Wada Kuramon

Wada in this title likely refers to the historical post-station along the Nakasendō highway in present-day Nagano Prefecture, where Wada-tōge crossed the Central Highlands between Edo and Kyoto. The Nakasendō and its weathered gates, mileposts, and mountain passes recur in twentieth-century mokuhanga as artists explored Japan's pre-modern travel infrastructure. Maeda's print likely depicts a wooden structure or stone pass within a landscape, executed in flat color planes and a restrained palette consistent with his self-printed work. The grain of the woodblock often appears in his skies and middle-ground terrain, a sōsaku-hanga signature in which the material of the block becomes a design element rather than something a professional printer would polish out. Within his catalogue, this kind of architectural-historical subject sits alongside his mountain and lake compositions, extending his record of Japanese place beyond the meisho canon inherited from Edo-period print tradition.