Rainbow in the eastern sky

"Rainbow in the Eastern Sky" presents a horizon-band composition organized around an arcing color spectrum set against a darker upper register. Hodaka Yoshida printed the rainbow itself by adjacent flat color blocks rather than the wet-into-wet [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation his father Hiroshi used for atmospheric effects, producing a hard-edged, modernist treatment of a meteorological subject. The lower portion of the sheet typically gives an abbreviated landscape — a low dark horizon line, perhaps a silhouetted building or tree reduced to a geometric mark — printed from separate blocks on [kozo](/glossary/kozo) [washi](/glossary/washi). Multiple-block registration through [kento](/glossary/kento) marks keeps the spectrum's color bands crisp where they meet. The subject connects to the Yoshida family's long engagement with sky and weather, from Hiroshi's Sailing Boats variations to Toshi's later floral and animal sheets, but Hodaka's flatness of color and rejection of tonal modeling place this print squarely within his postwar engagement with abstraction and color-field thinking.