Togano-o Kyoto

Togano-o is a wooded mountain district in northwestern Kyoto, home to Kozanji temple and known for the autumn foliage along the Kiyotaki River. Kozanji is also associated with the twelfth-century Choju Giga animal scrolls, often cited as an early ancestor of Japanese caricature and graphic art. This print belongs to Sekino's substantial body of meisho-e — pictures of famous places — focused on Kyoto, where he produced extensive landscape work in the 1960s and 1970s. The composition likely depicts temple architecture nestled among trees or a stretch of the mountain path, rendered in flat color blocks with bokashi gradations for atmosphere. Sekino's Kyoto prints generally favor quiet, often unpopulated views rather than crowded famous-site scenes, treating the city's outlying districts with the same attention he gave its central temples. Working in the sosaku-hanga manner, he carved and printed the blocks himself, allowing visible woodgrain to register the texture of the surrounding forest.