength is not documentation, but mood.

Look at Hasui’s snow: it is not weather here, but a method of seeing. Snow whitens the world not to flee from truth, but to sharpen it—to create a distance in which Tokyo of the 1920s and 1930s can be seen like a recollection: simpler, quieter, less clamorous, and therefore more penetrating. And then something happens that is hard to look away from: the “Great Gate at Shiba” stands like the weight of tradition, and into this frame—too beautiful for pure sentiment—rolls a car with a chauffeur in uniform; the passenger wears a fedora.

And then shin-hanga drives in a pin that turns this beauty into something else entirely: the historic temple gate… is made of concrete. It is a reconstruction. A rebuild. And suddenly we understand that what we take for “old Japan” is sometimes already modern material painted red in order to remember who one used to be. In today’s article we will meet the successor of ukiyo-e—the shin-hanga woodblock prints. They were accused of being “pretty pictures” made for export to the West—selling nostalgia for what the West took to be Japanese. Sometimes there was a bit of truth in those accusations, but today we will go deeper and see how masters—such as Kawase Hasui—hid above all the drama of the era inside these beautiful landscapes: a Japan modernizing at a dizzying pace, and at the same time desperately needing images that provide a sense of continuity—even if that continuity must be rebuilt from scratch every so often. Today we will see how shin-hanga can be both a lovely “nostalgia for export” and a piercing record of a world in which, beneath the red paint of tradition, one increasingly feels the hard touch of concrete.

「芝大門の雪」

(Shiba Daimon no Yuki)

“Snow at the Great Gate in Shiba”

 - Kawase Hasui (川瀬巴水), 1936 (Shōwa 11),
Shiba, the area around Zōjōji and the Daimon Gate,
Series “新東京百景” (“One Hundred Views of New Tokyo”)

When you look at Kawase Hasui’s 1936 woodblock print, it is easy to think: “What a beautiful picture!” Snow quiets the city, the red of the gate burns calmly like embers under ash, and the whole thing looks like a memory from an age when time moved more slowly and one still did not have to name the illnesses of the modern soul.. But it is precisely in this work—“Snow at the Great Gate in Shiba,” created by Kawase Hasui in 1936—that the shin-hanga style reveals its most fascinating mechanism: an art that seems, on the surface, to preserve old Japan, but in reality speaks about a country standing on the border of eras, about modernization entering—sometimes quietly, sometimes with a stomp—and about tradition that can be nothing more than a beautiful reconstruction.

Let us begin with facts, because they will lead us. Hasui was the loudest—and most consistent—poet of landscape within shin-hanga, a movement co-organized and propelled by the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō. Hasui entered a long collaboration with him that yielded hundreds of designs; in his art, what returned was not so much “geography” as atmosphere: rain, mist, snow, night light—everything closer to memory than to reportage. The work we are discussing is: a color woodblock print, ink and color on paper, format approximately 32 × 22.7 cm.

What do we actually see? In the foreground stands a monumental temple gate: massive, heavy, reddening against the white of winter snow. It is a gate within the Zōjōji complex—a Buddhist temple whose origins reach back to the 9th century, and which in the Edo period was especially prestigious, because it belonged to the Tokugawa’s “favored” institutions and served functions tied to their power and memory.

That alone sets the tone: we are not looking at decoration, but at a gate that carries the weight of old Japan—the Japan that the West in Hasui’s time wanted to collect like an enameled miniature of the world.

Snow falls thickly and methodically. Hasui knew snow the way a craftsman knows material: he could “inflect” it throughout his life, from flakes that are large, readable, and distinct to snow so dense it becomes a veil in which space disappears. In this work the snowfall sits in between, as if it is thickening, suggesting that in a moment it will become almost a curtain—whiteness that not only covers roofs and ground but also smooths the world, hushes it, removes grime, advertisements, chaotic detail. On the right side of the frame, a figure with an umbrella appears: a person in traditional dress, standing like a hesitation—like a pause in a sentence. And then, into the very middle of this “scene about Japan,” something enters that should not be here if the image were to satisfy purely nostalgic expectation: a car.

The automobile is not background. It is an argument. The catalog notes a precise detail: the vehicle has a chauffeur in uniform, and the passenger wears a visible fedora.

