In 1928, the third year of the Showa period, Fujishima Takeji was requested to produce a work to decorate the emperor’s study, in celebration of the enthronement of the Showa Emperor. Fujishima chose “dawn” as the theme that would suit the new emperor. Ultimately in his The Rising Sun Illuminating the Universe (1937, the Museum of the Imperial Collections) he painted the sunrise over the desert at Dolonnor, Inner Mongolia. In the decade that preceded it, he had sought sunrises everywhere, Mt. Zao in the north, Taiwan’s Yu Shan (then the highest peak in Japanese territory) to the south, producing many works exploring mountains, sea, and sunrise. The sunrise was his most important theme in his sixties. This painting is a masterful example of a sunrise and sea painting from that period.
Fujishima repeatedly told younger artists that an important key to creating paintings was the French term simplicité. He believed in eliminating unneeded elements, one by one. What could not be removed was what should be painted. We can see in this painting an example of his pursuit of simplicité to the limit. It is so succinct that if the one sailboat floating on the left were deleted, it could be an abstract painting. We have only layers of four color planes: from the bottom, the sea, clouds, sky, and clouds again. We know that the sun is starting to rise above the sea, but the painting draws the viewer’s attention not to the sun but to the pure workings of the universe.