Kakegawa - Tokaidô

Kakegawa was the twenty-sixth station of the Tokaido, in present-day central Shizuoka Prefecture, historically associated with the Akiba shrine route, kite-flying, and distant views of Mt. Fuji. In Sekino's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (1960–1974) the station enters his developing late style, in which observed Japanese landscape is recast through bold compositional reduction and a controlled palette. Sekino, a leading figure in the sosaku-hanga (creative prints) movement, designed, carved, and printed every block himself, in line with the movement's principle of authorial control over the entire process. The image uses flat fields of opaque color set against bokashi gradations to register sky, ground, or water passages, with the washi grain visible through the layered impressions. Within the larger Tokaido series — which occupied roughly fourteen years of his working life — Sekino moves away from Hiroshige's narrative staffage toward calmer, more architectural treatments of the post stations, treating place itself rather than the travelers passing through as the central subject.