Village of Yuge

Yuge likely refers to Yuge Island in the Seto Inland Sea, part of the Ōshima archipelago in Ehime Prefecture, or to another rural Japanese locale. Sekino traveled extensively through Japan documenting regional landscapes and folk culture, and village prints from this period of his work typically center on the geometry of traditional architecture—tiled rooflines, whitewashed plaster walls, wooden fencing, stone-paved lanes—set within a natural landscape that is suggested rather than exhaustively described. Color is applied in broad, confident areas rather than in elaborated tonal gradations: the warm ochre of aged plaster, deep charcoal for roof tile, sea or sky in graduated blue. The print belongs to Sekino's larger project of creating a printed record of Japanese provincial life and landscape before modernization altered it.