Katsura (Shôkei), Shôwa period, dated 1965

Katsura refers to Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, a seventeenth-century retreat whose tea pavilions, stone paths, and pond garden have served Japanese architects and printmakers as an iconography of restraint. Shokei - pine view - points to a garden vista within the villa complex, framed through carefully placed pines and stepping stones. Hashimoto's 1965 treatment likely uses a low horizon and architectural fragment, perhaps a verandah edge, a shoji panel, or a stone lantern, to anchor the composition in the manner he had developed across his temple and shrine prints. His blocks of this period favored flat color fields with measured key-line carving, allowing the planar geometry of Japanese garden design to register clearly. Within his oeuvre, the Katsura subject belongs to a sustained engagement with Kyoto's monastery and villa gardens, where he treated landscaped space as an extension of architectural composition rather than as picturesque scenery.