The U.S.A. - A Nostalgic journey

This print belongs to the body of work Kitaoka produced reflecting on his American period. He lived and worked in the United States during the 1960s, including time at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York, and the experience of American landscape and urban life entered his prints as a recurring subject. A title framed as a nostalgic journey indicates a retrospective composition — likely produced years after the experience itself, drawing on memory and sketches rather than direct observation. The print probably layers iconic American motifs (architecture, road, regional landscape) into a single structured composition, organized through the flat color planes characteristic of his mature sosaku-hanga style. The work documents an unusual cosmopolitanism within mid-century Japanese printmaking: Kitaoka was among the generation that traveled internationally and consciously absorbed lithography and intaglio practices abroad, then returned mokuhanga to Japan as a deliberate choice rather than a default tradition. The title's elegiac framing places the print among his late autobiographical statements.