Tokyo station

Tokyo Station's Marunouchi building, designed by Tatsuno Kingo and completed in 1914, was a flagship symbol of Meiji-era Westernization in red brick, its three-arched facade and twin domes signaling the arrival of European Beaux-Arts architecture in the imperial capital. Onchi depicted the station repeatedly, almost certainly within the Shin Tokyo Hyakkei collaborative series of 1928-1932. As a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) subject, the building functions as a compact study in architectural geometry — horizontal massing, regular fenestration, twin pavilions — translated into the flat color planes and economical line that defined his modernist printmaking idiom. The mokuhanga technique uses hand-carved blocks printed onto [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), the artist controlling the entire process rather than working through a publisher's craftsmen. The choice of Tokyo Station as subject ties the series to the post-1923 reconstruction of the capital, in which surviving Meiji-era landmarks took on renewed civic and pictorial significance.