Meiji Jingu Shrine

This print depicts Meiji Jingu, the Shinto shrine in Tokyo's Yoyogi district dedicated to Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, completed in 1920 and set within a constructed forest precinct. As a Tokyo-born artist who lived through the shrine's founding, Onchi engaged Meiji Jingu as part of his observational record of the modern capital, a recurring subject across his sosaku-hanga output. Prints of this type typically isolate elements of shrine architecture — torii gates, sloping copper roofs, stone lanterns — against simplified, often empty grounds, allowing the artist's hand-carved blocks and individually pulled impressions to register as personal expression rather than reproductive image-making. Although Onchi is most associated with his abstract work, his architectural and landscape subjects reveal the same interest in flattened planes, layered tone, and quiet compression of space. The print belongs to that strain of sosaku-hanga in which a known place becomes a vehicle for the artist's mood rather than topographical record.