Sakurada Gate

Sakurada Gate (Sakurada-mon) is the southwestern entrance to the outer moat of the Imperial Palace complex in Tokyo, a masugata gate of stone foundations and tile-roofed timber upperworks dating from the early Edo period. As a meisho-e subject, the gate had been treated by Edo-period designers, but Maeda approaches it through the formal language of twentieth-century mokuhanga: flattened planes, restricted palette, and emphasis on the geometric mass of the walls rather than narrative incident. The print typically reduces the gate to its essential silhouette, with the long horizontal of the stone base setting up against the tiled roof line. Bokashi gradations across sky or moat surface would soften the otherwise hard-edged construction. The choice of the gate places Maeda within the Tokyo-meisho tradition that Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi worked in the shin-hanga mode, while Maeda's print-aesthetic — looser registration, more visible block grain — signals his sosaku-hanga sensibility.