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British Museum Curator's comments - Lawrence Smith 2002 
"The torii (ceremonial gateway of a Shinto shrine) at the Yasukuni Shrine in Kudan, opposite the moat of the Imperial Palace, is still Japan's biggest. It was re-named Shrine for the Repose of the Country in 1879 to honor the dead of the disturbances surrounding the Restoration of the Emperor Meiji (reigned 1868-1912) and quickly became the national shrine for the war-dead, who from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 onwards became more and more numerous. During the Occupation, it was forbidden for the Emperor and Japanese politicians to go to it, and it remains politically controversial to this day (2002). It was a bold move, therefore, to include it in this series only four months after the cessation of hostilities, but Kawakami was the man to portray it. He had devoted his essentially amateur artistic career to recording the impact of Westernization on Japan from 1868 onwards - a period which he remembered with passionate fondness from his childhood - up to the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 when the remains of most of that culture were almost obliterated by that disaster in Tokyo and Yokohama. He was also an old and trusted friend of Onchi's. In this print he was able to neutralize the current impact of the shrine by shifting it back to a vaguely pre-militaristic period filled with a melancholy and peaceable calm, when trams still ran. It is unclear whether this design was one of the few new ones made for this series (in Kamon, Yasuo, Tozaka, Koji, and Asahi, Akira, Shin Tokyo hyakkei (A Hundred Views of New Tokyo), Tokyo, 1978, p. 52, it is ambiguously referred to as 'added'), or whether Kawakami reactivated an old design of his own."

Source: Los Angeles County Museum of Art http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=104179;type=101
Exhibition Wall Label from Japanese Prints: Edo/Tokyo
Along with Yamaguchi Gen’s print of Meiji Shrine, Kawakami’s print is from a series of fifteen prints created by a group of artists in 1945 to memorialize areas of Tokyo damaged or destroyed by war bombings. The great torii of Kudan with its broad approaching road, both built in 1887, led to Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to the souls of warriors who had died in the name of the Emperor. The print gives a good sense of the geography of the area, the hilly and tree-lined center of the high city.