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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">REFERENCE: Woodblock Print Styles</h2>
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<div><em>Ukiyo-e</em>
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<h5>In Japan, woodblock prints were an early popular art form, both in terms of audience and subject matter. At least one art historian has likened this art form to our contemporary poster and calendar art. During the Tokugawa period, woodblock print artists often took as their subject matter the everyday lives and pastimes of urban dwellers, particularly the lives of geisha, kabuki actors, and other entertainers. Prints with this focus were given the name ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world.” In the late Tokugawa period—the 1800s—woodblock print subjects expanded to include landscapes and scenic spots frequented by travelers. eturned to Edo—now renamed Tokyo—and soon afterwards emerged as a woodblock-print artist of note. (Source: Lynn Parisi, <em>Throwing off Asia </em> Curriculum, MIT Visualizing Cultures)</h5>
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<div><em>Nishiki-e</em>
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<h5>In addition to such publications modeled on Western periodicals, one found in 19th-century Japan a vibrant and evolving indigenous tradition of woodblock-print broadsheets. Combining image and text, and focused on newsworthy incidents, the earliest of these coincidentally began to appear around the same time as the earliest publications of illustrated news in the West. Called kawaraban and circulated in spite of prohibitions issued by the Tokugawa authorities, they flourished in the early-19th century. After the Meiji Restoration, a now legal—if closely monitored—genre of broadsheet prints soared in popularity, especially during the Satsuma rebellion. Known as <em>nishiki-e,</em> these were single-page sheets featuring a traditionally produced woodblock print in vibrant color and a short explanatory text, usually taken from a recent newspaper article. (Source: Andrew Gordon <em>Social Protest in Imperial Japan,</em> MIT Visualizing Cultures)</h5>
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An additional description of <em>nishiki-e </em>elaborates on censorship and coded references in the prints to current events:</div>
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<h5>Multicolored woodblock prints, or nishiki-e 錦絵, brought information about out-of-the-ordinary topics and happenings to a broad audience, depicting everything from popular kabuki actors and courtesans to the latest rumors and incidents. By the first half of the nineteenth century, <em>nishiki-e</em> had become a distinctive genre produced in a standard format by publishers specializing in the genre. Rapidly printed in large quantities, they were quickly sold on the open market to the general public by similarly specialized urban-based booksellers. As such <em>nishiki-e</em> evolved into a medium for taking up current events and, together with amusement and entertainment, brought news of the momentous developments of the shogunate’s final decades into the everyday life of Edo townspeople. The shogunate, not looking favorably upon the open circulation of news about current political affairs and controversies, repeatedly issued regulations aimed at preventing the spread of such information. In response, authors, artists, and publishers devised means to circumvent these regulations, such as presenting current events through allusive references rather than direct exposition. For their audience, looking for hidden meanings became a customary part of the reading and viewing experience, and one of its expected pleasures. (Sugimoto Fumiko, translated from Japanese by Michael Burtscher. "Shifting Perspectives on the Shogunate’s Last Years: Gountei Sadahide’s Bird’s-Eye View Landscape Prints," <em>Monumenta Nipponica</em> 72/1: 1–30, Sophia University, 2017)</h5>
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<p><em>Kaika-e</em></p>
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<h5>It was only after Edo became Tokyo that the great boom in “Westernization” prints took place, centering on the renamed capital. This coincided with the new government’s ardent campaign to eradicate “evil customs of the past” and seek knowledge “throughout the world.” (The words appear in a famous “Oath in Five Articles” promulgated in April 1868.) “Civilization and enlightenment” <em>(bunmei kaika)</em> became a resonant slogan of the times, with both parts of the conjunction understood to refer to culture and progress as manifest in the West. This was the background to the glittery boosterism seen in the flood of Tokyo-centered woodblock prints that became so voguish in the 1870s and 1880s, celebrating not just Westernization of Tokyo’s physical features, but of its upper-class inhabitants as well. Thus the generic name “enlightenment pictures” <em>(kaika-e).</em> (Source: Ulak, <em>Kiyochika's Tokyo—l,</em> MIT Visualizing Cultures)</h5>
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<p><em>Yokohama-e</em></p>
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<h5>“Yokohama prints” (variously known in Japanese as <em>Yokohama-e, Yokohama ukiyoe,</em> and <em>Yokohama nishikie)</em> comprise a small and distinctive subset within the great tradition of woodblock artistry that had flourished since the mastery of color-printing techniques in the 1760s, almost exactly a century before the opening of the treaty ports. They were especially popular in the few years immediately following the arrival of the Western merchants and traders. According to one estimate, between 1859 and 1862 some 31 artists produced over 500 different “Yokohama” images, involving more than 50 different publishers in the process, most of them located in Edo. The total print run in this great early burst of interest and energy may have been as high as 250,000 copies. The Yokohama prints are as excellent a source as one can find for gaining insight into the “first impressions” of the foreigners that were made available to ordinary Japanese. (Source: Dower, <em>Yokohama Boomtown,</em> MIT Visualizing Cultures)</h5>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">REFERENCE: Animation Making a Woodblock Print</h2>
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<p>The follow animation give you an idea of how a woodblock is made in multiple layers.</p>
<p>This step-by-step sequence demonstrates the successive stages in printing a woodblock print by Ohara Shoson (1877-1945) titled ”Yanagibashi Bridge in the Snow.“ The sequence was issued in 1935 as a full-size accordion-style booklet by a source identified only as ”the proprietor of the Wanatabe Colour-prints Shop.“</p>
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<h5>From “Yokohama Boomtown,” MIT Visualizing Cultures</h5>
<h5>Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2020 Visualizing Cultures</h5>
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<p><strong>Making a Woodblock Print</strong></p>
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<pre><iframe id="ifrm" name="ifrm" src="https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/yokohama/woodblock/woodblock_a.html" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border: 33px solid #111111;" height="668" width="812">IFrame
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