Hodogaya - Tokaidô

The third Hodogaya variant in this group again places Sekino's print in the sustained Tôkaidô cycle that occupied much of his later career. By the time he reached the highway subjects, Sekino had fully integrated the sôsaku-hanga doctrine of jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed — into a personal visual language drawn from his Aomori upbringing alongside Shikô Munakata. Expect a tightly cropped framing of a single building or roadside element, often viewed obliquely so that perspective lines push the eye into shallow recession. Color is applied in flat planes punctuated by a single bokashi transition, and the wood's grain is sometimes visible as a textured ground, an effect Sekino prized for its honesty about the printed surface. The print exemplifies how a twentieth-century artist could re-inhabit an Edo-period subject without nostalgia, treating the station less as a meisho than as a study in form.