Terraced fields of Izu

The Izu Peninsula, southwest of Tokyo, has a hilly interior that has long been worked into terraced rice and dry fields rising in stepped registers up the slopes. The subject offers a structural rhythm well suited to Hiratsuka's carving idiom: parallel horizontal bands of paddy following the contour of the hill, broken by the dark verticals of trees, embankments, and farm buildings. In place of the atmospheric distance favored by shin-hanga landscapists, the composition would press the geometry of the cultivated slope flat against the picture plane, with carved black setting off the exposed washi of the field surfaces. Rural agricultural subjects appear repeatedly across Hiratsuka's catalogue alongside his temples and townscapes, part of the broader sosaku-hanga interest in everyday Japan rather than the famous-place tradition (meisho-e) inherited from Hiroshige.