Sand dune no. 2

The numbered title suggests one of a small set of dune studies, most likely drawn from the Tottori dunes on the Sea of Japan coast, the only large dune field in the country and a recurring postwar landscape subject. Dunes invited sosaku-hanga artists to push toward abstraction: ridge lines, wind ripples, and cast shadows reduce naturally to flat curved bands, and the absence of architecture or vegetation throws emphasis onto the carved contour itself. Hashimoto's handling here would have relied on a limited palette of warm sand tones with darker shadow blocks, registered by kento and pulled with the baren in even, unmodulated passes. Such studies stand somewhat apart from his castle and pagoda prints, which depend on built geometry, but they share the same underlying interest in mass, profile, and the structural reading of a landscape. Dunes also provided a contemporary, non-meisho subject in keeping with sosaku-hanga's break from traditional named-place imagery.