Onuma National Park

Onuma is a lake-and-volcano landscape in southern Hokkaido, near Hakodate, designated a Quasi-National Park in 1958. The defining view is Lake Onuma in the foreground with the conical bulk of Mount Komagatake (Hokkaido's Komagatake, an active stratovolcano) rising behind. For Maeda, born in Hokkaido in 1904, this is home territory — the volcanic ranges, birch forests, and snow-fed waters that distinguished his native landscape from the gentler Honshu scenery dominating shin-hanga's standard repertoire. The print likely uses bokashi across the sky and water surface to register atmospheric depth, with the silhouette of Komagatake as the dominant compositional mass. Reflections on the lake surface offered the opportunity for a doubled, mirrored design typical of meisho landscape prints. By treating Hokkaido's specific topography rather than the canonical Tokyo and Kyoto views, Maeda extends mokuhanga's geography northward, contributing to a regional landscape vocabulary that other Hokkaido-connected printmakers, including Hiratsuka Un'ichi in his northern subjects, were also developing.