Mitsuki - Tokaidô

This sheet belongs to Sekino's Fifty-three Stations of the Tôkaidô, the long landscape project he pursued through the 1960s and into the 1970s as a contemporary response to Hiroshige's 1833–34 series. Mitsuki — read by some catalogues as a variant transliteration of Mitsuke, station 28 on the old Edo-to-Kyoto highway — sat near the Tenryû river crossing in present-day Iwata, Shizuoka, a stretch historically associated with ferry traffic and seasonal flooding. Sekino approached each station as a record of the post-war landscape rather than a reissue of the canonical image: power lines, paved roads, and modern building stock are admitted into the design alongside any surviving older fabric. The print is a self-carved and self-printed mokuhanga in the sosaku-hanga tradition, working flat colour planes against washi with selective bokashi for sky or water. The Tôkaidô series, together with his portrait cycles, is the spine of his mature output.