Showa Shinzan volcano, Hokkaidô

A depiction of the lava dome that pushed up out of farmland near Lake Tōya in southern Hokkaidō between 1944 and 1945, an event recorded contemporaneously by the postmaster Mimatsu Masao. Sekino, who traveled widely across Japan to gather landscape material, treats the dome as a near-geological portrait: the still-warm, denuded slopes set against cooler surrounding hills. Hokkaidō and the far north appear repeatedly in his work, reflecting both the postwar widening of the Japanese landscape print beyond the Tōkaidō corridor and his own roots in Aomori at the northern tip of Honshū. Technically, the print would use stratified bokashi for the smoke or haze rising from the still-active dome, with broad flat color fields modulated by the cherry-plank grain visible through the inks. The subject sits within a strand of mid-twentieth-century Japanese prints — alongside work by Hiratsuka and Maekawa — that registered new geological and industrial features of the modern landscape.