Lucky dreams five months late

With this post a further 7 months late... all I can hope for is that my PhD thesis does not befall the same fate.

Hacio gave me a calendar for Christmas this year of details from woodcuts by Rinsai Utsushi (active, c. 1869 - 1890).  The image for the month of May stood out, not only is Mt Fuji snow capped in the distance, there is also an Otaka (goshawk) as the detailed feature in the fore-ground, and the artist name stamp in shape of an eggplant.  

The calendar was put out by a Dutch company, and by the looks of things by designers who are not woodcut enthusiasts, otherwise I think the three lucky dream images associated with New Years Eve would appear as the picture for January.
Below is the print in full.

I did a fairly extensive search for some more information on Utsushi. But not much is online- only a brief entry on a commercial woodcut dealers site that lists his main subjects as Kacho-ga or Kacho-e -flowers and birds. This subject matter started to become popular in the Meiji period and was further developed by the Shin hang print movement. 

However  in the West, by the turn of last century "birds and flowers" was considered to be the genre of women "hobbyists" and I wonder whether this dismissive attitude has contributed to the absence of Utsushi's work from the collections of the Smithsonian, British Museum, V& A, and all Australian state art galleries. There are two prints in the Canadian Museum - the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The AGGV has the largest holdings of Japanese art in Canada and like many regional museums the collection is often made up from gifts from local citizens, in this case Mr. & Mrs. William Hepler. Unfortunately the online search facility only allows for searches via artist and artwork title, so I was unable to see what else Mr. & Mrs. William Hepler donated and perhaps make an assessment of Utsushi standing within their collection or even to find out some more information about who where the Heplers. 

All of these dead ends and small findings pose the question about what is collectible, what has ongoing cultural significance and what does not. Utsushi's prints sell for US$250 on some Internet print galleries, which is not much but more than some listed on bay. Is it time to start my own Mt Fuji oban collection? Hmmm... that sounds like more procrastination... 

(if you click on the link for Kacho-e and then the link to Parrots and Birds, you can see that the birds are either Macaws or Australian short-tailed parrots... now there another story to look into... but at least that one is somewhat closer to my Phd thesis...)

Soba salt

Thanks to a recent post on 100 Hundred Mountains I discovered Okinawa Soba aka Rob Oechsle, a collector of Meiji and Taisho Japanese photography. Along with an amazing flickr collection, he also has a labyrinthine website devoted to T. Enami a turn of the century photographer based in Yokohama. There are about 3,000 images on his flickr profile, many with including Fuji as the central subject or used as a back drop. I spent several hours this afternoon trawling through his collections loosing myself in beauty and wonder. Although this is not an image by T. Enami, I have decided to post the following salt print with Okinawa Soba commentary in full. It gives a feel for his writing style and for the seriousness of his collecting and generosity with sharing his research. It's a fascinating project by an unusual man.

THE HEADLESS HORESMAN OF JAPAN'S MEIJI MADNESS

-- or, How Light Areas of a Salt Print Tend to Fade Away First ("Salt Print" # 11)

No Photoshop or Paint Eraser here. Posting un-retouched AS IS !!! This ca.1890s photograph was printed as a postcard size image around 1905 by a commercial photographer using the "Salted Paper Print" process. No standard albumen, collodian, or gelatin emulsion coatings for this guy. He was going to do it the "Classic" way like the old "Salt Print" and "Calotype" days of yore....and color it when he was done.

I will be the first to admit that the commercial revival of the classic salt print is pretty cool...and pretty rare for the late Meiji era. But, depending on how they were processed, these rare and often beautiful "revival salt prints" sometimes had a strange side effect: Very light areas, such as the face, or light clothing, had a tendency to lose the details -- and sometimes disappear altogether.

On some of these pictures (not all), the dreaded "fade-out" syndrome would hit those extremely light portions within a relatively short time, but leave the darker areas untouched. Even the once delineated summit-line of Mt. Fuji has reached a touch-and-go point in this image.

And our poor fellow on the horse, whose head was wrapped in a white winter "turban towel", just happened to line himself (and his neck) directly with the slope of the hill behind him. It was only a matter of time before he.....well, before he LOST HIS HEAD !.

trademarks and grey clouds

I have been spending the evenings half watching television and looking through museum digital databases for Fuji-san images. This is a 1949 calender published by Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Company and is in the British Museum. The upward-looking composition with a solitary grey cloud in a large field of pink sky creates a striking image. This feeling is given an uncanny twist with the unusually placed heads of the two female "Americans" right along the base of the image, as though they were humpty-dumpty on the edge of a wall, or body-less phantoms.

I was wondering whether it had been mislabeled as a Fuji image till I enlarged the image and saw the companies logo.

The woodcut print is titled Ginza no tasogare-doki - Dusk in Ginza and is by the artist Onchi Koshiro. On the back there is printed a haunting melancohic text written by the artist, each line rich in poetic imagery.

A suit and one grey painting brush are sufficient. The neon of the PX is still like a dream. The new culture of Japan comes flashing from those sharp words. When one walks here, there comes a feeling that the days when we were struck to the ground are already from a distant world. Probably everybody would like quickly to wash away their hateful memories. The narrow pavements make our shoulders rub together. Through this congestion tall Americans stride. Already there is a sort of magnificence here, but the truth is that Japan is under Occupation. It is not necessary to wait for dusk. People have already lost sight of themselves.


There are 445 Onchi pieces in the Museum's collection, unfortunately most of it is not digitally archived but there are a few more Fuji pieces to save for a another post.

Update:

The store in the image is the Tokyo PX, the post office and stores for American servicemen, then located in the Wako Store in Ginza. Ginza was the fashionable going out district in post -war Tokyo

I don't know how I missed this detail before in the notes but the use of Mt Fuji in the logo above is a pun, as the character used for Fujisawa Pharmaceutical has nothing to do with the mountain. The writer of the object notes also comments that the Fugaku Publishing company, which published the calender and other works by Onchi and other post war print artists also uses Fuji in the logo- Unfortunately I couldn't find a scan on the interweb of their logo- only expensive rare books...

Update #2:
Lawrence Smith speculates that Onchi poetic text was for a Japanese audience as it was printed in Japanese only, which was unusual during the period of American occupation.