The Face[s] of Tokyo No. 2

Part of a numbered series, The Face of Tokyo No. 2 belongs to Kitaoka's project of recording the changing physiognomy of his home city through [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga). Such series prints typically gather a particular type of urban view — facades, signage, junctions, crowded pavements — and treat it as a continuing investigation rather than as discrete images. The composition likely flattens architectural and signage elements into overlapping color planes, with the mokuhanga technique allowing dense passages of layered registration. Kitaoka returned repeatedly to Tokyo as a subject across the decades that included his sojourns in Paris, where he encountered Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17, and in New York; the city accumulated for him as a body of forms rather than a single view. The numbering of the series asserts a documentary rather than a souvenir intent — closer to photojournalism's seriality than to the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) single-sheet tradition.