Fuchu - Tokaidô

Fuchū was the nineteenth station of the Tōkaidō, located in former Suruga province at the seat of the Sunpu castle town (modern central Shizuoka City), historically associated with Tokugawa Ieyasu's retirement residence. Sekino's Fuchū sheet belongs to his Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi series (1960–1974), a fifty-five-print project that took the Edo-period highway as its armature for a sustained study of provincial Japanese landscape. Where Hiroshige had treated Fuchū with the Abe River crossing and a procession of porters, Sekino's modernist sōsaku-hanga vocabulary tends toward architectural fragments and quiet, depopulated views. The print combines a deeply carved key block with three to six color impressions, registered with kentō notches and burnished by hand with a baren onto kōzo washi. Sekino's insistence on jiga, jikoku, jizuri—designing, carving, and printing each work himself—stands in deliberate contrast to the Edo-period division of labor between designer, carver, printer, and publisher.