Although he is widely acknowledged as a painter of the Silk Road, Hirayama Ikuo has completed many paintings of the landscape in Japan. As an teaching assistant at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1959, he took his students to northeastern Japan, where they practiced drawing sketches in Oirase Mountain Stream and Mount Hakkoda. Due to the aftereffect of the explosion of the atomic bomb, he was out of condition and underwent a terminal trough in his career. Under that condition, he said he "felt the joy of life from his heart" when seeing Oirase Mountain Stream. Since then, he was determined to project what he felt then into all of his works. In 1994, 35 years after that trip, he finally published his screen masterpiece "No Interruption in the Flowing Water (Oirase Mountain Stream)".