Nihonbashi district

Nihonbashi is the historic commercial center of Tokyo, the kilometer-zero point from which Edo-period road distances were measured and the site of the bridge over the Nihonbashi River. By Kazuma's working life, the district had been substantially rebuilt in stone and concrete following the 1923 Kanto earthquake. The print likely depicts this new urban fabric — granite bridges, Western-style commercial buildings, electric lines — rather than the timber storehouses of earlier prints. The subject sits within the Tokyo Junikei tradition that several sosaku hanga artists revisited in the 1920s and 1930s, integrating modern infrastructure into the meisho-e lineage without nostalgic retreat. Kazuma's mokuhanga handles the geometric architecture through clean keyblock cuts and layered color flats, a treatment indebted to his lithographic background. The result reads as an artist-printmaker's record of the interwar metropolis rather than a commercial souvenir of an unchanged Edo.