Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido: no. 1, Nihonbashi, Expressway (Tokaido gojusan tsugi: Nihonbashi)

The opening print of Sekino's mid-twentieth-century reinterpretation of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido depicts Nihonbashi — the stone bridge in Edo that served as the official starting point of the historic highway — now overlaid with imagery of the modern expressway that was built above it in the 1960s. Hiroshige's 1833 version of this station shows a dawn procession of feudal lords crossing the bridge; Sekino's interpretation confronts that tradition with the concrete infrastructure of contemporary Tokyo. The juxtaposition is characteristic of his willingness to engage critically with both Edo-period conventions and Japan's rapid postwar modernization. Composing a woodblock print around the visual language of elevated highways and urban density requires a different formal vocabulary than the pastoral landscapes of the earlier Tokaido series. Sekino would bring his sosaku-hanga autonomy — designing, carving, and printing every aspect himself — to this politically and aesthetically charged subject.