Aquarium

Aquarium reflects Sekino's interest in finding pictorial structure in unexpected modern subjects, here the glass-walled tank of a public aquarium. Prints on this theme allowed him to exploit the woodblock's capacity for layered transparency: overprinted blues and greens approximate the refracted light of water, while sharply carved silhouettes of fish or visitors register against the gradient field. Bokashi shading, applied directly on the block with a damp brush before pulling the impression, would have been essential for evoking the diffuse glow of the tank, and Sekino was widely admired for the precision of his bokashi registration across multiple blocks. The composition likely flattens foreground and background into a single decorative plane, a strategy he shared with contemporaries in the sosaku-hanga movement who absorbed lessons from European modernism. Within his oeuvre, Aquarium sits beside other genre studies of postwar urban leisure — train stations, theaters, festivals — where Sekino treated everyday Japanese life with the same compositional seriousness he brought to his Tokaido and portrait series.