Yokkaichi

Yokkaichi is the forty-third station of the Tokaido road, on the western shore of Ise Bay in Mie Prefecture, rendered by Hiroshige in 1833 in a widely reproduced image of a wind-bent traveler chasing his hat across a reedy bridge. Sekino's Yokkaichi forms part of his own "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido" series, in which he revisited each post station in the postwar period through a sosaku-hanga sensibility. The composition likely takes up Yokkaichi's coastal flatlands, the Suzuka mountains in the distance, or a townscape detail of the modernized station, treated in flat color planes with strong silhouettes and bokashi gradients in the sky or water. Throughout the series Sekino maintained the creative-prints method of carving and printing his own blocks on washi, asserting the artist's hand against the Edo-period workshop division of labor while consciously echoing — rather than copying — the meisho-e iconography established by Hiroshige.