Fishing Village

Fishing Village situates this print within Sekino's recurring engagement with the coastal and rural communities of northern Japan, a thread in his oeuvre that draws on his upbringing in Aomori on the Tsugaru Strait. The composition arranges a layered foreground of nets, hulls, or low timber roofs against a flattened sea or sky, organized by a key block whose incised lines establish the architectural rhythm. Color is applied in broad, registered planes with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations reserved for sky and water—a hallmark of postwar sōsaku-hanga technique that descends from the experiments of Onchi Kōshirō and Hiratsuka Un'ichi, both of whom Sekino studied under. As a creative-prints artist, Sekino designed, carved, and printed every block himself on kōzo [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren), departing from the Edo-period [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) workshop model. His coastal village subjects share the documentary impulse of his Tōkaidō series: ordinary places treated with structural seriousness rather than picturesque sentiment.