Hikone Castle

Hikone Castle, sitting on a hill above Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture, is one of the few Japanese castles to survive intact from the early Edo period. Hashimoto's 1956 print presents the castle's celebrated three-tiered donjon with the architectural exactitude that made his castle series a definitive visual record of Japan's surviving fortifications. The composition likely situates the donjon against sky with the castle's distinctive curved gables and whitewashed walls rendered in careful detail, the structural logic of the building made visible through Hashimoto's precise carving.