Nagasaki Confucius Temple

The Koshi-byo in Nagasaki, completed in 1893 by the city's resident Chinese community, is among the few Confucian temples in Japan built in an authentically Chinese architectural idiom — vermilion lacquered columns, yellow-tiled roofs, and ornate animal-figure ridge decorations distinct from Japanese temple traditions. Sekino's print captures this hybrid architectural subject through the graphic flattening and bold color blocks characteristic of his mature sosaku-hanga style. The temple's saturated reds and yellows lend themselves naturally to mokuhanga's planar color logic, with each architectural element reduced to legible shape. Nagasaki's status as Japan's historical window onto China and the broader world made it a recurring subject for Sekino, who included other Nagasaki landmarks in his portfolio. The print belongs alongside his other architectural studies — temples, shrines, civic buildings — through which he documented the layered religious and cultural landscape of postwar Japan, including its minority cultural traditions.