Niju Bashi Bridge

Another impression from Onchi's treatment of the stone bridge at the Imperial Palace gate, this version differs in palette or registration from related impressions in the group. Niju Bashi — literally "double bridge" — refers to the paired stone arches reflected in the moat, and the doubling motif lent itself to the kind of formal repetition Onchi favored in his architectural studies. The work sits within a tradition of urban meisho-e that Meiji-era artists like Kobayashi Kiyochika had already begun pulling toward atmospheric abstraction before Onchi's generation pushed it further. In sosaku-hanga practice, no two impressions are necessarily identical: variations in inking, paper saturation, and pressure applied through the baren produce subtle differences from sheet to sheet, and Onchi often pulled multiple states of a single block deliberately. The image reduces the bridge's stonework to broad tonal blocks, downplaying detail in favor of mass.