Tokyo Tower

The title points to Tokyo's 1958 lattice tower, an emblem of postwar modernity that drew the attention of printmakers attentive to changes in the urban landscape. A Takahashi treatment would typically reduce the structure to its constituent geometry — verticals, intersecting diagonals, the splay of the broadcast antenna — rather than rendering the silhouette descriptively. His mature practice favored flat color fields registered in close keying, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations softening hard edges where adjacent blocks meet. As a pupil of Onchi Koshiro, Takahashi inherited the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) conviction that a print's surface organization should carry meaning independent of any naturalistic referent, and that approach informs his rendering even when the source is recognizably architectural rather than the Kyoto gardens he more commonly worked from.