Factory

Another print in Ono's extended factory cycle, this image likely depicts laborers within the industrial environment — figures bent over machinery, loading carts, or moving across a workshop floor. The treatment of figures in his prewar prints tends toward type rather than portrait: simplified silhouettes carved with broad gouges, faces left summary so that the worker reads as a class subject rather than an individual. This approach reflects the influence of proletarian art journals circulating in Tokyo in the late 1920s and early 1930s, several of which Ono contributed to. The mokuhanga technique, with its capacity for stark tonal opposition and its association with the socialized print run, suited the political program of making images of labor accessible at low cost. Ono maintained this iconography through the difficult years of wartime censorship, later returning to industrial subjects in postwar work that reflected on Japan's reconstruction.