Mt Fuji from Taisekiji Temple

Taisekiji, the head temple of Nichiren Shoshu in Shizuoka Prefecture, faces directly toward Mt Fuji from its position at the foot of the mountain. The subject returned Koizumi to his birth prefecture — he was born in Shizuoka before moving to Tokyo — and joins the long tradition of meisho-e featuring Fuji from named viewpoints, descending from Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views and Hiroshige's Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji. The composition likely places the temple's architecture in the middle ground with Fuji rising behind, employing bokashi to render the gradient of sky and the snowcap on the peak. As across his output, Koizumi cut and printed every block himself, fulfilling the sosaku-hanga ideal even when the subject — Fuji from a named place — sits squarely within the shin-hanga landscape repertoire and the older meisho-e lineage that defined Edo-period printmaking.