With a long tradition spanning more than two hundred years in Japan, printmaking evolved from the infamous ukiyo-e woodblock print during the Edo period, to the postwar shin hanga (“new print”) and in the mid-twentieth century, and finally emerged as the sosaku hanga or ‘creative print’ movement.  Sosaku hanga in both its first and second generations, reveals the artists’ struggles to define Japanese identity, points to the dynamics of power and perception between the East and West, and the changing relationship between Europe, America and Japan.  The unique properties of prints, their reproducibility and process of creation, as well as their inherent connection to a larger public, have contributed to the diverse history of printmaking in Japan. 

      The ukiyo-e woodblock print emerged in the Edo Period (1603-1867),1 initially as a method of reproducing drawings and paintings for the wider public.2  As a popular art form, it was integrated into a commercial system in which the artist made a drawing and then gave it to a   publisher. A craftsman was trained to carve that drawing into a woodblock and then print multiple copies for distribution.3  Editions would sometimes be made in the thousands to satisfy popular demand, and as the market progressed, artists were continually challenged to find new compositional techniques, stylistic innovations and subject matter to engage and excite the public.4  Interestingly enough, the distinctive qualities of these prints attracted an avid European audience in one of the first waves of Japonisme. Ukiyo-e prints were influential in the careers of European artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin, who were inspired by them to create modernist works characterized by a similar exploration of colour, flattened composition, and premodern subjects that revealed their belief that the Japanese lived in unique harmony with the natural world.  Ironically, with the move towards Westernization in the early Meiji period, Japanese printmaking began to decline in stature and reputation as artists’ inclinations shifted towards other media. 

      The Japan Creative Print society, founded in 1918, advanced the idea that the print should be entirely made by the artist, from start to finish.  This emphasis on the artist’s full involvement   introduced the sosaku hanga ‘creative print’ movement, with the emblematic creed “self-designed, self-carved and self printed”5 at its core. It was not until much later that sosaku hanga prints received attention from an international audience through American contacts, while in Japan they remained largely unrecognized. 

      Japan was a devastated nation after her defeat and surrender in World War II; in that fallen state, it was the Americans occupying Japan and their hunger for souvenirs and other ‘authentic’ Japanese memorabilia that fuelled the print market and began to rejuvenate the struggling economy.  The early prints made in response to this demand were called shin hanga, or the “new print,” a term that identified prints made in the style and technique of ukiyo-e   between 1915 and 1940.  Started by a publisher, Watanabe Shosaburo, shin hanga was characterized by subject matter like that of ukiyo-e but tailored to the market of foreigners in Japan.6  The emphasis thematically was beautiful women, or bijin, but other themes included actors and landscapes.  Replicas of ukiyo-e classics were also distributed.7 

      Soon, however, sosaku hanga prints were marketed to the American occupiers, beginning with those characterized by nostalgia for pre-war Japan.8  Many sosaku hanga prints were honest depictions of Japan in its fallen and ruinous state, and were expressive of the emotions of the printmakers and the hardships they endured. As the market for prints expanded in Japan, sosaku hanga prints soon became an important guarantor of international success, improved East-West relations, and functioned as a means for Japan to express its newly defined national identity.  Thus it was through the print that Japan finally began to reconstruct itself in the postwar period.

      Sosaku hanga prints were hailed as “self designed, self carved and self printed,” with all aspects of the print-making process carried out by the artist.  Japanese artists combined their control of the medium with their ability to infuse it with unique self expression.  The traditional heritage of ukiyo-e prints in Japan further legitimized sosaku hanga internationally as an innovative art movement.9  The College Art Journal voiced this idea in 1959:  “In the Hanga or modern woodcut the Japanese are leaders, not imitators.  … work of uniformly high quality and originality.  Here too is an art which is native in the best sense.”10  The perception, however, of the inherent ‘Japanese’ quality of the works, is a point of importance. The ways in which the print movement was received throughout its development   subsequently influenced substantially the relationship between America and Japan during the formative postwar period.  Sosaku hanga prints have often been seen as a sort of bridge between cultures: critics praised them as “a genuine blending of East and West” which “struck a perfect balance between native and foreign, traditional and contemporary.”11  The Japanese print was able to transcend cultural borders, and was perceived as having an aesthetic capable of expressing universally human truths while retaining the individualistic expression of the creative artist.  The flat graphic qualities of the print, with its ability to demonstrate textural and formal expression, provided an opportunity for abstract experimentation. 

      The sosaku hanga print movement consisted of two major approaches that we can identify as the first and second generations of postwar print artists.  Initially, the movement grew out of a rejection of the oft-reproduced and commercially published and created ukiyo-e prints, wherein the artist was only responsible for the initial drawing.  Embracing the self-created print from start to finish, these early sosaku hanga artists reveled in the woodblock medium which would reveal the process of the artist’s direct engagement with the material.  Reducing the massive editions of ukiyo-prints, which undermined their authenticity, sosaku hanga artists   would make only a few copies as if their work and only upon request.12  These artists favoured craftsmanship and more personal, handmade quality of the print completely produced by the individual artist. 

      The second generation of the sosaku hanga printmakers emerged in the 1960s, by the time they had become accustomed to international exposure. In 1951, several Japanese print artists were recognized with top prizes at the Sao Paulo Biennale, and Shiko Munakata won the grand prix at the Venice Biennale in 1956.13  In 1957 the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Yomiuri Newspaper established the Tokyo International Print Biennial.  This institution was integral to the development of printmaking, and the authority of the government and commercial officials replaced the role of the smaller original Japan Print Association which had started sosaku hanga in 1918.14   In the 1960s, printmaking lost its patronage base with the opening of commercial print galleries and the business generated by business and leisure tourists in Japan. Many new and young printmakers began to join in the movement, challenging its principles and in some cases rebelling against them. 

      The second generation of sosaku hanga questioned the values of “sincerity, self-expression and originality” at the core of the initial approach and exhibited alongside American pop artists such as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein in the Tokyo International Print Biennial in the 1960s.15  New, more commercial print technologies such as the screenprint and photo offset emerged.16  Using these new non-autographic approaches to the medium, the second generation was concerned with blurring the lines between the individual artist and the commercially and professionally reproduced product.   Shinohara Ushio, whose print work Combs is in the Resounding Spirit exhibition, was a part of this second wave of sosaku hanga, and once admitted that “no art could claim to be unique or authentic anymore, and no tradition was immune or pure to commoditization.”17 Thus the unique relationship of the print to commoditization and reproduction was exploited by the second generation of sosaku hanga artists as a way to challenge consumerism in mainstream society.

      The print, as a reproducible medium, is inherently connected to a larger community:  from the immediate public who purchases the multiples to the permeation of cultural borders through far reaching distribution.  Entering thus into the social world, the print can act as an object of socio-political exchange, revealing the tensions and dynamics of larger geo-political relationships.  This role of the print is indicative of the history of the Japanese print in its various incarnations, the most important to Resounding Spirit being the sosaku hanga “creative print” movement.  Serving an integral means to the rehabilitation and reinvention of Japan following the occupation, the exploration of print artists during this period signifies a major achievement in art history.