‘Radical Moments’ in Japanese Printmaking

Perspective presents original research and provocative ideas anchored to art histories and contemporary practices that are shaping forms of print and paper-making across generations and geographies.

Flourishing from the 17th century onwards, ukiyo-e prints were created for mass circulation through a production process developed to create professionally polished works. That process is depicted in a triptych print series from circa 1803, known as The Cultivation of Edo meibutsu nishiki-e kosaku (Brocade Prints, a Famous Product of Edo), by famed artist Kitagawa Utamaro. Featuring beautiful women (which was Utamaro’s specialty) instead of actual male craftsmen, the artist is depicted on the right showing the publisher his print design, while carvers cut into the hard wild-cherry wood using a knife to make colour blocks according to the design, and an apprentice sharpens a blade. To the left, beauties prepare for printing by premoistening the paper to avoid warping, since fibrous washi can expand after absorbing pigment. Then the final prints are hung.

Ukiyo-e printmaking can be seen as Japan’s first advertising media, paving the way for future posters, pamphlets, and commercial inserts: an effective medium to circulate popular entertainment, political commentary and satire, as well as artistic imagination. As Japan entered a time of rapid change through modernisation in the early 20th century, print media and evolving reprographic technologies developed further, as artists began recording radical transformations in society using print forms.

Printmaker Hashiguchi Goyō’s 1911 poster, Kono bijin (This Beauty), for the pioneering modern Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi (Hashiguchi Goyō, This Beauty (Kono bijin)), is emblematic of how popular visual culture and commercial art traced the rise of the middle-class in the early 20th century, as consumer culture, urbanisation, and Western influences became increasingly integrated into daily life.

Department stores at the time provided not just a shopping venue, but a “modern experience” in which visitors could imagine themselves partaking in a new and exciting lifestyle. Employing the trope of the standard beauty, Goyō places the image of the moga (modern girl) within these modern spaces of consumerism, incorporating Western furniture such as an Art Nouveau chair while highlighting exuberant kimono patterns and rich floral patterning on the wallpaper. As part of the composition, Goyō cleverly inserted an illustrated book showing Edo period ukiyo-e imagery, and a scene of koromogae (changing of clothes for the season)—an ode to Mitsukoshi’s beginnings as a gofukuten (kimono fabric store) in the Edo period.

At the same time, printmaking was becoming crucial to Japan’s identity-making as a nation in the 20th century. While new reprographic technologies paved the way for the development of design and commercial art in the twentieth century, the woodcut print—related to premodern ukiyo-e woodblock prints in terms of medium but not in the sense that one autonomous artist did all the work—became a visual tool for artists to express their positions during critical historical moments.

One notable event was the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, which reshaped the urban landscape of Tokyo as well as its structure in the visual and literary imagination. A contemporaneous commentary on the disaster was published as a daily series called Tōkyō sainan gashin—or “Sketches of the Tokyo Disaster”—in the Miyako Shinbun newspaper. Created by illustrator and designer Takehisa Yumeji some 18 years after producing his first socialist illustrations (including his critical images of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war), Yumeji records his reactions to the earthquake and its aftermath in texts and images. Beginning its serialised release from 14 September to 4 October, merely thirteen days after the earthquake struck, Tokyo Disaster represented one of the earliest responses towards the tragedy that reached the public. Observations showcase Yumeji’s empathy for the victims and his disappointment at the Japanese government’s inaction. Small abstract figures crawl through rubble rendered with dynamic cuts into the woodblock to create undulating forms, making dramatic use of carved and non-carved areas of black and white.

That Yumeji published these powerful responses in a popular newspaper widely circulated as a kind of entertainment for the masses, encapsulates the contradictions of print media as something both political and apolitical, frivolous and serious. The series assembles these threads in a way that only made sense in this particular moment of the early 20th century mediascape. Reflecting these tensions, Yumeji sought to reconcile what happened with how to express the experience from an artistic point of view. One strategy he used can be seen in the artist’s writing accompanying Hyōgen-ha no e (No. 5—Expressionist Painting) (1923), an illustration from his earthquake series, which includes the line: “I finally understood German Expressionist painting.”1 

Yumeji’s reference to German Expressionism underscores his interest in foreign modernist art trends entering Japan at this time, and how they were received. It is understandable that such a visually agitated form of expression was employed to depict the rupture and range of emotions associated with the disaster. The pictorial language provided a visual platform for Yumeji to demonstrate the earthquake’s disruptive sensory experience, which he described, in part, as “not just an ordinary bang…,” but “a lovely sound even more so than an imagined tune.” As art historian Gennifer Weisenfeld points out, the expression of modern art became an aesthetic for the notion of trauma that could be applied to recreate the feeling of shock.2 

Yumeji’s interest in this mode of expression can be traced to his involvement with Onchi Kōshirō and the Tsukuhae group, of which Yumeji was a crucial mentor and patron. Tsukuhae, meaning “Moonglow,” was the name of the magazine dedicated to poetry and creative woodblock prints founded by Onchi with Tanaka Kyōkichi and Fujimori Shizuo while they were students at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. A printmaker mostly associated with the Sōsaku hanga (Creative Print) movement and the first Japanese artist of abstract prints, Onchi was highly influenced by Yumeji during his early career and in his choice of the print medium as his creative expression. For example, Onchi’s first woodcut group, Tsukuhae, held their exhibitions at Yumeji’s Minatoya shop. Onchi’s large prints were internationally well-received, and he continued to be one of the big names representing postwar Japanese prints in the international arena. Like Yumeji, Onchi used his art to respond to collective experiences of trauma.

Onchi’s woodcut, At Ruin: Allegory No. 3 (1947), is a direct response to the devastation that defined Japan’s postwar moment in the 1940s. The composition centres a levitating female nude suspended in air, which art historian Alicia Volk has read as an “effect of immobility and frozen potentiality,” in the context of Japan’s defeat and Allied Occupation (1945–52).3 Of course, I do not want to disregard the fact of Japan’s aggression as an Imperialist force in Asia, but here, we see an artist using the print medium and its expression to respond to the ruins of war. As a composition, the work embodies what Volk terms the double trauma of war and occupation: of the collapse of imperial state and its ideologies and the country’s physical ruins, and its inability to move forward due to occupation: “suspended in an eternal state of in-betweenness, of irresolution…”4 

As new reprographic technologies paved the developmental path for design and commercial art in the 20th century, printworks like those discussed above reveal how woodblock printmaking evolved into a crucial visual tool for artists to directly respond to events shaping the nation as it entered the modern era. Radical compositions for radical moments in time.

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This essay was developed for the panel The Politics of Print, organised for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.