Pagoda in Murō

Pagoda in Muro, produced by Hodaka Yoshida in 1954, is an early-career print that catches the artist at the threshold of his distinctive postwar program, when he was still negotiating the relationship between the Yoshida-family inheritance of [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) landscape and the international modernist idioms that would soon dominate his work. The subject is the celebrated pagoda at Muroji, the mountain temple in Nara prefecture long admired for its diminutive scale and steep wooded setting, but the treatment is conspicuously stripped of the documentary clarity that his father Hiroshi Yoshida or his elder half-brother Toshi would have brought to such a motif. Hodaka instead reduces the building to flattened tiers of dark color set against a textured ground, with carved striations and modulated inking carrying the weight of forest, weather, and accumulated time. There is no attempt at picturesque view; the pagoda registers as a totemic vertical presence within a tonal field. The print sits within the broader [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) movement, in which artists designed, carved, and printed each impression themselves, treating the block as a vehicle for personal expression rather than for reproductive craftsmanship. For Hodaka, born in 1926 as the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida and the painter Fujio Yoshida, this insistence on personal authorship was bound up with an early decision to differentiate his practice sharply from the family workshop tradition that Toshi would continue. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/117649), preserves Pagoda in Muro as an instructive document of Hodaka's mid-1950s production, when classical Japanese architecture was still admissible as subject but was already being filtered through a flattened, semi-abstract idiom. For students of the postwar Japanese print, the 1954 sheet shows how thoroughly Hodaka had begun to break with the photographic naturalism of the prewar Yoshida studio, replacing topographic specificity with a carved, layered surface that anticipates the more aggressive abstraction of his international travels later in the decade.