Hakone

Hakone marked the tenth station on the Tokaido and one of its most demanding passages, climbing through volcanic mountains to the strategic checkpoint above Lake Ashi where the Tokugawa shogunate inspected travelers. Hiroshige's Edo-period Hakone showed angular peaks looming over a small procession; Sekino, working three centuries later, returned to the same terrain with the geometric vocabulary of postwar sosaku-hanga. His Hakone prints typically reduce the mountain mass to interlocking planes of color, setting the cool greens and grays of cedar and stone against a warmer sky band rendered in bokashi gradation. The keyblock outline is restrained, giving primacy to color shape rather than descriptive line. As one of the larger oban-format prints in his Tokaido cycle, Hakone allowed Sekino room to balance several competing color masses, a compositional problem he addressed by anchoring the design with a single dark accent — often a rooftop, gate, or distant figure — that gives the eye a point of return.