Fishing Village, Shôwa period, dated 1959

Dated 1959, this print falls within Kitaoka's mature period following his return from Paris and New York, when he was translating observed social reality into woodblock form. A fishing village subject would present stacked wooden structures, drying nets, boats drawn up on shore, and the compressed spatial logic of a working coastal settlement. The 1959 date places it in the decade when sosaku-hanga artists were actively exhibiting internationally and engaging with both documentary realism and modernist simplification. Kitaoka likely employed a limited palette of indigos, grays, and ochres, with bold carving that defines architectural forms through silhouette and grain texture rather than fine-line detail.