This is not accidental “contemporaneity”—it is contemporaneity of class: civilized, Western in gesture, in elegance, in the very idea of private mobility. What is more, the car is not speeding. It “seems to navigate cautiously” within the old complex.

That word—cautiously—is the key. Modernization in Japan of that era often does not look like a barbarous invasion, but like a discreet crossing of a threshold: today a gate, tomorrow the метро, the day after radio—and next week a new kind of loneliness.

And now comes what shin-hanga does best: a layer of irony, but not mocking irony—rather sad, or tragic. For the red gate, which seems a symbol of permanence, is in fact a concrete reproduction. The previous wooden structure was moved to another temple after the gate suffered damage during the 1923 earthquake.

This is the moment when the image begins to speak not of “pretty snow,” but of the psychology of a country: tradition looks like an unbroken continuity, but sometimes it is already a reconstruction after catastrophe. Memory is rebuilding.

In that one detail, we also see how shin-hanga—often accused of “prettiness” and export candy-sweetness—can be a child of its epoch in a very truthful way. The Kantō earthquake was not merely a geological event; it broke the city’s narrative. In Hasui’s images, the motif of destroyed and rebuilt buildings, studios, places returns many times: Hasui lost his home in 1923 and again during wartime bombings, and his woodblock prints captured that state of uncertainty. And yet at the same time Tokyo was “rising” in new constructions: for instance the Kiyosu Bridge, modeled on a European suspension bridge, one of many elements of the rebuilding after 1923.

In such a world, a concrete gate is not a scandal—it is normality: modernity repairs the past with its own materials.

But shin-hanga goes further still. This image shows that “old Japan” in the 1930s was no longer only inherited—it was also being manufactured. Watanabe, publisher and inspirer, had a sense for the market and a sense for nostalgia: he understood the Western longing for a “vanished Japan” and could make it available, relatively accessible, and wonderfully material—in the form of prints produced by refreshing the guild model of production.

At the same time, however, his ambition was not limited to copying old patterns. In academic sources it is said outright: Watanabe worked like the old hanmoto, guarding the traditional collaboration of designer, carver, and printer (the traditional model of ukiyo-e production I described here: The Ukiyo-e Business: How Hanmoto Balanced Between Shogunate Censorship and the Art Market Trends in Edo), but he emphasized that although the techniques are the same, “the spirit of the artists is completely different”: the goal is an individual work of art, not slavish adherence to prototypes.

In that sense, “The Great Gate at Shiba in Snow” is the quintessence of shin-hanga as a civilizational project: we preserve the old technology, we preserve the old subject (temple, gate, snow), but we insert into it a new nerve. That nerve is modernity, which does not need to be described with billboards or crowds, because a fedora and a car are enough. It is enough that the gate is concrete.

And finally—the most essential layer—light. Nothing distinguishes modern Japanese woodblock artists more than a stubborn fascination with light. Old ukiyo-e built recognizable places through detail and specific perspective; modern woodblock prints put the emphasis on mood and atmosphere. And Kobayashi Kiyochika—a precursor of the shin-hanga movement/style—taught viewers to see the night city as a new landscape made possible by electricity, creating an alternative to photography, indeed a new way of seeing familiar places. Hasui inherits that lesson: even when he makes snow, he is, in a way, making light—as a filter of perception. In another of his night views of the Shinkawa warehouses, atmosphere becomes more important than the “rough” reality of the place; a single electric light and a few stars can erase the grime of everyday life.

That is exactly what happens in Shiba: snow works like the soft bulb of memory.

So what does this image tell us about Japan in 1936 and about shin-hanga? It says that Japan of that time lived in a double movement. On the one hand it modernized materially—in infrastructure, in style, in the rhythm of the city—and on the other it needed a space in which it could still feel “oldness” as meaning, not as a museum exhibit. Shin-hanga steps precisely into that gap: it is an art of consolation, but an intelligent consolation, marked by a crack. It does not pretend that modernity is absent—it puts it at the center of the frame. At the same time it does not allow modernity to dominate the narrative—it slows it with snow. And at the end it says something even more bitter: even tradition, if it is to survive in a great twentieth-century city, can be condemned to reconstruction. It is not “betraying” itself then. It simply changes material.

That is why I chose this woodblock print to open today’s article. It is not a pretty card from old Japan. It is an elegantly hidden “essay” about a country that—after the catastrophe of 1923, in the shadow of the era’s mounting tensions—builds its gates out of concrete, but still paints them red to remember who it was.

