Ueno Zoo

The third in this group of Ueno Zoo prints again addresses the Ueno Zoological Gardens, a recurring subject in Onchi's documentation of modern Tokyo. The repetition across multiple compositions reflects the working method Onchi favored within the sosaku-hanga movement: returning to a motif across separate sheets, varying viewpoint, palette, or seasonal mood rather than producing a single definitive image. This approach inverted the centuries-old hanmoto system, in which a publisher commissioned a fixed design for mass duplication. Here the artist's hand controls every stage from drawing to printing, and successive treatments of the same subject become small studies in composition and atmosphere. Technically, the print likely employs the standard sosaku-hanga toolkit — multiple keyblock and color block impressions on washi, registered through kento marks, with bokashi available where gradations are required. The resulting image would treat the zoo not as documentary record but as a node within Onchi's broader visual mapping of interwar Tokyo.