Shin-hanga and Sōsaku-hanga
In the Meiji era, one ukiyo-e publisher after another closed shop — photography and printing had taken their work. And yet woodblock printing came back in the 20th century, in two forms. The two did not get along. One was sōsaku-hanga, creative prints. The starting point is usually given as Yamamoto Kanae's Fisherman in 1904, raised under the banner of jiga jikoku jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed. Everything, from sketch to carving to pulling the print, done by one hand. It brought the Western idea that a work belongs to a single artist into the world of woodblock. The other was shin-hanga, new prints. From around 1915, the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō set it in motion. This side kept the old division of labor between artist, carver, printer, and publisher intact, and added Western perspective and shading on top of it. Kawase Hasui's rain and snow, Yoshida Hiroshi's mountains and sea — both came out of this system. In the 1930s, the two sides collided. Sōsaku-hanga argued that nothing made by more than one hand could be art; shin-hanga was dismissed as a craftsman's trade. What is interesting is how each one traveled afterward. Shin-hanga faced outward from the start, and it really did cross the sea. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright was a major collector of ukiyo-e — for a stretch, trading prints paid better than architecture did, and records show he sold around 400 prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another person who loved Kawase Hasui was Steve Jobs. Of all the prints he collected in his life, twenty-five are said to have been Hasui's, and a 2021 Hasui exhibition in Japan set aside a corner in his memory. The quiet surfaces and empty space of those products are probably continuous with this, in some way.