If you wanted to start a fight in a Tokyo art studio in 1920, all you had to do was ask who actually made the print. In the early 20th century, the Japanese woodblock world tore itself in two. On one side stood the traditionalists, running massive workshops to create impossibly flawless images for Western export. On the other stood a group of young rebels who insisted that if you didn't carve the wood and press the paper with your own hands, you weren't a real artist.
That bitter rivalry defined modern Japanese art. To understand it, you have to look at the two radically different paths they took to modernize the traditional Ukiyo-e print.
Shin Hanga: The Flawless Machine
The Shin Hanga (or "new prints") movement started around 1915. It was completely driven by a publisher named Watanabe Shōzaburō. Watanabe wasn't an artist himself; he was a businessman who realized that Western buyers in the US and Europe were hungry for nostalgic, romanticized visions of Japan.
To feed that demand, Watanabe strictly maintained the old Edo-period "quartet" system. The artist drew the picture. A master carver cut the blocks. A specialized printer applied the ink. Watanabe orchestrated the whole thing. The resulting prints were staggering in their technical perfection. Artists like Kawase Hasui integrated Western lighting (think Impressionist sunsets and deep chiaroscuro shadows) into traditional Japanese landscapes.
When the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake destroyed Watanabe's shop and his original woodblocks, he didn't stop. He simply hired his craftsmen to painstakingly re-carve the best designs from scratch.
Sōsaku Hanga: The Individualist Rebellion
To the Sōsaku Hanga ("creative prints") artists, Watanabe's assembly line was an insult. Heavily influenced by Western ideas of "fine art" and the lone genius, they declared that the collaborative method was mere artisan craft.
They demanded a new, rigid rule: jiga, jikoku, jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed). The artist had to do every single step themselves. Because they weren't master carvers who had spent decades learning to cut perfectly smooth lines, their prints looked wildly different. Sōsaku Hanga prints are raw, unpolished, and experimental. They lack the flawless gradients of Shin Hanga, but they vibrate with an immediate, avant-garde energy.
Who Won?
The short answer is both. Within the global art establishment, Sōsaku Hanga's philosophy won out. Today, if a printmaker doesn't cut their own blocks, the art world tends to view it as a reproduction rather than an original artwork. But in terms of sheer commercial popularity and market dominance? Shin Hanga won by a landslide.
Those hyper-refined, collaborative prints remain the vision of Japan that most of the world still falls in love with.
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