Fujieda- Tokaidô

Fujieda was the twenty-second station of the Tōkaidō, in former Suruga province (modern Shizuoka Prefecture), a post-town historically tied to horse-changing and tea cultivation. Sekino's print of Fujieda belongs to his Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi series (1960–1974), which reframed Hiroshige's nineteenth-century stations through a postwar sōsaku-hanga sensibility. Rather than recapitulating Edo-period genre staffage, Sekino's stations isolate architectural fragments—a tile roof, a stone wall, a section of road in low light—and render them in flat planes of carefully registered color. Bokashi gradations are used sparingly, often along a horizon or beneath an eave, while the key block carries the weight of the composition as incised line. The reduced palette and emphasis on contour reflect Sekino's training under Onchi Kōshirō, a central figure of sōsaku-hanga, and his absorption of European modernist composition. The Tōkaidō series stands as a sustained postwar engagement with the meisho-e tradition.