Deeply marked by his experiences as a kamikaze pilot during the war, in 1964, Yoshida escaped from Japan and moved to Paris. Joining Stanley Hayter’s legendary Atelier 17, Yoshida found a place to interact with other artists, and quickly absorbed Hayter’s experimental approach to the discipline of printing. In some of Hayter’s prints, (e.g. Oedipus, 1934) his own hand-print can be found. In About Prints (pub. 1962) Hayter remarks, ‘the first print observed by man was his own footprint or hand print’ remarking that, to early man, these must have seemed like magical expressions of identity and imply an awareness of his individual place within the surrounding world. By including his own hand-print here, Yoshida not only suggests similar existential ramifications, but broadens them to include oriental overtones. The use of bright vermilion (the cinnabar of Chinese antiquity) was the colour officially required for making ‘seals’ representing one’s personal signature on formal documents. In the early Buddhist world, ‘hand-prints’ were often found engraved in stone on what were termed ‘oath pillars’. These stone monuments recorded the signing of an agreement between two powerful rulers or Buddhist sages. The three-dimensional stone ‘hand-prints,’ often later inscribed in gold, were revered as sacred relics that supposedly recorded the imprints left in the stone by mystical Buddhist beings. Thus, the fluid, central sky-blue figure represents the hand (or seal) of God, and commemorates the compact whereby God gave Mankind the Gift of Life.