Lake Toya

The fourth print in the Lake Toya sequence completes a substantial Hokkaido cycle within Maeda's output and underscores how central the lake was to his sense of place. By this point the artist had likely worked through different times of day, weather conditions, and viewpoints, and a fourth treatment would either consolidate the visual language of the earlier prints or push it further into abstraction — northern hanga artists in the postwar decades increasingly allowed flat color shapes and visible carving marks to dominate over descriptive detail. The print is hand-pulled mokuhanga on [washi](/glossary/washi), the pigment driven into the paper by the [baren](/glossary/baren) in successive registrations, with the keyblock carrying whatever line work the design retains. Considered alongside the other Lake Toya states, it documents Maeda's commitment to the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) principle of jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed — applied to a regional landscape that mainstream [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) publishers had little commercial interest in promoting.