Sukiya-bashi Police Box

"Sukiya-bashi Police Box" depicts the [koban](/glossary/koban) that for decades stood at the Sukiyabashi crossing on the edge of Ginza in central Tokyo — a small, distinctively shaped structure that became a recognizable urban landmark in the postwar city. Hodaka Yoshida treats the kiosk as an architectural object, isolating it from its surrounding traffic and signage and reducing it to a frontal arrangement of flat planes: walls, signboard, roof, and openings printed as rectangles of opaque color from multiple cherry-wood blocks onto [kozo](/glossary/kozo) [washi](/glossary/washi). Where his father Hiroshi rendered Tokyo through atmospheric landscape prints of bridges and rivers, Hodaka chose a quotidian piece of urban infrastructure and rendered it with the same registration discipline applied to abstract design. The result records a specific Tokyo location while extending the architectural-facade approach he used for houses and shopfronts. Such prints document a generational shift in the Yoshida studio from scenic [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition toward the contemporary city as compositional subject.