Sometimes, unexpected things are nearer than I think. Florida State University’s Art Museum houses a 67-impression series from Hiroshi Yoshida’s (1876-1950) oban-size “Kagurazaka Dori” ( the English title is “Flower Street After a Night Rain”) from 1929.

Since I am a printmaking professor, I asked the Associate Director of Collections if there were any archived images available as an academic resource. To my delight, she was very kind to send all 67 files (33 cumulative and 33 individual impressions plus a chop mark impression) to me!

I have no idea where (or when) FSU got these, but they are very, very rare. It is my understanding that this is the only set of it’s kind outside of Yoshida Studios in Toyko where Tsukasa Yoshida stores such things along with the blocks of his grandfather.

From what I am told, Hiroshi Yoshida’s prints are rarely re-printed (if ever). Since the hand-written notes are in English (apparently in Hiroshi’s hand), I’ll bet that this was a keepsake gift (probably for a US army officer family during the occupation) rather than the normal instructions for printers to follow.

Despite that this is not exactly my favorite print of Hiroshi’s, I am so obsessively-interested in producing shin hanga-style prints- specifically in the Yoshida-style, that this is a real find for a geek like me.

I’ve actually seen the set once before- as a grad student, I went down to Tallahasee in 2002 and attempted to record the set by using slide film- which turned out terribly because of the low lighting. The idea was to take them to Japan where Dave Bull and I were mapping out another shin hanga-style night scene of my design, “Milton”, as part of his Surimono series. At the time, I wasn’t very ‘deep’ in such printing techniques and now I feel that I can see and glean the information much more.

I know that while looking at the animation that it’s difficult to get all of the subtleties of each cumulative layer. After looking though all of them, there are several things that quickly struck me- particularly the use of fukitori or (“wiping off”) technique. Since you can’t skip to frames in this animation, I wanted to point out the 1st image of the keyblock where the brown ink in the street lamp’s lighted areas were wiped off. In the 2nd image, the keyblock was re-printed in red (to indicate the lamps and wet street’s glare) in conjunction of where the 1st impression areas were wiped off. It’s pretty obvious that the printer (Komatsu-san?) used a stencil overlaid onto an inked block. Design-wise, using the isolated red instead of the darker brown creates an environmental effect that is… well, very effective.

As I said, there are also the other 34 individual impressions that I hope to add with notes soon.

Sets like this are like preliminary drawings for paintings- they provides a lot of insight that tends to get buried in the final product.

Side note: It’s well known that most of the Yoshida’s keyblocks were made of zinc and glycerin was mixed with pigment to adhere to the metal.

There are many more 89 year-old mysteries yet to be unfolded.

Click here to see the next entry featuring and in-depth analysis of the individual impressions