Minamoto no Kanemasa

Welcome again - to the ninth year of the 'Hyaku-nin Isshu Hanga Series', and here is the 81st print, Minamoto no Kanemasa. Being 80% finished makes me think back to those days when I was a school student and had to write frequent tests and exams. Of course the implicit point of such tests was to obtain a high mark, but what constituted a high mark? I am sure that my parents and I usually disagreed, but I think that our family ranking went something like this: around 50% - don't dare take this home!; 60% - expect to be nagged; 70% - grudging acceptance; 80% - mmm ... OK; 90% - 'Good Boy'; 100% - unthinkable, so no comment! Well here I am at 80% with this printmaking series ... Would anybody say Mmmm ... OK if I stopped here? I don't think so - it's 100% or nothing!

My books don't tell me much about Kanemasa, and it seems that all we know is that he lived at the beginning of the 12th century, and took part in many poetry contests.

Of much more interest to me than the poem however, is this illustration by Shunsho. Look at this guy! This year's set of ten prints is one of the two sets with no emperor, and when I was making my choice of which poets to put in which set, I specifically chose this design for this set - if there was to be no emperor's picture, with tatami and screen, then at least I could make sure that the year started out with a powerful image.

I think that most of you are familiar with traditional 'Hyakunin Isshu' illustrations; you probably own a set of 'karuta', and have seen many books that contain pictures of the poets. But I'm sure that you have never seen an illustration like this in such places. From long before Shunsho's time the traditions of depicting these poets had been set in stone; I have seen illustrations drawn centuries apart so similar that every kimono line falls in exactly the same place. Colours, poses, facial expressions ... all were standardized by centuries of repetition. How then is it that Shunsho was able to create such dynamic and realistic portraits?

Well of course it goes without saying that he must have been a truly creative artist. Hundreds of men worked in this field during the centuries, but very few of them were able to break away from the patterns that they had been trained to use. These are the men whose names we know so well: Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro ... Shunsho deserves to have his name remembered alongside them. I think though, that there is another answer to this question of how he was able to create such an original set of designs.

During the years surrounding the time that this book was created (in 1775), educated men such as Shunsho had increasing access to books and pictures imported from the West. Although Japan was technically a closed society, a trickle of such material did come in through Nagasaki, and it is not hard to accept that somewhere along the line, Shunsho had a chance to see some realistic European portraiture. I firmly believe that he did, and that it influenced his work profoundly. But he had to work within the framework of his time, and wasn't free to apply such new ideas too liberally - his main work was designing kabuki prints, and ultra-realistic kabuki prints would probably not have been accepted by the consumers of the day. But on a more small-scale project like this Hyaku-nin Isshu book, I think that he felt free to indulge his desire to try his hand at the 'strange' new idea of making portraits that were realistic.

The fact that first editions of this book are now extremely rare leads us to believe that his experiment wasn't a great success, as so few copies were apparently sold. It wasn't until the book was re-issued with the poems written in a dramatic form by a famous calligrapher that it started to sell more copies. (My prints show Shunsho's original calligraphy). Of course I am not an ukiyo-e scholar, so my hypothesis may just be empty words, but I have spent a very long time studying these designs. It is interesting to think about the different influences going round and round: ukiyo-e prints being influenced by Western art, then of course hugely influencing Western art a hundred years later ... And now this series being made together by men from both sides - the 271 year-old Shunsho, and the 45 year-old me.

I hope you enjoy this year's set of prints. I can't wait to see them all lined up on the gallery wall next year!

February 1997

Translation: Haruo Miyata, 1980