Recruited by Watanabe Shōzaburō, Shōtei contributed significantly to the revival of ukiyo-e, creating works that resonated with both Japanese and Western audiences, sparking renewed interest in traditional Japanese art forms.

Despite the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 destroying many of his woodblocks and the subsequent challenges he faced, Shōtei rebuilt with determination and continued producing evocative prints that captured the essence of Japan.

Shōtei's art, marked by delicate landscapes, atmospheric scenes, and a careful attention to detail, remains a testament to his resilience and the enduring beauty of shin-hanga. His ability to merge traditional techniques with an innovative approach not only preserved the legacy of ukiyo-e but also helped to shape the future of Japanese woodblock printing for generations to come.

His landscape prints sold predominantly to tourists and Western collectors specifically because they evoked an "old" Japan that was visibly disappearing under rapid modernization — meaning his commercial success functioned as a form of manufactured nostalgia, satisfying a foreign audience's desire for a version of Japan that was already fading by the time they bought the prints.

His early shin-hanga designs were stylistically reminiscent of Hiroshige on purpose, produced through the traditional hanshita method where the artist personally designed the keyblock — a conscious act of continuing a specific ukiyo-e lineage at the exact historical moment photography and Westernization were making that tradition commercially obsolete in Japan itself.

Publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō explicitly divided his output into "high class colour prints" (oban) reserved for artists like Kawase Hasui and "commercial tourist prints" for Shōtei — a hierarchy that reveals how the shin-hanga movement's international success was built partly on an internal caste system distinguishing "serious" art from mass-market souvenir production.

The 1923 disaster destroyed publisher Watanabe's entire operation including all existing woodblocks, forcing Shōtei to recreate roughly 250 lost designs from memory — meaning much of his surviving "vanishing Japan" imagery is itself a literal act of reconstructing a physically erased visual archive.

His prints were part of a calculated business model: publisher Watanabe recognized extraordinary demand for ukiyo-e among American and European collectors and pivoted from reproducing old blocks to commissioning new export-oriented images — positioning Shōtei's landscapes as one of the first deliberate commercial experiments in packaging "authentic" Japanese aesthetics specifically for foreign consumption.

Despite producing technically accomplished oban prints when finally given creative freedom by a different publisher, Fusui Gabo, Shōtei was kept in a subordinate commercial role by Watanabe for most of his career — revealing that the shin-hanga movement's now-celebrated "artistic renaissance" narrative concealed real internal hierarchies over whose work counted as fine art versus disposable tourist merchandise.

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