Kobe bridge

A view of one of the bridges spanning the rivers and harbor channels of Kobe, Yuzaburo's lifelong home and the city that supplied the majority of his subjects. Working without a black keyblock—the technical signature he inherited from his father Kawanishi Hide and refined throughout his career—the print builds the bridge's structure entirely from registered color blocks, each contributing both contour and tonal weight. The subject suits this approach: industrial geometry reduced to flat planes of color, with girders and supports rendered as overlapping shapes rather than outlined forms. Kobe's modern bridges, rebuilt and expanded through the postwar decades, were a recurring motif for Yuzaburo, who treated his city's reconstructed infrastructure as legitimate landscape material for sosaku hanga. The absence of a keyblock gives the image a luminous, watercolor-like quality despite the deliberate flatness of woodblock color fields. The print sits within his broader investigation of Kobe as place—harbor, bridges, hillside neighborhoods—filtered through the sosaku hanga ethos of the artist as designer, carver, and printer of his own work.