Obanazawa

Obanazawa is a small town in northern Yamagata Prefecture, best known to Japanese readers as one of the stops on Basho's Oku no Hosomichi journey of 1689, where the poet rested for ten days and wrote the famous safflower verse. Sekino, born in nearby Aomori and deeply attached to the landscape and folk life of northern Honshu, returned repeatedly to Tohoku subjects across his career, treating them with the same seriousness he brought to the Tokaido. A print of Obanazawa would most likely foreground vernacular architecture — heavy thatched or tiled roofs, snow-country eaves, weathered wooden walls — rather than picturesque vista. Compositionally Sekino tended to flatten such scenes into strong rectilinear blocks of color, relying on a firmly cut key block to articulate timber and tile, with bokashi reserved for sky or distant fields. The print sits within his sustained sosaku-hanga project of recording a vanishing rural Japan from the perspective of someone who had grown up inside it.