Side gate of the Confucian shrine in Tainan (Taiwan)

This second impression of the Tainan Confucian Shrine side gate reflects Onchi's practice of producing small editions with deliberate variation between pulls. Sosaku-hanga printmakers, working without a separate printing studio, often introduced subtle differences between impressions — varying inking density, bokashi gradation transitions, or the color of supplementary blocks. Such variation was treated as an expressive feature rather than a defect, distinguishing artist-printed mokuhanga from commercial editions where uniformity was the goal. The subject — a side gate of Tainan's seventeenth-century Confucian temple — is rendered through reduced architectural shorthand: roof line, gate pier, surrounding wall. The shrine's southern Chinese architectural vocabulary, with its ornate ridge tiles and red brick, would have appeared visually distinct to Japanese audiences accustomed to Shinto and Buddhist temple forms. Onchi's compositional treatment privileges silhouette and the relationship of solid masses, anticipating the formal abstraction that would come to dominate his later work.