History of Shin-hanga

The beginning of the journey:

ukiyo-e woodblock print at the crossroads (late 19th c. – ca. 1910)

Shin-hanga is not born from comfort, but from trouble. The woodblock print ceases to be what it was in Edo: a daily carrier of images, a living newspaper of the street, the theater, and entertainment districts. New technologies of mass reproduction—photography, print, press illustration—take away its practical position, and with it the economic sense of the old system.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, creators stand at a crossroads, pushed by something like “cultural schizophrenia”: on one side Western ways of seeing modernity, on the other a longing for forms and themes that carried local identity, “Japaneseness.”

In this period an important precursor of mood also appears: Kobayashi Kiyochika. He sets the new sensibility that will later become one of shin-hanga’s most beautiful languages: night, electric light, contrasts, the atmospheric “haze.” Kiyochika—trained also as a photographer—does not so much imitate the camera as try to “surpass” it in what photography finds most difficult: rendering the psychology of light and darkness, how the city begins to glow “from within.”

The birth of the project

Watanabe and the idea of “new ukiyo-e” (ca. 1912–1923)

Watanabe Shōzaburō enters the history of shin-hanga like a director who understands two facts at once: that woodblock printing needs a new market, and that the West—paradoxically—is ready to provide it, because it longs for “old Japan,” often more imagined than real (this will later become the main charge against shin-hanga’s artistic value).

Watanabe revives the logic of the old hanmoto: he controls quality, organizes the workshop, links designer, carver, and printer into a precise mechanism—but he does so with a modern ambition. He does not want merely to reheat old patterns—he wants to create new ukiyo-e: beautiful women, landscapes, kabuki theater, the world of animals, but filtered through the sensibility of the twentieth century.

Watanabe speaks of himself almost like an ideologue, not only an entrepreneur. He admits: the carving and printing techniques are the same as in the past, but “the spirit of the artists is completely different”*; artisans are to collaborate in creating individual works of art, not to have their hands tied by prototype and patterns. It sounds like a program: the traditional production apparatus is to squeeze out a new sensibility—modern, and at the same time “Japanese” in emotion.

* here and much else in the article after: 渡邊庄三郎「川瀬巴水創作版画解説」 (Watanabe Shōzaburō, “Explanations to the Creative Woodblock Prints of Kawase Hasui”)

From the start it is clear how multilayered this mixture is. The first designer to offer Watanabe patterns was… an Austrian, Fritz Capelari. Soon artists from very different schools join: Hasui and Itō Shinsui from the nihonga circle, Yoshida Hiroshi or Hashiguchi Goyō more strongly connected to “Western” painting (yōga), as well as British creators (Elizabeth Keith, Charles Bartlett) or Dutch ones (Peter Irwin Brown). From the beginning, then, shin-hanga is a paradox: it is supposed to sell Japan her own image, but seen through a Western gaze.

From this early phase it is worth remembering a detail that says a great deal about the movement’s logic: Hasui debuts with Watanabe in 1918 with a set of three vertical landscapes of Shiobara—a place he carried in memory from childhood and even called his “birthplace.” This is the opening scene: shin-hanga begins with “landscape as memory,” not with reportage.

Catastrophe as a turning point

Kantō 1923 and the economics of nostalgia (1923–1926)

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 is for shin-hanga a physical and psychological blow. The quake destroys the city, and with it workshops and blocks, and in Yoshida Hiroshi’s case—the blocks for the famous series “Inland Sea.” What is more, the catastrophe also destroys Watanabe’s shop and studio, which had previously published these works.

This story has a beautiful and bitter continuation: Yoshida—especially attached to one of the views—recreates the design in 1926 and publishes new impressions, this time from his own studio. In 1927 this series becomes the first woodblock prints accepted into the prestigious Teiten salon, an event almost “systemic” for a medium long perceived as plebeian: until then the salon recognized painting and sculpture, not woodblock prints. Here we see the whole drama of shin-hanga: catastrophe destroys the material foundations of work, but at the same time forces professionalization and a fight for status.

At the same time, it is worth realizing why shin-hanga is sometimes accused of being a “conservative postcard.” After 1923—in financial crisis—Watanabe begins producing more traditional, cautious designs in order to earn faster from export and respond to Western demand. This does not invalidate his artistic ambitions, but it shows the tension written into the movement from the beginning: art and the market go together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in pain.

