Futomi fishing village

Futomi is a small fishing settlement on the Boso Peninsula in Chiba, the kind of working coastal village Hashimoto turned to alongside his more famous architectural subjects. The composition likely sets the dark-tiled roofs of the village houses against the line of the harbor, with hauled-up boats, drying nets, and stone breakwaters in the foreground and the pale band of the sea behind. Hashimoto's printmaking habits carry over from his castle work: a strong carved keyblock to define the geometry of the rooflines, a restrained palette of greys, indigos, and warm earth tones, and bokashi gradations on the water and sky. The grain of the cherry block is allowed to read in the broad areas of sea and ground, giving texture without illustrative detail. Self-cut and self-printed on washi, the sheet belongs to the village and farmhouse strain in his oeuvre, where Hashimoto applies the same architectural discipline he brought to castles and gates -- treating ordinary built form with the same compositional seriousness as monumental sites.