Tea plantation of Nishio Town

Nishio in Aichi Prefecture is one of Japan's principal matcha-producing centers, and Kitaoka's print captures the region's terraced tea fields with their distinctive parallel rows of clipped Camellia sinensis bushes. The composition organizes the rolling green expanses into rhythmic linear patterns receding toward distant hills or farm structures. As a sosaku-hanga printmaker, Kitaoka cut and printed his own blocks, allowing him to deploy bokashi gradations to suggest atmospheric depth across the cultivated landscape and tonal variation between sunlit and shaded rows. This subject sits within his broader practice of documenting working Japanese landscapes—rural agriculture, coastal fishing villages, and provincial towns—which he pursued throughout his postwar career alongside more abstract compositions. The image continues the meisho-e tradition of regional place-imagery while shifting it from feudal-era stations and shrines toward the productive countryside of mid-twentieth-century Japan, registering an agricultural craft landscape rather than a touristic or religious site.