Two paths of modern woodblock print

Shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga (1910–1930s)

To understand the development of shin-hanga, one must place beside it its “twin opposite”: sōsaku-hanga. In the same decades grows the idea of woodblock printing as the act of one person, often under the slogan jiga jikoku jizuri—“I drew it myself, I carved it myself, I printed it myself.” Sōsaku-hanga artists, receptive to European avant-gardes (expressionism, cubism, futurism, dada), treat the medium as a tool of personal expression and commentary on the era.

Sources from the time are honest to the point of brutality: it is said outright that shin-hanga chooses a more traditional, idealizing, and “intellectually non-inquiring” path, while sōsaku-hanga captures more accurately the turbulence and contradictions of Tokyo after the earthquake. That is harsh, but important. Because shin-hanga is not a “chronicle of ruins.” It is rather an attempt to create a world in which one can breathe, even though modernity can be suffocating.

Besides, one can see how, after 1923, the need for a “record of the moment” grows—not to describe it, but to protect it from another destruction. In 1928 designs for major series of views of New Tokyo arise; one even speaks of a so-called “memory hedge,” a safeguarding of memory in case of a future catastrophe that no one can predict… and which, as we now know, will soon arrive in the form of wartime raids and bombings.

The maturity of shin-hanga:

the language of light, atmosphere, and “romantic modernity” (1926–1937)

In the 1920s and 1930s shin-hanga becomes as recognizable as music: you do not need to see the signature to “hear” the style. What sounds strongest in it is light. In the materials it is stated outright: nothing distinguishes modern Japanese woodblock artists as much as their stubborn interest in light—especially in landscape and city. Old artists identified recognizable places; new ones explore mood.

Hasui, Shinsui, Goyō, Yoshida—each differently—try to “translate painting into woodblock print”: density of pigment, gradations, sometimes embossing and surface effects. In early Hasui works there even appears an ambition to obtain a texture reminiscent of oil paint—the impression of paint mass, not just a pure patch of color.

This language allows shin-hanga to do something seemingly contradictory: show modernity, but “lull it” with atmosphere. Many shin-hanga works convey the impression of timeless, unchanging tradition, while at the same time sometimes romanticizing the “intrusion of modernity.” And as an example one can give precisely the image discussed at the beginning—Hasui’s “Great Gate at Shiba in Snow” from 1936. That is the core. Modernity is in the frame, but it usually stands there like a guest: in the form of an iron bridge, a car, electric light—not as the roar of industry.

At the same time—and this is another beautiful paradox—the West did not always want quite so much modernity in Japanese art. One can find remarks by Western reviewers of the time who could be disoriented by the modernization and “Europeanization” of shin-hanga. One critic, William H. Edmunds, wrote that some modern artists had gone “too far” in Europeanizing this art, though one could still see in many a “quiet restraint” and preservation of “true Japanese feeling.” *

* William H. Edmunds, “Modern Japanese Artists: Kawase Hasui: an Appreciation”

Shin-hanga thus lives in tension: it is to be new, but not “hybrid”; it is to be readable to the West, but not entirely Western.

War and the cracking of memory:

the decline of an era (1937–1945)

When Japan enters the war years, the space for “quiet modernization” disappears. Shin-hanga, of course, does not vanish in an instant—but the conditions that fed it begin to crumble: the economy, export, paper, pigments, the rhythm of life. And above everything hangs the awareness that Tokyo—rebuilt after 1923—may again be turned to ash.

The artists creating “views of New Tokyo” after 1923 made them also as a safeguard of memory in case of a future catastrophe; no one could predict that less than two decades later the city would become rubble again, this time through wartime raids and firebombing.

Shin-hanga, in its most beautiful version, thus proves to be an art of premature mourning: an image of a world that already then—though it looked calm—stood on an edge.

The postwar “last wave” and transformation into legend

(1945–1960s)

After the war shin-hanga does not so much die as change status. Some creators still work, some themes endure, but it is no longer the same world. Even Shinsui (Itō Shinsui, one of the most important creators of the shin-hanga movement) can after the war abandon the nostalgia of earlier years and enter a more contemporary, formal excitement: schematic lines, a quasi-cubist play of form and color.

