Kakegawa - Tokaidô

A third Kakegawa from Sekino's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (1960–1974), this print continues his methodical, multi-impression revisiting of individual stations across the long campaign. Kakegawa, the twenty-sixth station, was known for its castle-town setting in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture and for views toward Mt. Fuji and the Akiba pilgrimage route. As with the rest of the series, Sekino executed every stage of production himself — design, block carving, and impression on washi using a baren — in keeping with sosaku-hanga's rejection of the historical ukiyo-e workshop division between designer, carver, and printer. The image combines bokashi gradations across atmospheric or topographic transitions with flatter, opaque color masses for built form. Compared with Hiroshige's nineteenth-century Tokaido, Sekino's treatment is less anecdotal, more composed around silhouette, ground plane, and weather. The Tokaido cycle is the most extensive single body of work in Sekino's career and a central document of the sosaku-hanga movement's engagement with classical Japanese landscape subjects.