Bamboo at Shisendo Temple, Kyoto

Shisendo, a hermitage temple in northeastern Kyoto founded by the seventeenth-century scholar-poet Ishikawa Jozan, is known for its meditative garden and surrounding bamboo groves. Hashimoto's print presents the bamboo as a vertical screen of culms, the slender trunks rising in parallel rhythm against a flatter ground tone. The graphic possibilities of bamboo — linear stalks, scattered leaf clusters, a strong figure-ground reading — align closely with the sosaku-hanga preference for bold compositional structure over surface detail. The subject sits within Hashimoto's broader engagement with temple environments rather than temple architecture proper, isolating a single visual element of the precinct rather than depicting the buildings themselves. Carving would have demanded careful registration to preserve the unbroken vertical lines of the culms, and bokashi tonal washes likely soften the recession of the rear bamboo into atmospheric depth. The print belongs to his Kyoto temple subjects produced across the 1950s and 1960s.