Anjo Tanabata festival

Anjo, a city in Aichi Prefecture, has held one of Japan's three major Tanabata festivals each August since 1954, drawing visitors with elaborate fukinagashi streamers of colored paper and bamboo erected along the streets near the train station. The festival commemorates the legend of Orihime and Hikoboshi, two stars permitted to meet across the Milky Way once a year. Kitaoka's print treats the contemporary festival as a subject of vernacular Japanese life, in line with his interest in documenting postwar communal events. The dense vertical streamers, the crowds passing beneath them, and the lanterns lit at dusk offer the printmaker a composition built from massed color and rhythmic repetition — qualities mokuhanga renders through stacked impressions of flat color blocks registered against firm carved outlines. The print extends his catalogue of Aichi subjects, which also includes the Korankei autumn scene, and reflects the wider [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) interest in matsuri imagery as a continuing thread in modern Japanese print culture.