OKUYAMA Gihachirō (奥山儀八郎, 1907–1981)

Condition Report

Impression & Colours

Stunning. A first-rate impression with the full chromatic range of the design intact: the coral-pink afterglow banding the horizon, the cool teal of the upper sky, the deep indigo-violet mass of the mountain with its snow channels picked out in the last light, and the luminous turquoise of the flooded paddies and irrigation canal. The bokashi work — sky, mountain, water, and the mirror-reflections of the reeds and stone revetment — is delicately graded and beautifully preserved. Colours are vivid and unfaded throughout.

Paper

Excellent. The sheet is clean, firm, and complete, with full margins and the original deckle edge preserved. 

⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully — they form part of the condition report.

The Scene — "Watch Out for Fire": Dusk at the Foot of Fuji

Workers return home to their village at the foot of Mount Fuji after a long day in the fields. A packhorse and figures in straw hats file down the raised road between a flooded paddy and a stone-walled irrigation canal; farmhouses gather under tall cryptomeria at right, and above everything the mountain rises against a sky banded in coral and teal, thin clouds lit by the last of the sun seeming almost to lift off the paper.

The print's most charming detail sits on the sliding paper screen of the house at right: the words hi no yōjin (火の用心) — "watch out for fire." Even today in Japan, in the dry winter months, groups of volunteers walk the streets at dusk chanting this warning, a living echo of the country's long history of catastrophic fires. Here, though, there is no hint of danger: everything in the scene — the still water, the homeward figures, the fading light — promises a peaceful night ahead. It is a knowing touch from an artist steeped in the Tōkaidō tradition, placing a scrap of everyday text inside the landscape exactly as Hiroshige loved to do.

The Fuji Series and the Japan Print Institute

This sheet is No. 3 of Okuyama's Fuji Rensaku (Fuji Series), his post-war suite of views of the sacred mountain, and it wears its production history openly. It was published in 1948 by the Nihon Hanga Kenkyūsho — the Japan Print Institute that Okuyama himself founded in Kanda after the war to keep the traditional collaborative craft of woodblock printing alive, producing both recuts of classic ukiyo-e and new designs of his own. The right margin carries something one rarely sees so explicitly on a modern print: block-printed colophon credits naming the professional carver (horishi) and printer (surishi) who cut and pulled the edition.

That colophon is the whole argument of Okuyama's mature career in miniature. A sōsaku-hanga modernist by training and Japan's pioneer of the woodblock advertising poster, he had converted in the late 1930s — under the ukiyo-e scholar Ishii Kendō — to the cause of reviving the classical division of labour between designer, carver, and printer. Where the creative-print movement insisted the artist do everything himself, Okuyama put the craftsmen's names on the paper. The result is a genuine shin-hanga print in the full sense: a designer's vision realised by master artisans, in the same production chain that made Hiroshige possible.

Okuyama Gihachirō — The Poster Pioneer Who Joined the Old Masters

Born in Sagae, Yamagata, in 1907 and essentially self-taught, Okuyama debuted at the Japan Creative Print Association exhibition in 1928 and in the same years became the pioneering designer of woodblock advertising art in Japan, producing celebrated campaigns for Nihon Keori (Nikke) and later the famous Nikka Whisky posters and labels — commercial work now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1942 he was among the founders of the Shin Hanga Kyōkai, formalising his crossing from the creative-print camp into the traditionalist one.

Over a career of more than a thousand designs he moved fluently between both worlds: rustic, self-carved sōsaku-hanga on one side, and richly graded collaborative landscapes like this one on the other. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo holds his woodblock work in depth, and from 1954 he ran his own print workshop in Matsudo, continued by his son after his death in 1981.

Collector's Note

This is the immediate post-war edition of the design, issued by the artist's own Japan Print Institute in 1948 with the series cartouche and the carver's and printer's colophon credits printed in the margins — the marks of the original collaborative production. 

Shipping: Shipped flat, protected between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, via tracked and insured international post. Ships from Germany.

Guarantee: Original Japanese woodblock print, 1948. Guaranteed authentic — full refund if not as described.