Lumberyard in Fukagawa

Fukagawa, the timber district on the east bank of the Sumida in Tokyo, was a working subject for printmakers from Hiroshige's Meisho Edo Hyakkei onward, where stacked logs, lumber rafts, and the canals that floated timber from the bay gave the area its visual identity. By the twentieth century the yards had contracted but the motif persisted, taken up by Kawase Hasui among others as a record of a vernacular industrial landscape. Maeda's treatment would belong to that lineage while bending toward [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) formal interests: the orthogonal stacks of milled lumber, the dark waterways, and the low workshop rooflines lend themselves to flat planes of carved color and a tight tonal range. The subject also reflects the willingness of self-printing artists to find their material in unglamorous urban work rather than in classical meisho. The print sits in counterpoint to Maeda's northern landscapes, showing his range across both Hokkaido scenery and the everyday Tokyo industrial subjects of his adopted city.