Syohuryu Zyosui Osikawa [Author signed]

Tokyo: Syohuryu School [of] Japanese Flower Arrangement, N.D. [ca.1930s]. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Folio, 12 x 8 inches, containing 12 b&w plates of the artists work, on of th ethem inscrebed by her, in Japanese. Very minor creasing to upper right corner of four of 12 plates; some nibbles to upper edges of folio (not affecting plates); minor corner wear also to folio; all in all very good thus. . Paperback.

Scarce. No copy located in WorldCat. | Oshikawa Josui (1892–1966) matters in ikebana history less for founding a large school than for what she represented: a woman iemoto leading a self-declared "new ikebana" (新いけばな) school at the very moment the art was being reinvented for the modern home. Ikebana had for centuries been transmitted by male priests and hereditary masters, and its practitioners in the Meiji era were still largely men; Oshikawa, who took over the Shōfū-ryū in 1916 in her mid-twenties, belonged to the generation that turned it into an art women both practised and led. Her school's program of "individualistic ikebana," stressing personal expression over fixed classical forms, ran parallel to the better-known modernizing movements of the 1920s–30s (the Ohara school's moribana, the 1927 founding of Sōgetsu, the jiyūka "free-style" debates that eventually pushed even Ikenobō to formalize free arrangement) and to the wider Taishō-era embrace of Western flowers such as the roses in your plate. She also carried this modern ikebana abroad: the Japanese-American press of the 1930s reported on her as "Shōfū-ryū iemoto" sailing on the Taiyō Maru and returning to Japan, making her one of the early ambassadors of ikebana to overseas audiences decades before the post-war boom that made the art internationally familiar. Her instructional books, including an "Ikebana Reader" and "Flower Arrangement," helped codify the new style for a mass readership, and the school she shaped survives today as the Tokyo-based Shōfū Kadō-kai, recognized as a public-interest association in 2013 and still describing its mission in her terms, the cultivation of arrangements rich in individual character. She is thus a representative rather than a towering figure: a documented example of the female, modernist, outward-looking iemoto who transformed ikebana from an elite male discipline into a popular and international one, which makes a signed plate from her not-for-sale photo album a nice piece of that transition.Sources:- [押川 如水 — コトバンク](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%8A%BC%E5%B7%9D%20%E5%A6%82%E6%B0%B4-1641502) (dates, 1916 succession, publications)- [流派紹介 | いけばな×百段階段2017 — 目黒雅叙園](https://www.hotelgajoen-tokyo.com/ikebana2017/ryuha.html) ("new ikebana," individualistic emphasis, 2013 public-interest status)- [押川 如水:活花; 松風流家元; 往航大洋丸寄港 — Hoover 邦字新聞](https://hojishinbun.hoover.org/?a=d&d=A-J1630-005.1.2&l=ja) and [帰朝の際](https://hojishinbun.hoover.org/?a=d&d=A-J1630-004.1.1&l=ja) (overseas travel; headlines only, the pages returned an error on fetch)- [松風花道会 official site](https://shohfu.com/) and [その歴史](https://shohfu.com/history.html) (located but not fetchable from here)- [自由花の確立と新風体の成立 — 池坊](https://www.ikenobo.jp/ikebanaikenobo/history/showa/), [いけばなの歴史 — 草月流](https://www.sogetsu.or.jp/columns/19703/) (context on the free-style movement; located, not fetched)From training knowledge, not a checked source: the male-dominated transmission of pre-modern ikebana and its feminization in the Meiji–Taishō period, Ohara's moribana, Sōgetsu's 1927 founding, the Taishō adoption of Western flowers, and the post-war international spread of ikebana. The characterization of her as "representative rather than towering" is my own assessment.