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](/glossary/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](/glossary/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.