Okabe - Tokaidô

Okabe was the twenty-first station on the old Tokaido highway between Edo and Kyoto, lying at the foot of the Utsunoya pass in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture. This sheet belongs to Sekino's extended Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido series, a project he pursued from the 1960s onward and one of the most ambitious sosaku-hanga reworkings of a classical ukiyo-e theme. Where Hiroshige's Okabe centered on the rocky mountain stream cutting through the pass, Sekino's stations characteristically reframe the place through a contemporary observer's eye, often emphasizing roof lines, walled lanes, or villagers at work. The print uses mokuhanga's full vocabulary — registered color blocks, bokashi for atmospheric depth, and visible baren marks across broad fields — to weight the scene with material presence. As with the wider series, Sekino signs and numbers each impression himself in the sosaku-hanga manner.