Niju Bashi Bridge

The Niju Bashi (Double Bridge) is the stone arched bridge that fronts the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, a meisho (famous place) subject that entered the print repertoire during the Meiji era as a marker of civic identity. Onchi approaches the architectural subject with the structural reduction characteristic of his sosaku-hanga practice, treating the bridge's twin spans as a study in geometric mass and the surrounding moat as a flat plane of color. The print reflects his broader project of bringing modernist compositional ideas — flatness, simplification, and chromatic intervals as a primary expressive tool — into a medium that had historically privileged narrative and ornament. As a founding figure of the creative prints movement, Onchi insisted on the artist's full responsibility for design, carving and printing, and the irregularities of inking and registration in works like this carry the trace of that single-hand authorship on washi.