Kano’s biography is fragmentary. Born in Yokohama in 1921, he studied briefly under Un’ichi Hiratsuka before disappearing from public records after 1965. His Onsen Pilgrimage series—twelve woodblock prints depicting hot springs across Honshu and Kyushu—was produced between 1952 and 1954, during the final years of the Allied occupation of Japan. This paper does not claim Kano as a lost master. Instead, it uses his hypothetical corpus as a case study for how minor artists negotiate trauma, tradition, and topography in the wake of war.
To answer this, I employ close visual analysis (section 3), situate Kano within the sōsaku-hanga movement (section 4), and interpret the onsen as a narrative device for national convalescence (section 5). A brief methodological note on the fictional status of this artist follows the conclusion. Scholarship on Japanese bathing culture is robust (Clark, 1994; Slade, 2009). Art historical work on hot springs, however, focuses almost exclusively on Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c. 1833), which includes several yado (inn) scenes, and on Kitagawa Utamaro’s intimate fūzoku prints of women bathing. These works emphasize erotic suggestion or travelogue documentation. By contrast, Kano’s Onsen Pilgrimage contains no bathers’ bodies. Instead, steam, empty wooden tubs, and folded yukata become protagonists. eiji kano onsen trip
Eiji Kano, Onsen, Sōsaku-hanga, Japanese post-war art, spatial narrative, therapeutic landscape 1. Introduction The Japanese hot spring, or onsen , occupies a unique position in cultural geography: simultaneously a site of physical remediation, ritual purification, and social leveling. In the visual arts, onsen imagery appears sporadically—from Edo-period travel diaries to contemporary manga—but rarely as a sustained thematic project. One exception, albeit a critically neglected one, is the print series Onsen Pilgrimage by the mid-century artist Eiji Kano. Kano’s biography is fragmentary