Goyu - Tokaidô

Goyu was the thirty-fifth post-station on the Tokaido, a small town in what is now Aichi Prefecture historically known for its rows of inns and the pine-shaded approach road still partially preserved today. Hiroshige's Edo-period treatment of Goyu showed the inn's serving women aggressively soliciting travelers; Sekino, working in the postwar sosaku-hanga idiom, approached the same station with a different visual register, more likely emphasizing architecture, road, or pine corridor than figures. His Tokaido prints typically reduce each station to a few essential planes of color, with the keyblock used sparingly to define edges rather than to model form. Bokashi may appear in a sky band or in the gradation of a distant tree mass, but flat areas predominate. As with the rest of the cycle, the print would have been drawn, carved, and impressed by Sekino himself on washi, in keeping with the movement's principle that authorship extends through every stage of production.