red gate of Imperial University

The Akamon, or Red Gate, of the former Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) was built in 1827 to mark the marriage of a daughter of the shogun Tokugawa Ienari into the Maeda clan of Kaga, and its lacquered vermillion face has stood at the Hongo entrance to the campus ever since. Designated an Important Cultural Property, the gate is among the surviving pieces of late-Edo daimyo architecture in central Tokyo. A print of this subject would foreground the deep red of the lacquer against the green of surrounding pine and the grey of the roof tiles — a chromatic problem that suits mokuhanga, where saturated vermillion is laid down from a separate block and pressed into the [washi](/glossary/washi) with [baren](/glossary/baren). For Maeda, an architectural subject like this connects to the urban [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition while admitting the geometric simplifications of form that the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) generation favored. The two-storied gate's symmetrical pillars and curving roof lend themselves to bold compositional framing.