Mt Fuji

A focused study of Mount Fuji presented without the contextual landmarks that anchor more elaborate compositions. Tokuriki produced numerous Fuji prints throughout his seventy-year career, and an unspecified-location view of this kind tends to concentrate on the mountain's silhouette, snow line, and surrounding atmosphere—a particular time of day or season indicated through color choice and the calibrated softness of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation. Working in the lineage initiated by Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views and Hiroshige's later Fuji series, Tokuriki updated the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) formula for twentieth-century audiences, using mokuhanga's hand-printed register to deliver chromatic depth difficult to achieve in mechanical reproduction. The unprinted whiteness of the snow cap, achieved by leaving [washi](/glossary/washi) bare while surrounding blocks impart their pigment, is itself a compositional device. Such prints functioned both as collectible single sheets and as components of larger thematic series, reflecting the artist's training in the Kyoto craft tradition while serving the postwar tourist and export markets that sustained Japanese woodblock printmaking after the decline of full [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) publishing.