Prince Arisugawa Memorial Park in Azabu (Azabu-ku Arisugawa no Miya kinen kôen), from the series Prints of a Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era (Shôwa dai Tôkyô fûkei hyaku zue hanga)

Prince Arisugawa Memorial Park in Azabu (Azabu-ku Arisugawa no Miya kinen kōen) is part of Kishio Koizumi's sosaku-hanga series Prints of a Hundred Views of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era (Showa dai Tokyo fukei hyaku zue hanga). Catalogued in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and accessed here via ukiyo-e.org, the print shows the hillside park in central Azabu that had been donated to the city by Prince Takamatsu in 1934 in memory of Prince Arisugawa Takehito. Koizumi captures the layered terrain of the site — a sloping garden of curving paths, stone steps, a pond fed by a small cascade, and stands of mature trees — set within the residential fabric of pre-war Tokyo. As with the rest of the One Hundred Views of New Tokyo project, the print is the work of a single artist functioning as designer, carver, and printer; the matte, hand-pulled quality of the impression is integral to its sosaku-hanga character. The choice of Arisugawa Memorial Park is characteristic of Koizumi's editorial sensibility within Showa dai Tokyo fukei hyaku zue hanga: he repeatedly highlights newly created or recently inaugurated public spaces, registering the way mid-Showa Tokyo continued to acquire civic amenities after the earthquake reconstruction of the 1920s. The print therefore functions both as topographical record and as a quiet celebration of the modern park, treated not as a grand landmark but as an everyday neighborhood resource. Within the broader One Hundred Views series, it stands among Koizumi's most concentrated essays in green space, balanced composition, and the textures of cultivated nature inside a working capital city.