Kurobe Dam

The print depicts the Kurobe Dam in Toyama Prefecture, an arch dam completed in 1963 in the Northern Japanese Alps that rises 186 meters above the Kurobe Gorge. As an etching rather than a mezzotint, the work relies on bitten linework and aquatint rather than the rocked tonal fields that characterize Saito's better-known Tale of Genji plates. The subject sits at a distance from the [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and literary interiors that dominate his catalog, placing him within a broader twentieth-century Japanese tradition of printmakers who turned their attention to modern infrastructure alongside classical landscapes. An etched treatment of this site would translate the curve of the concrete face, the surrounding ridgelines, and the spillway plume into a graphic vocabulary of incised line and graded acid tone, building depth through successive bites of the plate rather than through woodblock layering.