Asakusa Niomon Gate

The Niomon (now called the Hozomon) is the inner gate at Senso-ji, Tokyo's oldest Buddhist temple in Asakusa, a two-storied vermillion structure flanked by wooden Nio guardian statues and hung with the enormous straw sandals offered to them. A print of this subject would foreground the deep red of the gate against the dark tiled roof and surrounding temple precinct, a chromatic problem well suited to mokuhanga, where saturated vermillion is built up from a separate block and burnished into the washi by baren. Asakusa was a long-standing meisho-e subject taken up by ukiyo-e designers and continued into shin-hanga production through artists such as Kawase Hasui and Tsuchiya Koitsu. For Maeda, who moved fluently between the shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga traditions, an Asakusa landmark sits within the urban-temple lineage that linked the two movements while allowing the simplified massing and broader inking that distinguished sosaku-hanga from publisher-led work. Bokashi gradations behind the gate would suggest atmospheric recession into the temple grounds.