Lumberyard in Fukagawa

Fukagawa, in eastern Tokyo's Koto ward, was for centuries the city's principal timber district, where logs from upriver were stored in canals and yards along the Sumida estuary. Maeda's print likely shows the geometry of stacked lumber, water-filled lots, and the working architecture of warehouses and crane masts that defined the area before postwar redevelopment. A subject of this kind invites a graphic, almost diagrammatic handling — long horizontals of cut timber set against the verticals of poles and buildings — and Maeda would have used flat color areas and crisp edges typical of the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) manner he cultivated alongside his [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) work. As an urban industrial scene it sits apart from the romanticised [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) of earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), taking instead the unsentimental working city as its subject. The print belongs to the strain of mid-century Japanese landscape that found dignity in everyday labor and the made environment.