Yukiyama no takekaba 雪山の岳樺 Birch in snowy mountains

The title — yukiyama (snow mountain) and takekaba, a high-altitude birch native to subalpine zones in Honshu and Hokkaido — locates the print within Kitaoka's mature engagement with Japanese landscape. White birch against snow presents a particular problem for the woodblock printmaker: rendering pale trunks and branches against a white ground without losing them to the paper. Solutions typically involve careful key-block carving for trunk silhouettes, embossing through [karazuri](/glossary/karazuri) (blind printing), and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) shading at trunk edges and in the snow shadows. Kitaoka, who studied under Hiratsuka Un'ichi at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, inherited the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) commitment to the artist as carver and printer, and prints of this kind reflect his interest in the abstract patterning latent in natural subjects — vertical trunk lines functioning almost as a grid laid across the field of snow.