"AN ACCOUNT OF THE NATIONAL CALAMITY OF 1855" Thus runs the title of a rare Japanese book, rare because even color-prints, which portray all phases of life in Japan, seldom depict the horror of the earthquake or tidalwave that occasionally overwhelms the island kingdom. In this old book, however, we find prints by Yoshihoru which are, in spirit and in content, graphic descriptions of the disaster that the artist saw nearly seventy years ago It would be difficult to imagine a craft more inadequate to cope with a tidal wave than helpless little beings who crowd the deck are terrified, as the Japanese text states or death will dispense their separate fates one of these frail vessels of wood and bamboo and sail-cloth. No wonder that the that they are, when that strange and appalling calamity overtakes them. Life whimsically, and no man knows what his will be |