Zojoji Temple

The print takes as its subject Zojoji, the Pure Land Buddhist temple at the foot of present-day Tokyo Tower whose Sanmon gate dates to 1622 and stands among the older wooden structures in the capital. Yamaguchi's treatment likely flattens the temple's tiered roofs, columns, and lantern arrangements into an interplay of geometric blocks, working in the abstracted manner he cultivated after the war rather than the descriptive meisho-e tradition. Carved on washi from cherry or katsura blocks, the composition probably reduces architectural mass to overlapping rectangles and trapezoids, with passages of bokashi gradation suggesting twilight or weathered timber. Yamaguchi was a central figure in sosaku-hanga, the creative-print movement in which the artist designs, carves, and prints the work himself, and his temple subjects sit alongside the fully abstract compositions that brought him recognition at the São Paulo and Tokyo Biennales during the 1950s.