Hongo Motomachi Park

Hongo Motomachi Park is a small public park in Bunkyo Ward, on the slopes below the University of Tokyo's main campus. Established in the Taisho period as one of the neighborhood parks created in central Tokyo, it is the kind of unmonumented locale that the One Hundred New Views of Tokyo series sought to document alongside more obvious meisho. A sosaku-hanga treatment of a small landscaped park typically reduces the scene to a few broad masses of foliage, path, and bench or lamp, printed in muted greens and earth tones with the woodgrain often left visible in larger blocks. Henmi, who carved and printed his own blocks, would have relied on registered key-block lines and a limited palette rather than the dense color overlays of nishiki-e. Within his wider body of work, the print belongs to the same impulse that produced his later Sui In Fu (1942): an interest in modest, lyrical subjects rather than grand vistas, set down with the restrained means characteristic of the sosaku-hanga movement.