It sounds like a signal that the “old dream” is no longer enough; that Japan cannot forever pretend time stands still in snow.

At the same time, the importance of collectors and international circulation grows, beginning to fix shin-hanga as a separate, finished chapter. Robert O. Muller (an American dealer and collector with probably the largest collection of Japanese prints from the 19th and 20th centuries) buys his first print from Watanabe in 1940 (for seven dollars), photographs the publisher and his workshop, meets Hasui and Shinsui. This is no longer an era in which the woodblock print is a “here and now” medium. It is an era in which it becomes an object of care, collection, memory, export of nostalgia—also the nostalgia of the postwar West.

And then comes the quietest, simplest thing: people grow old, studios close, publishers pass away. Watanabe dies in 1962, Hasui a few years earlier. And shin-hanga—as a living historical project—fades, leaving behind something that paradoxically sounds stronger today than then: a vision of Japan that, in the most turbulent century, tried to save its landscape not through document, but through mood.

Shin-hanga was the art of a country that modernized violently, and at the same time needed images that allowed it to believe it possessed some continuity—even if that continuity regularly had to be… rebuilt. And that is why in these works snow falls so often, night light shines, and modernity enters not with the din of factories, but with the quiet gleam of headlights.

Themes and techniques of shin-hanga

When one speaks about the themes of shin-hanga, it is easy to fall into the trap of catalog language: landscapes, bijin-ga, actors, birds and flowers; contour, pigment, paper. And yet this movement—precisely because it grows in the era of photography and cinema—does something more refined: it chooses classical themes in order to pour into them a modern psychology. That is why shin-hanga can be so “accessible” at first glance, and at the same time so deceptively deep: it looks like a sentimental picture of old Japan, but inside there is something more.

The surest way to understand this is to begin with light. Nothing distinguishes Japanese creators of modern woodblock print as much as their stubborn interest in light—especially in landscape and urban scenes. Old ukiyo-e gladly chose recognizable, “canonical” places; modern woodblock print shifts the center of gravity: place is to exist above all through atmosphere.

And here Kiyochika appears—the great precursor who sets the program: night in the city becomes a new landscape only when electricity arrives. Kiyochika could speak about modernization without fireworks, solely through the drama of light sources: natural and artificial, spread across a dark background like notes on a staff. One sees why this was so important: photography increasingly “takes over” the daytime world, but at night—in soft transitions, in light that is not sharp but “feeling”—woodblock print can answer with something the camera will long be unable to render: the emotion of light, not its record.

Hasui, in this sense, is Kiyochika’s student in the purest form. Take for example his “Shinkawa at Night” from 1919: the artist deliberately subordinates the recognizability of place to atmosphere, and “softens” the whole scene with a single electric light seeping between buildings and a few lonely stars. This formal study of tones can literally wipe the “roughness” of warehouse everydayness from the frame. This is one of shin-hanga’s most important techniques—even if it sounds like a paradox: it is not about printing technique in the craft sense, but about a technique of selecting the world. Shin-hanga teaches that modernity does not need to be shown directly to be present. It is enough that it stands beyond the frame—like current in a cable that gives that one light.

And then snow arrives—and snow in shin-hanga is not weather, but philosophy. Hasui experimented throughout his life with how to “tell” snowfall: early works have flakes that are large, clear, separate; later ones turn snow into a veil that becomes an environment, not a detail. This change matters psychologically: a large flake is a concrete thing, an event; a veil of snow is a state—something that does not so much happen as endure and change perception. In “Zōjōji in Snow” (1922) snow becomes a pretext for the collision of two absolutes of color: the rich red of architecture and the bright white that is not only white, but the silence of paper.

Snow here is “whitening the world,” but not in the sense of naive escape; rather in the sense of creating distance: if Tokyo of the 1920s and 1930s rushes, rebuilds itself, changes the rhythm of clothing and work, then snow is the moment in which the city can be seen like memory—and memory is always simpler, cleaner, less noisy.

That is precisely why a scene like the one discussed at the beginning—“The Great Gate at Shiba” (1936)—works so strongly: the quiet meeting of tradition and modernity—the gate of the old Zōjōji complex and a car with a chauffeur in uniform and a passenger in a fedora—takes place in snow that slows modernity, as if telling it to enter on tiptoe. And at the same time the work drives a pin into the heart of nostalgia: the gate is a concrete reproduction, because the earlier one was moved after the destruction of 1923. So “oldness” can already be reconstruction, “pastness” can already be modern material. And that is shin-hanga in a nutshell: an image that satisfies the desire for “traditional Japan,” but leaves in it a barely audible grind of truth.

