He is credited with originating the sōsaku-hanga ("creative prints") movement, which aimed at self-expressive printmaking, in contrast to the commercial studio systems of ukiyo-e and shin-hanga.

Kanae spent 1912 to 1916 in Europe and brought ideas back to Japan gleaned from exhibitions of peasant crafts and children's art in Russia.

In the late 1910s he founded movements that promoted creative peasant crafts and children's art education; the latter quickly gained adherents but was suppressed under Japan's growing militarism.

Kanae Yamamoto descended from the Irie clan [ja] of hatamoto—samurai in the direct service of the Tokugawa shogunate of feudal Japan in Edo (modern Tokyo).

His grandfather died 1868 in the Battle of Ueno, during the Boshin War which led to the fall of the Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration which returned power to the Emperor.

[6] The painter Harada Naojirō, whom Ōgai had befriended when the two were studying in Germany,[f] asked Kanae's mother, whom he had seen at the Mori household, to model for the painting Kannon Bodhisattva Riding the Dragon of 1890.

[12] By 1896,[9] Ichirō had earned his medical license and set up a practice in Kangawa [ja] (now part of Ueda), a village in Nagano Prefecture.

[4] Kanae joined a group of friends in July 1904 on a trip to Chōshi in Chiba Prefecture, where they stayed near the mouth of the Tone River.

That September[21] Kanae, Hakutei and Ishii Tsuzurō, and some other friends founded the short-lived magazine Heitan[j] in which they published a number of their prints.

He moved out of the Ishiis' home on 8 March 1906 and rented a residence in Morikawa-chō in Hongō Ward [ja] of Tokyo determined to pursue financial independence.

[25] Kanae felt disappointed at hand-printing's gradual loss of prestige in Japan; to revive interest he wrote a four-part series of articles in 1907 for the art magazine Mizu-e examining a wide variety of printing media and techniques.

[26] The contents were primarily literature, criticism, and art cartoons,[25] and its publishers paid fine attention to details of graphic design.

At one of these rowdy bohemian meetings, a drunken Kanae fell through a window and landed in the garden below, wrapped in a shōji paper screen; he returned to the gathering as if nothing had happened.

The pair began a series titled Sōga-butai sugata ("Stage Figure Sketches")[o] of portraits of kabuki actors in the vein of the yakusha-e genre of ukiyo-e.

Though Kanae had announced that prints were to come from thirty-four theatre pieces only three sets of four prints—two by each artist in each set—appeared in June, July, and September that year.

[34] Kanae wished to study painting in Paris, so his father organized the distribution and sale of his son's work to raise funds for it while he was away.

He found French difficult to master and associated mostly with expatriate Japanese artists such as Ryūzaburō Umehara and Sōtarō Yasui.

[38] The pair went to seaside Brittany for six weeks from that July, and soon were joined by a number of other artists, all of whom were drawn there by the tales of the beauty of the region Kuroda Seiki had written in the 19th century.

[39] His disappointment and confusion impacted his productivity; he produced few of the prints that were supposed to fund his stay, and the language barrier made it difficult to find buyers.

He resolved to return to Japan the following spring, but first moved with a group of Japanese compatriots to Lyon where he found work that brought in enough money for a trip to Italy in March 1916 to see the Renaissance masterpieces.

In Moscow he met the Japanese consul and the social critic Noburu Katagami; the latter introduced him to proletarian art[45] and encouraged him to visit Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy's home which he had made into a farmers' school.

The same year he married Ieko Kitahara, had an instruction book on oil painting published, and finished a number of prints whose subscriptions had been paid for.

[49] In June 1918 Kanae co-founded the Nihon Sōsaku-Hanga Kyōkai ("Japan Creative Print Cooperative Society") with lithographer Kazuma Oda, etcher Takeo Terasaki, and woodblock artist Kogan Tobari; this last had been a member of the Pan no Kai and had also recently returned from several years in Europe.

[47] These ideas did not escape criticism, and the rise of militarism in Japan put an end to Kanae's movement in 1928; it was not to be revived until after World War II.

He secured funding from the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Agriculture, and Mitsubishi to set up a school[53][r] that December[54] to teach to the rural population arts and crafts skills they could use to augment their incomes during the long winter months[53] as part of a peasant art movement that combined creativity and utility,[46][s] inspired by the peasant crafts he had seen in Russia.

[53] The police so harassed him that he asked Un'ichi Hiratsuka, who was teaching frame-making there, to give up wearing his Russian-style jacket and to cut his long hair.

In 1928 the magazine devoted an issue to sōsaku hanga, and from the same year Shunyo-kai included a prize in the print category in its annual exhibitions.

"[57] While at by Lake Haruna in Gunma Prefecture[63] in 1942 Kanae suffered a cerebral hemorrhage[57] which partially paralyzed him and hindered his ability to paint.

[68] Sōsaku-hanga artists followed Kanae's lead in using a curved chisel to carve out planes rather than to define lines as in Japanese tradition.

The Ishiis discovered the block in their house decades later, and Oliver Statler had Hashimoto Okiie made forty copies of a commemorative edition in 1960.