Viaduct

Viaduct treats one of the signature structures of industrial modernity — the elevated rail or road bridge — as a subject worthy of sustained graphic attention. Ono's prewar prints of factories, workshops, and the working districts of Tokyo had already established his interest in built infrastructure, and a viaduct's repeating piers, arches, and trusses lend themselves naturally to the high-contrast black-and-white mokuhanga he favored. The composition typically would set the heavy mass of the structure against a more open sky or street below, exploiting the carved block's capacity for dense unbroken black against the white of the washi. Visible chisel and knife marks — a hallmark of sosaku-hanga's rejection of the polished surface of commercial Edo-period printing — would animate the apparently mechanical forms. The print connects to the broader concern of his Ichimoku-kai-adjacent generation with the everyday face of industrial Japan, treating engineered structures with the same documentary seriousness that earlier ukiyo-e meisho-e had given to bridges and harbors.