#38 Fukugawa Incinerator

The Fukagawa Incinerator, an industrial facility in Tokyo's Fukagawa district, becomes an unlikely subject for a woodblock print in this work numbered thirty-eight in what appears to be a series documenting modern Tokyo. Suwa treats the utilitarian structure with the same compositional seriousness given to temples or gardens, finding visual interest in the incinerator's smokestack, angular architecture, and the interplay of industrial forms against the urban skyline. The choice of an incinerator as subject reflects a modernist willingness to find beauty or at least significance in the infrastructure of daily life, rejecting the convention that only picturesque or historically important sites deserve artistic attention.