Stakes, Inokashira

Inokashira Park in western Tokyo, with its central pond and wooded perimeter, has been a subject for Tokyo printmakers since the Meiji period. Hodaka's treatment focuses on the wooden mooring posts or boundary stakes that punctuate the pond's edge, isolating them as a compositional motif in the modernist manner he developed from the 1950s onward. The print likely flattens spatial recession into stacked color fields, with the vertical stakes providing rhythmic incident against horizontal water and shoreline. Hodaka's mokuhanga technique — water-based pigments on [washi](/glossary/washi), hand-pressed with the [baren](/glossary/baren) — preserves the textural grain of the wooden block, giving the stakes a tactile presence that aligns the materials of the subject with the materials of the print itself. The work belongs to the period when Hodaka was distancing himself from his father Hiroshi's representational landscape tradition while still drawing subjects from observed Tokyo locations, treating them as occasions for formal abstraction rather than topographical record.