About These Prints

This print was originally issued in 1929 with the title Factory Streets of Honjo (Kojochitai, Honjo) as part of the series One Hundred Views of the New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo Hyakkei)   The print was re-issued in 1945 from newly cut blocks under the title Fakutory [sic] Street at Fukugawa for the series Scenes of Last Tokyo.  IHL Cat. 56 and 174 are both 1945 re-issues, but represent two different states of this re-issue, as can be seen by the different treatment of the sky in the prints and the inclusion of the kanji characters in the upper right corner of IHL Cat. #174.  According to some sources, the 1929 and 1945 issues can be distinguished by the presence of the kanji characters in the upper right margin, as seen in IHL Cat. #174.   However, IHL Cat. #174 containing the kanji characters is definitely a 1945 issue, as it is tipped into a 1945 folio as shown below.  Reference images for the 1929 issue are shown below.

Source: Terrific Tokyo – A Panorama in Prints from the 1860s to the 1930s, Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton, Worcester Art Museum, 1998, p. 47.
Factory Streets at Honjo first appeared in One Hundred Views of the New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo Hyakkei), published between 1929 and 1932.  This series captured the city that arose in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.  Published by the Takujo group, the series’ artists were all members of the Japan Creative Print Association.  Immediately after World War II, Scenes of Last Tokyo, an album of fifteen prints, appeared.  This print was one of the eight from the earlier series but was not printed from the original blocks  but from new ones cut from the earlier prints.  The print was re-titled in English Fakutory [sic] Street at Fukugawa for this 1945 series.

The artists had agreed to allow reissuing the prints for sale at the U.S. Army Post Exchange in Tokyo.  Due to shortages after the war, the paper is quite different from that used for the originals, and the effect is consequently flatter and less vibrant than in the first state.

Honjo, east of the Sumida River, was designated as one of Tokyo’s industrial wards during the Meiji period.  The writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), who grew up in Hongo, described it in an essay written after the earthquake as “not the region of factories that it is today” but a city of ghosts.  Situated across the river from Asakusa, it was after 1923 one of the poorest sections of the city.  Maekawa catches the bleakness of this factory area, full of smokestacks and utility poles, with overall-clad factory workers trudging up the road.  The seedily romantic quality of Akutagawa’s boyhood has been replaced by the harsh ugliness of industrialization.