Chichibu, Nagatoro

Nagatoro, in the Chichibu region of Saitama Prefecture, is known for its sheer schist cliffs along the Arakawa River. Hiratsuka's treatment of this site likely reduces the famed rock formations to interlocking planes of black and unprinted washi, a graphic strategy that converts geological texture into sculptural pattern. The print belongs to the broader meisho-e tradition of depicting noted Japanese places, but Hiratsuka updates the genre by stripping away atmospheric color in favor of carved contour and tonal opposition. As a sosaku-hanga artist, he cut and printed the block himself, preserving visible chisel work as part of the image's expressive vocabulary. Travel within Japan supplied many of his subjects throughout his long career, and prints of regional landscapes form a substantial subset of his more than 3,000 catalogued works. The composition would typically rely on dense black masses for rock and tree, with the river indicated by reserved white passages—a method by which Hiratsuka conveyed weight and depth without recourse to the polychrome layering of nishiki-e.