Kotohira

Kotohira refers to the pilgrimage town in Kagawa Prefecture on Shikoku, home to Kotohira-gu (Konpira-san), the Shinto shrine reached by a long ascent of 785 stone steps up Mount Zozu. Sekino's treatment of meisho-e—famous-place subjects—generally favors quiet architectural fragments over panoramic views, isolating a torii, stone lantern, or section of stair within a tightly cropped frame. Such compositions draw on his sosaku-hanga practice of carving and printing his own blocks, which permitted careful registration alongside subtle bokashi shading and the matte, slightly grained surface produced by hand impression on washi. The print belongs to a body of pilgrimage and shrine subjects that Sekino developed in parallel with his series after the Tokaido, recasting traditional travel imagery in the modernist idiom of mid-twentieth-century Japanese printmaking.