Double bridge at the imperial palace

Double Bridge at the Imperial Palace depicts Nijūbashi, the stone-arched bridge spanning the inner moat at the main entrance to the Kōkyo in Tokyo. Unusually for Wada Sanzo, whose Shōwa Shokugyō Emaki series concentrated on figures and occupations, this sheet is a meisho-e: a famous-place view. The composition almost certainly centers on the twin arches mirrored in the moat water, with the wooded palace embankment and a guard turret beyond. Wada renders the architecture as flat planes of stone gray and water indigo, with the keyblock supplying clean structural outlines rather than tonal modeling — a treatment that owes more to his yōga design sensibility than to the atmospheric bokashi gradients favored by shin-hanga landscape printmakers such as Hasui or Yoshida. The print extends the Edo meisho-e tradition, in which Hiroshige and others had recorded Edo Castle's outer precincts, into a Shōwa civic register, presenting Nijūbashi as a national symbol rendered in the same graphic vocabulary Wada applied to working figures.