Fuji C

"Fuji C" belongs to a sequence of Mount Fuji studies labeled alphabetically — a working method common in [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), where artists exploring a single motif across multiple states or compositions distinguished prints by letter rather than narrative title. Mount Fuji is a subject Japanese printmakers have returned to since at least Hokusai's "Thirty-Six Views" of the 1830s, and successive generations approached the mountain with their own formal commitments. Sasajima's hand-carved sosaku-hanga idiom, learned under Onchi Koshiro, produces a Fuji unlike the layered [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi)-built versions of nineteenth-century commercial woodblock or the atmospheric [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) revivalist treatments of the early twentieth: bold contour, exposed knife and gouge marks, heavy black against the texture of [washi](/glossary/washi). While the temples of Nara and Kyoto remained his central subject through five decades of practice, Mount Fuji recurs as a secondary motif, treated with the same insistence that the artist personally design, carve, and print every block.