Lama tower

The print depicts a tower of Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist architectural lineage, likely one of the lama-tō structures that punctuated Tokyo's eclectic religious landscape in the early Showa period. Koizumi composes the building with the topographic precision that characterizes his documentary surveys of the capital, rendering tiered stories and ornamental finials through carefully registered keyblock outlines and flat color planes. The print exemplifies the artist's self-reliant approach: he carved his own blocks and pulled each impression with the baren himself, achieving the matte, slightly textured surface that distinguishes his work from the more polished commercial nishiki-e produced by professional ateliers. As with the broader corpus of Dai Tokyo Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo, 1928-1940), the subject registers a specific architectural witness rather than a generalized vista, treating the city as an inventory of singular places worth recording before further modernization eroded them.