Kamakura Sugimotodera

Sugimotodera is the oldest temple in Kamakura, founded in 734 and approached by a famously moss-covered stone stairway flanked by white pilgrim banners and ranks of stone Jizo. Morimura's print likely takes this ascending path as its compositional spine, the stair treads abstracted into a series of horizontal bars climbing the picture plane while the thatched roof of the Kannon-do appears at the summit. Stone steps and lantern bases would be carved with the woodgrain left visible to suggest weathered surface, a technique drawn from the sosaku-hanga tradition of letting the block declare itself. The hanging banners offer vertical accents that Morimura uses elsewhere to break flat fields of greenery. Sugimotodera fits his recurring interest in Kamakura subjects — Hasedera, Engakuji, Hokokuji's bamboo grove — and within Japanese print history it joins a long meisho-e lineage of temple approaches, from Hokusai's pilgrimage scenes onward, but reframed through the postwar self-published woodblock idiom that Morimura helped sustain into the twenty-first century.