Factory

One of multiple variations Ono produced on the factory motif, this print belongs to the industrial series that defined his prewar output. The composition likely employs the high-contrast black-and-white treatment typical of his 1930s mokuhanga, with the carved key block carrying most of the visual weight — angular smokestacks, geometric rooflines, and the dense massing of an industrial site cut in flat planes against a pale sky. Working without the burnished gradations of a traditional [baren](/glossary/baren)-rubbed [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e), Ono treated the woodblock as a graphic medium in the manner of European expressionist printmakers, whose work he knew well as a critic. Such factory subjects placed him within the leftist current of [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) that ran parallel to the lyrical landscape work of contemporaries like Hiratsuka Un'ichi. The image documents the industrial Tokyo periphery of his youth, a landscape of smoke, brick, and corrugated metal that he returned to repeatedly across the decade.