Goyu - Tokaidô

Goyu was the thirty-fifth post station on the Tokaido, the historical highway connecting Edo and Kyoto. Sekino's Goyu forms part of his ambitious Tokaido series, which he carved and printed himself between 1960 and 1974, comprising fifty-five large oban-format prints documenting each station. Where Hiroshige's celebrated 1830s treatment of Goyu showed aggressive inn solicitors seizing travelers at dusk, Sekino's postwar approach typically substitutes a quieter contemporary or memorial scene, capturing the residual character of the old post-station settlement as it appeared in mid-twentieth-century Japan. As a defining figure in the sosaku-hanga ("creative prints") movement, Sekino conceived, drew, carved, and printed each block personally, rejecting the traditional division of labor between artist, carver, and printer that had organized Edo-period ukiyo-e production. The Tokaido series stands as one of the major postwar reinterpretations of the meisho-e tradition, sustained over more than a decade of disciplined work.