Car town

The title points toward Toyota City in Aichi Prefecture — formerly Koromo, renamed in 1959 after the automaker that dominates its economy — though it could equally describe any postwar Japanese town reshaped by the automotive industry. Kitaoka's choice of subject reflects his sustained documentary interest in the transformation of Japanese cities during the period of rapid economic growth, when factories, parking lots, and arterial roads displaced earlier urban patterns. The composition draws on industrial geometry: rectilinear factory blocks, parked vehicles, overhead wires, and the flat horizons of an engineered landscape. Mokuhanga's flat color zones and firm key-block contours adapt readily to such hard-edged subjects, with bokashi gradation reserved for sky or distance. The print sits at a distance from the meisho-e tradition of his Shinobazu Pond or Korankei prints, registering instead the engineered, infrastructural Japan emerging in the 1960s and 1970s — a subject his Tokyo nightscapes had already begun to foreshadow.