Asama Shrine (Mt.Fuji)

The image depicts an Asama shrine—a Shinto institution dedicated to Konohanasakuya-hime, the deity of Mount Fuji—framing the mountain through or alongside shrine architecture. Vermilion torii or shaden roofs typically anchor the foreground while Fuji's cone rises behind, rendered through bokashi gradation that runs from deep indigo at the base to the unprinted white of the washi for the snow cap. Tokuriki's Fuji subjects draw on the meisho-e (famous views) tradition that Hokusai and Hiroshige established, but his palette is distinctly twentieth-century: saturated and mineral-hued. As the twelfth-generation head of a Kyoto family that had supplied prints to Honganji Temple since the Keicho era, he brought a fluency with religious architecture into his landscape practice. This print belongs to the broad current of Mount Fuji subjects he produced from the 1930s through the postwar decades, issued through Uchida and other Kyoto publishers.