City bird

City bird places an avian subject within an urban Tokyo setting, bringing together the two strands that ran through Ono's career: the kacho-e tradition of bird-and-flower printmaking, and the socially conscious depiction of the modern city he pursued in the 1930s. The composition likely sets the bird against the geometry of buildings, rooftops, poles, or street infrastructure—a juxtaposition of organic form and urban structure that recurs across postwar sosaku-hanga. Mokuhanga on washi allows the carver to hold the architectural elements as flat planes of solid color while reserving textural and gradational handling for the bird and the open ground. Ono's earlier high-contrast prints of factory workers and industrial yards shared the graphic directness visible here; the difference lies in the substitution of a single quiet observer for the human figures of his prewar work. As a historian of the movement, Ono understood his own prints in relation to the longer arc of Japanese printmaking, and the city-bird subject reads as a deliberate recasting of traditional kacho-e for a modern urban environment.