Kazuma | A View of Mihonoseki, Izumo

Oda Kazuma (1882-1957)

Oda Kazuma was something of an outlier in the world of Japanese woodblock prints because prints were not his main claim to fame. Indeed, he was one of the premier Japanese lithographers of his day, and his interest in prints came rather late. But even though he produced relatively few designs in that medium, the quality was exceptionally high – and with a modern, slightly surreal style that was truly his own.

Born in Tokyo in 1882, Kazuma moved to Osaka with his family when he was little. He learned lithography from his brother Tou and studied European drawings. Interestingly, his interest in woodblock prints stemmed not from the great Meiji artists, but from Czech artist Emil Orlik.

Eventually, after a stint in Hiroshima, he returned to Tokyo and became a member of the Japan Creative Print Association and, later, the Western-style Print Association. Soon his lithographs of Ginza and other parts of Tokyo captured the charisma and energy of the Taisho and early Showa eras, with lovers in cafes, crowds filling movie theaters, and office buildings rising into the sky where wooden buildings had stood only a few decades previously.

In time he did some woodblock designs for the father of the Shin Hanga (new print) movement, Watanabe Shozaburo. These include the famous “Matsu Ohashi Bridge” from 1924, which shows pedestrians slogging across the snow-covered span, and the extraordinary “Catching Whitebait at Nakaumi”from the same year, which shows a lone fisherman amid a sparkling sky of stars and their watery reflections – an image as magical and otherworldly as any Van Gogh.

Kazuma became a recluse during World War II but later returned to Tokyo and started his own lithographic institute. He died in 1956.