Hongo Residence

A traditional residence in the Hongo district of Tokyo, the area near the University of Tokyo that retains pockets of prewar wooden architecture amid the surrounding postwar cityscape. The subject is somewhat unusual for Morimura's published output, which more typically engages with religious architecture and gardens, and its inclusion suggests his attention to the surviving everyday built environment as itself a subject worthy of mokuhanga's concentrated craft. The composition likely presents the house's facade or garden side with characteristic features of late-Meiji or early-Showa residential architecture: tile-roofed eaves, latticed wooden walls, plastered storehouse walls, and a small enclosing garden. Morimura would render these elements through his familiar geometric reduction, with rectangles of plaster and timber stacked into orderly compositions and small naturalistic touches — pine needles, stone basin, moss — providing the textural counterpoint. The print fits within his documentation of vanishing Japanese vernacular architecture, treating each building as an individual portrait rather than a generic type.