Garbage

An unromantic urban observation that exemplifies the documentary impulse of Ono's prewar work — a refuse heap or scattering of discarded material treated as a fully composed subject rather than a backdrop. The choice locates Ono within the social-realist strand of sosaku-hanga, where the unbeautified margins of the modern city were considered legitimate matter for the artist's eye. Mokuhanga's reductive black-and-white palette serves this kind of subject directly: the chaos of garbage resolves into a pattern of light and dark masses, the irregular silhouettes of crumpled paper, splintered wood, and broken vessels translating naturally into the gouge marks of the carved block. The print reads as a deliberate refusal of the picturesque — a counterpoint to the meisho-e tradition of celebrated views — and aligns with the prints Ono made of workers, factories, and industrial sites throughout the 1930s, all part of a documentary survey of the unprivileged surfaces of urban life.