Koizumi Kishio

Who They Were

Koizumi Kishio (1893–1945) was a Japanese woodblock print artist and painter. He was a member of the Japan Print Association and worked within the sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement, a current in early twentieth-century Japanese printmaking that emphasised the artist's direct hand in carving and printing, rather than delegating those tasks to artisans. Koizumi was born in Shizuoka on 23 June 1893, during the Meiji period (1868–1912), in the twenty-sixth year of the Meiji era.

He is best remembered for his ambitious series Showa dai Tōkyō hyakkei zue ("One Hundred Pictures of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era"), produced between 1928 and 1940. The series documents a city in flux: Tokyo modernising at speed and rebuilding after the devastation of the Great Kantō earthquake of September 1923. His work captures trams, bridges, department stores, and canals alongside older neighbourhoods, offering a visual record of a metropolis caught between tradition and rapid change.

Life and Career

Koizumi trained as a painter and printmaker, and by the 1920s he had established himself within Tokyo's print circles. In 1924 he published a technical manual titled Mokuhanga no horikata to surikata ("The Method of Cutting and Printing Woodblock Prints"). The book was practical in scope, explaining the mechanics of block cutting and printing, and it became a reference used by colleagues and fellow woodblock artists. Its publication placed Koizumi not only as a maker of prints but as a teacher and codifier of technique within the creative print community.

The central project of his career was the Tokyo series begun in 1928. Over the next twelve years, Koizumi produced one hundred prints depicting the capital. The series is distinct from a similar-sounding project, One Hundred Pictures of New Tokyo, which was a multi-artist collaboration created by eight of Koizumi's contemporaries, including Kōshirō Onichi and Senpan Maekawa. Koizumi's own series was a solo endeavour, and it stands as his most sustained artistic statement.

The prints show Tokyo in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake, which had destroyed large portions of the city. Koizumi's Tokyo is one of reconstruction: new steel-framed buildings rise beside wooden houses, wide avenues cut through old districts, and the daily life of the city continues against a backdrop of scaffolding and change. He died on 7 December 1945 in Minamiyoshimi, in the closing months of the Pacific War, having lived through the very transformations his prints recorded.

Why They Matter

Koizumi matters for two reasons. First, his Tokyo series is one of the most complete visual documents of the city's interwar transformation. Where many artists depicted individual landmarks or picturesque scenes, Koizumi set out to capture the whole of the modernising metropolis — its infrastructure, its streets, its ordinary corners — over a period of more than a decade. The result is a record of urban change that is both artistic and documentary.

Second, his 1924 manual on woodblock technique helped define the practical standards of the sōsaku hanga movement. By writing down the methods of cutting and printing, Koizumi gave the movement a shared technical foundation. The fact that his colleagues used the book suggests that his influence extended beyond his own prints into the working habits of the artists around him.

His membership in the Japan Print Association placed him within the institutional heart of the creative print world, and his output bridged the gap between painterly ambition and the disciplined craft of the woodblock.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 小泉癸巳男.

• Kana reading: こいずみ きしお
• Romaji: Koizumi Kishio

Character by character:

• 小 (こ, ko) — "small." In this name it is the first character of the family name.
• 泉 (いずみ, izumi) — "spring" or "fountain." Together, 小泉 (Koizumi) means "small spring," a common Japanese surname.
• 癸 (き, ki) — the tenth of the ten heavenly stems in the traditional Chinese calendrical cycle. This is a rare character in given names, chosen for its calendrical associations rather than everyday meaning.
• 巳 (し, shi) — the sixth of the twelve earthly branches, corresponding to the snake in the zodiac. Like 癸, it belongs to the traditional East Asian calendrical system.
• 男 (お, o) — "man" or "male." A common final character in male given names.

The given name 癸巳男 (Kishio) is built from the two calendrical characters 癸 and 巳, followed by 男. The combination of the heavenly stem and earthly branch forms a full sexagenary cycle unit, and the name thus carries an explicitly calendrical, almost astrological character. The reading kishio is unusual; the characters 癸巳 are not ordinarily read together as kishi in modern Japanese, which makes the name distinctive even to native speakers.

Legacy

Koizumi's legacy rests primarily on the One Hundred Pictures of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era. The series has become a standard reference for the look of Tokyo between the wars, valued by historians of urbanism and print collectors alike. Its long production span — from 1928 to 1940 — means it also tracks the shift in Japanese society from the relative openness of the late 1920s into the militarised 1930s, though Koizumi's focus remained on the city itself rather than on politics.

His technical manual continued to be used by woodblock artists after his death, and it remains a document of how the sōsaku hanga movement understood its own craft. Koizumi died in 1945, the same year the war ended, and his prints of a rebuilt Tokyo now read as a memorial to a city that would be transformed again by firebombing and postwar reconstruction.

Within the history of Japanese printmaking, he is remembered as an artist who combined the discipline of the technician with the observational eye of a chronicler. His Tokyo is not a fantasy or a nostalgic view but a working city, caught in the middle of becoming something new.