Kurobe Dam

Kurobe Dam departs from Saito's customary figural and literary subjects to address a landmark of post-war Japanese civil engineering in Toyama Prefecture. Completed in 1963, the arch dam became a recurring subject in mid-century Japanese prints and photographs as a symbol of national reconstruction. In Saito's intaglio idiom, the curved concrete face of the structure and the surrounding mountain terrain would be rendered through graded aquatint and mezzotint, with etched line reserved for the upper rim, spillways, and the dam's vertical seams. The print sits within the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition — images of famous places — but reframes that genre through twentieth-century industrial subject matter, paralleling the way contemporaneous [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) and [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists turned to bridges, dams, and railway scenes. It is among the less common architectural subjects in Saito's body of work, which is otherwise dominated by women and literary themes drawn from The Tale of Genji, and demonstrates the technical adaptability of his mezzotint-trained hand.