Overview

Tokyo kaiko zue 東京回顧圖會, a portfolio of fifteen prints created by nine artists [all members of Nippon Hanga Kiyōkai (the Japan Print Association)], is variously translated as Scenes of Last Tokyo, Recollections of Tokyo, Retrospective Scenes of Tokyo, and Scenes of Lost Tokyo. (The cover of the portfolio containing the prints carries the translation Scenes of Last Tokyo but "Last Tokyo" is thought to be a "typographical error" for "Lost Tokyo.")¹ Though the target audience for the portfolio was the Occupation forces² the portfolio, according to Lawrence Smith³, contained "a coded message to Japanese readers" in the subjects depicted in some of the prints and in its introductory message (see Statement of the Artists below.)  This coded message, composed shortly after the surrender of the Japanese in August 1945, by the leading sosaku hanga (creative print) artist Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955), was a hope for the retention of some of the imperial institutions in the remaking of Japan.

Tokyo Kaiko zue was designed to be very similar in spirit to the 1929-1932 series Shin Tokyo hyakkei (One Hundred Views of New Tokyo) which was also a collaboration between multiple artists⁴.  Four of the same artists, Koshiro Onchi, Un’ichi Hiratsuka, Maekawa Senpan and Kawakami Sumio participated in both collaborations.  Onchi rushed the prints for Tokyo kaiko zue into production working with the publisher Uemura Masuo, proprietor of Fugaku Shuppansha, a newly formed company that Onchi helped establish.

_¹ The Artist's Touch, The Craftsman's Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum, Maribeth Graybill, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, 2011, p. 294.
² The artists agreed to allow reissuing the prints for sale at the U.S. Army Post Exchange in Tokyo. 
³ Japanese Prints During the Allied Occupation 1945 – 1952, Lawrence Smith, The British Museum Press, 2002, p. 23–24.
⁴ Due to shortages after the war, the paper is quite different from that used for the originals published in the 1929-1932 series Shin Tokyo hyakkei (One Hundred Views of New Tokyo), and the effect is consequently flatter and less vibrant than in the first state.

Statement of the Artists (a coded message)

Source: Japanese Prints During the Allied Occupation 1945 – 1952, Lawrence Smith, The British Museum Press, 2002, p. 23–24.
While the print titles are provided in English, as well as Japanese, the introduction included in the portfolio is in Japanese only.  The following translation is provided by Lawrence Smith and is described as being "as literal as is possible, given the poetic nature of the language used."
This statement is a coded message to Japanese readers, and needs some historical interpretation.  The collection was printed, according to the enclosed pamphlet, on 15 December 1945, so that the text must be even earlier, i.e., rather less than four months after the surrender.  It was not clear by then what the constitutional future would be, and there were many who expected that the emperor would be allowed to retain his full political position.  There was some reason to believe this, because the Imperial Surrender Rescript of 14 August 1945 had referred to the preservation of ‘the structure of the Imperial State’.  The extremely reverential language used for the Imperial Palace, and for the Nijubashi Bridge which leads to it, are thus explained.  By listing the Meiji Enlightenment, which had restored the emperors to power and put Japan on the military road, and the mythical 2,600 years of the imperial institution, the author preserves unchanged the militarist interpretation of recent history.  Some of the artists had contributed to the great exhibition in Tokyo in October 1940 which had commemorated that supposed 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the imperial dynasty, Onchi among them.

The fifteen places chosen for this set were mostly new editions of designs which had appeared in the series One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo hyakkei), originally published in the years 1929-1932, and were to date the most ambitious project of the Creative Print artists in the Japanese Print Association.  This in part explains the reference to ‘a reminiscence of Creative Prints’ (kaiso Sosaku Hanga.)  The original one hundred views had covered many aspects of Tokyo life, and no more than ten could be considered to have had imperial or militaristic connotations.  This makes all the more noticeable the choice in 1945 of six places with serious imperial resonances out of a total of only fifteen, especially as the titles are given in English.  The six are the Nijubashi Bridge at the Imperial Palace referred to in the above text, the Akasaka Palace (residence of the Crown Prince), the Meiji Shrine, the Torii (Gateway) at Kudan, the Gate of the Imperial University (alma mater of the most senior bureaucrats of the militarist era), and the Graveyard of Sengaku-ji, burial place of Japan’s most celebrated paragons of loyalty.  The inclusion of Kudan is particularly audacious, but also poignant, for it was there that Onchi’s son killed in the war would have been enshrined, as well as the  war dead related to others of the artists.  This inclusion could not be a mistake, for it was not a design from the old series, and had to be  added, however antique and apparently innocuous the sentiment with which it is loaded.  The remainder are of scenes of Tokyo from around 1930, mostly by then vanished.

The innovation of short English titles is obviously intended to attract potential customers from among the occupying forces and, possibly for that reason, too, the rather dark and apprehensive atmosphere of the originals is softened and lightened.  This does seem a preview of the sunnier mode of the future, which was to prove attractive to foreign customers.  However, there seems little doubt that the set is aimed at nostalgic native buyers, for scenes of Tokyo, new or old, were not to be much produced after this for many decades.

It is necessary to ask who actually wrote this significant paragraph.  It can hardly have been anyone but Onchi Koshiro.  He was by far the most literary of all the print artists, and was the acknowledged leader of the Creative Print movement.  He was the only one who, as the son of a Court official, would have known and revered the Nijubashi, ‘remaining so vividly in our hearts sine our childhood’.  Nobody else involved would or could have written with such oblique authority of a Japan which he assume would not be changed substantially by the Occupation.

Statement of the Artists - Alternate Translation

Source: Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints - The Early Years, Helen Merritt, University of Hawaii Press, 1998 pp. 282-283