View of Edogawa from under the Ichikawa bridge

View of Edogawa from under the Ichikawa Bridge, a second undated impression by Okuyama Gihachiro (1907-1981), is another treatment of the modern infrastructural landscape connecting Tokyo to its surrounding country. The Edogawa, the river forming the boundary between Tokyo and Chiba, is crossed at Ichikawa by major rail and road bridges, and Okuyama's print exploits the dramatic perspective afforded by a viewer standing beneath the bridge looking out across the water. The composition organizes the sheet around the strong diagonal of the bridge's underside cutting across the upper register, with the river opening below in saturated planes of color. This insistent low-angle, framed-view structure is a signature of Okuyama's mature work, in which built infrastructure supplies the geometric scaffolding for bold color massing. The survival of more than one impression of the subject in the JAODB record confirms its place as a recurring composition in his catalogue. A self-taught printmaker from Akita who became one of the few Tohoku-region figures in the predominantly Tokyo-and-Kyoto [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) scene, Okuyama designed, carved, and printed each impression himself, in keeping with the movement's foundational principle that every stage of production carry individual authorship. The Japanese Art Open Database, through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, holds this second impression alongside the related earlier sheet (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/jaodb/Gihachiro_Okuyama-No_Series-View_of_Edogawa_from_under_the_Ichikawa_bridge-00044295-121024-F12). For students of Okuyama Gihachiro, comparing the two Ichikawa Bridge impressions documents his commitment to the sosaku-hanga principle that no two pulls from a personally carved block need be identical, and demonstrates the sustained importance of the modern bridged-river subject within his bold-color, dramatic-perspective vocabulary.