Ueno Zoo

This depiction of Tokyo's Ueno Zoological Gardens — Japan's first zoo, opened in 1882 within the precincts of Ueno Park — likely belongs to the Shin Tokyo Hyakkei (New One Hundred Views of Tokyo) project, a sosaku-hanga series produced collaboratively between 1928 and 1932 by Onchi and fellow creative-print artists. The series adapted the meisho-e tradition of famous-place prints to a modern urban Tokyo undergoing rapid reconstruction after the 1923 Kanto earthquake. As a sosaku-hanga artist, Onchi designed, carved, and printed his blocks himself, allowing direct authorial control over color choice and registration. The Ueno Zoo subject would have been treated less as a wildlife study than as a vignette of public Tokyo life, with figures and animals reduced to compact silhouettes against bands of foliage or architecture. The print's flat color planes and economical line reflect the modernist visual idiom Onchi helped establish for Japanese woodblock work in the early Showa era.