With the growing desire to travel at the beginning of the 18th century in Japan, the demand for representations of real landscapes increased in Japanese landscape painting. The new genre 'depiction of true landscapes' (shinkeizu) is characterized by the fact that, unlike 'pictures of famous places' (meishoe), it refers not to the conceptions of landscapes established in classical Japanese poetry but to the empirical experience of the painter. The experimental and active painter Tani Bunchô, who worked in the Kantô region, applied the term shinkei to his representations of real landscapes at the end of the 18th century, thus creating a new genre. The author comments on the stylistic development and evolution of Tani Bunchô, traces the development of 'depiction of real places' in China, Korea, and Japan, and engages with the implementation of the term shinkei in the theory and practice of Edo period painting. Through an examination of cultural and art historical aspects of some significant works, it is shown how Bunchô, regarded as a 'painter-reporter,' opened up new ways of representation for native landscapes by applying Western painting techniques, thereby providing decisive new impulses to Japanese landscape representation in the pre-modern era.