Komura Settai (1887-1940) was an artist, book illustrator, and designer whose works are now recognised for their minimalism and graphically interesting composition. Many of his works offer modern takes on traditional Japanese woodblock-printed scenes, as we can see with this set.

This group of prints from his "Uchiwa-e Hakke" (うちわ絵八佳) series seems to have been pulled from the same set of blocks used for the original edition of these prints by Takamizawa (back in 1940). While the title suggests a link with the Bagua ("Hakke" in Japanese, 八佳), eight cosmological Taoist symbols used in fortune-telling, it seems probable that the prints have little to do with the symbols and that the characters 八佳 were merely chosen as a fashionable alternative to the usual "Hakkei" ("Eight Scenes", 八景) which appears in many titles for woodblock prints series.

Just when they were made is not clear, but going by the condition of the paper, a guess would be the 70s~80s. There are small imperfections on most of the prints - slight mis-registration, blots, etc. - and it would appear that these are 'left-overs' from the print workshop that produced the edition. As such, they do not have the designer's seal, something that is present on the 'real' published prints.

We know that the Takamizawa Kenkyusho published a reproduction from their original blocks in a limited edition of 280 sets, although the year of publication is unknown. Each of these sets, which included eight woodblock printed scenes, was housed in a slipcase, and each print kept in a purple wrap-around folder.