Tramline

An urban subject organized around the parallel rails and overhead wires of a streetcar line. Tokyo's extensive tram network, much of it dismantled through the 1960s, and Kyoto's surviving lines were both available to Kitaoka as subjects, and his treatment of city scenes typically emphasizes infrastructure—rails, poles, wires, signage—as compositional armature rather than backdrop. Mokuhanga handles the geometry directly: straight rails register cleanly as carved lines, dark wires read as a graphic overlay against flatter blocks for buildings and pavement, and the kentō registration system keeps adjacent color fields aligned across multiple impressions. Kitaoka's urban prints sit alongside his rural and coastal subjects rather than apart from them, the same observational impulse turned to a different terrain. The print follows the postwar sosaku-hanga interest in modern Japan—factories, stations, working districts—as material equally worthy of the woodblock as the temples and famous places of older traditions.