Suma is a town about half-way between Central Kobe and the Akashi bridge and has its own station on the JR Kobe line. It looks out into Osaka Bay and was once, likely, a peaceful fishing spot and sleepy rural town with a beautiful shoreline. Now it is part of a long conurbation that stretches to Himeji and beyond. You can't blame people for building along the coastal strip. That happens everywhere.

Arai Yoshimune's masterful woodblock print "Suma Beach at Night", created about a hundred years ago, evokes an entirely different perspective. A landscape, two human figures, a tree and the moon point to a changed relationship between man and nature, for even though the Japanese lionize tradition, the coastline and the rivers are often found compromised by concrete and oddly intrusive development. The balance of looking out at the sea becomes something more complicated and inward and our gaze is inverted to human structures.

The few times I took the JR Kobe line, I was on the way to Himeji Castle, usually with guests from back home. Suma Beach did not stand out then in the same way that the following Yoshimune image does now.