Dogo Onsen

Dogo Onsen in Matsuyama, Ehime, is among the oldest documented hot-spring settlements in Japan, and the three-storied wooden Honkan bathhouse completed in 1894 — with its prominent shinrokaku turret topped by a heron weathervane — is the structure almost any print of this title is depicting. The building's stacked tiled roofs, irimoya gables, and red-orange noren curtains over the entrance offer a strongly architectural subject, well suited to the firm keyblock outlines and flat color planes of contemporary mokuhanga. For Ido, whose decades of work concentrated on the temples and streetscapes of Kyoto, Dogo represents an excursion into the broader inventory of traditional wooden architecture that survived into the late twentieth century. The print extends his preservation-minded archive beyond the old capital to one of the few public bathhouses in Japan still operating in a Meiji-era timber building, and the choice of subject reflects the same instinct that drove his Kyoto views: record what is visibly disappearing from the rest of the country.