Top of the tower

A mokuhanga depicting the upper portion of a tower — likely an industrial, observation, or transmission structure rather than a temple form, given Ono's longstanding interest in modern built environments. The compositional logic of the title suggests a cropped view that brings the tower's superstructure close to the picture plane, eliminating its base and surrounding context to concentrate on the geometry of beams, struts, or platforms against open sky. This kind of framing recalls Ono's prewar urban and industrial prints, where factory chimneys, rail bridges, and machinery were treated as subjects worthy of serious graphic attention — a position aligned with the leftist social consciousness that ran through one strand of the sosaku-hanga movement in the 1930s. By the postwar decades that polemical charge had softened, but Ono's eye for the forms of modern infrastructure persisted, here translated into the carved planar vocabulary of his mature work. The print extends his five-decade engagement with the visual language of constructed Japan, parallel to his concurrent activity as a historian and critic of the creative print movement.