Kawase Hasui was a Japanese woodblock print designer, born in Tokyo in 1883, who died there in 1957.
He is the best known landscape artist of shin hanga, the movement that revived the woodblock print in the early twentieth century, and people remember him for his snow: a temple gate gone silent under white, a lone woman with an umbrella, lamps lit at dusk. In 1953 the Japanese government asked him for one more print, to record how such prints are made.
He was meant to run a family shop that sold silk braid. He spent his career walking Japan with a sketchbook instead.
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In January 1953 Hasui sketched snow falling on the great gate of Zōjōji, a Tokyo temple he had already drawn once. The commission was a strange one. The Japanese government had ordered the print after woodblock printing was designated an Intangible Cultural Asset, and the picture was only half of what it wanted.
The other half was the making. Every stage was recorded, and the Tokyo National Museum still holds the nine double-sided blocks cut for it and the forty-two printing impressions, one for each pass of color.
Hasui drew, a carver cut, a printer pulled the sheets, and the state wanted all of it on record. The artist who had spent his life drawing a Japan in the act of changing was now being asked to hold his own craft still.
It was a long way from where he started. Hasui was born to sell silk braid, and the first teacher he asked told him to go and learn oil painting. His first prints came out in 1918, when he was already in his thirties, and five years later an earthquake destroyed his house, his sketchbooks and the blocks of prints not yet sold.
What You'll Discover
Why he gave up the family shop.
Who sent him away first.
Who bet on his first prints.
What the earthquake left him.
What to look for in his snow.
Why the government came to him.