Modernity in shin-hanga often enters exactly like this—not with posters and factories, but with an infrastructure detail. This is best seen in the motif of bridges. In Hasui’s image “Kiyosu Bridge” (1931), we get a concrete fact: the bridge was modeled on a European suspension bridge and belonged to the structures rebuilt during Tokyo’s long convalescence after the Great Kantō Earthquake, which together with fires destroyed more than two thirds of the city. Again, this is a subject taken from the reality of “new steel,” but told in the language of mood. And in Koizumi Kishio’s series “100 Views of Great Tokyo in the Shōwa Era,” bridges become almost a manifesto: steel constructions, rivets, and electric lights symbolize reconstruction, while Western-dressed pedestrians symbolize modernity of custom. This shows that shin-hanga—though it often chooses a “neo-romantic” tone—is not blind to the metropolis. It simply does not want its shout.

In the same spirit works the theme of woman. Bijin-ga in shin-hanga is not a mechanical repetition of the old pattern; it is a field in which the movement learns how to “preserve tradition and at the same time overload it.” Shinsui could take the classic motif of a woman at the mirror of a vanity and turn it into something that directly connects with European sensibility—but with an ironic loop: the impressionists loved such views under the influence of old ukiyo-e, and Shinsui performs a “re-Japanization” of the theme, leading bijin-ga as if back to the source. At the same time, when you look at his “Painting the eyebrows” (1928), you see how far he moves from the stereotype of “female reverie”: this is professional gesture, concentration on constructing one’s own image; even the background—deep red—recalls the language of pleasure districts, but used as a pure, modern patch of color.

And then the postwar change comes, and in 1953 Shinsui goes even further: a hairstyle that is “pure 1950s,” hair drawn with schematic light lines (significantly, no longer a challenge for the carver), and the whole thing twists into a quasi-cubist excitement of form and color.

This is excellent proof that shin-hanga is not only “nostalgia”: it can switch to contemporaneity when the era itself stops believing in the old dream.

The theme of theater—yakusha-e—is, meanwhile, the place where shin-hanga touches rivalry with new media directly. Kabuki, reformed from the end of the nineteenth century and promoted as a national art capable of “representing Japan to the world,” also needed a new image. And the image of the actor in the twentieth century now competes not only with traditional woodblock print, but with photography and film. Therefore, in actor portraits something appears that one can call “realism of dignity”: faces are less schematic, more individual, gaining modeling and volume; artists try to show personality beneath the makeup, not only the mask. And at the same time—and very much in shin-hanga’s style—the theater remains “stable” in content: in a world where cinema steals attention, kabuki becomes an island of continuity. Woodblock print loves such islands.

All this requires techniques far more subtle than someone sees who notices only a “pretty picture.” Shin-hanga loves gradations—and here the well-known ukiyo-e technique returns: bokashi, the grading of tone by partially wiping pigment.

Bokashi makes it possible to “paint” night, mist, softness of sky, transitions on water. Shin-hanga also likes effects of “materiality”: in Goyō embossing appears—not ink, but a dry block that presses a relief into the paper to give the robe volume and texture. This is a technique that makes the woodblock print cease to be flat. It begins to “breathe” under the fingertips.

There are also techniques more spectacular, used sparingly like a strong chord: metallic pigment. In Goyō’s “Rain over Yabakei” (1918), silvery rain (with authentic silver particles) appears only in the first edition—so the technique becomes a sign of “primordiality,” almost a luxurious confirmation: “this is the original. And it has no equal.” This again says much about shin-hanga’s ambition: to “compete” with new media not through realism, but through impression.

In short: shin-hanga subjects are traditional because they’re meant to function as a shared alphabet. The techniques are traditional because only they can produce that particular softness of light—that mist, that snow that feels more like a state of mind than a meteorological event. And the movement’s modernity lies entirely in this: using that alphabet to speak about an already new world—a world where night glows with electricity, bridges speak in steel, a woman constructs her image like a design project, and tradition sometimes turns out to be concrete painted red.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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