Ima o tobe (Tocho-Ⅰ) 今を翔べ（都庁ーⅠ） (The Flying (Metropolitan Government Office-Ⅰ)) / Tokyo hyakkei niju-isseiki e no messeeji 東京百景 ２１世紀へのメッセージ (One Hundred Views of Tokyo: Message to the 21st Century)

Ima o tobe (Tocho-I), or The Flying (Metropolitan Government Office-I), is a Japanese woodblock print by Kawachi Seiko, drawn from the series Tokyo hyakkei niju-isseiki e no messeeji, translated as One Hundred Views of Tokyo: Message to the 21st Century. The print belongs to a contemporary reimagining of the venerable hyakkei, or hundred-views, tradition that stretches back through Hiroshige's nineteenth-century landscapes to the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) prints of Edo. Where earlier hyakkei series catalogued bridges, shrines, and seasonal pleasures, Kawachi Seiko's twenty-first-century message takes the modern capital itself as its subject, training the woodblock idiom on the steel, glass, and verticality of post-bubble Tokyo. The Tocho, Tokyo's Metropolitan Government Office complex in Shinjuku designed by Kenzo Tange and completed in 1991, became the city's most photographed civic landmark almost overnight, and Kawachi Seiko's choice to render its twin towers in carved relief situates the print squarely within the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) lineage of artists who insisted that woodblock could speak to the present moment as fluently as to the past. The phrase ima o tobe, literally an exhortation to fly through the now, sets a tone of forward propulsion appropriate to a series framed as a message dispatched across the millennium. In keeping with sosaku-hanga, or creative-print, practice as it developed across the twentieth century, the artist took responsibility for the full chain of design, carving, and printing, refusing the older [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) division of labor in favor of personal authorship of every block and impression. This particular sheet is preserved in the collection of the British Museum and was documented through ukiyo-e.org, which serves as the museum source for the cataloguing record. As a Japanese woodblock print at the close of the twentieth century, the work stands as evidence that the medium remained a living vehicle for civic observation rather than a museum relic.