Nihon Minzoku Zufu (Picture notes on native customs of Japan)

Nihon Minzoku Zufu (Picture notes on native customs of Japan) is a Japanese woodblock print by Gen Yamaguchi, a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artist whose work bridged the documentary impulse of mid-twentieth-century Japanese printmaking with the modernist abstraction that increasingly defined the movement after the Second World War. The title translates roughly as 'illustrated record of Japanese folk customs,' and the project places Yamaguchi within a broader postwar interest in preserving the textures of everyday rural and provincial life at a moment when rapid industrialization was visibly eroding them. Where Meiji-era [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) had largely treated such subjects with nostalgic sentimentality, Yamaguchi approaches them through the sosaku-hanga ('creative print') ethic in which a single artist designs, carves, and prints the block as an act of personal expression rather than commercial collaboration. The image circulates through ukiyo-e.org, the long-running aggregator that draws on dealer and museum catalogues, and is held in the trade through The Art of Japan, a long-established American dealer in Japanese woodblock prints. Yamaguchi (1896-1976) studied under Un'ichi Hiratsuka, one of the central figures of the sosaku-hanga movement, and absorbed from his teacher both a respect for the carved line and a willingness to push the medium toward graphic abstraction. That dual inheritance is the lens through which any of his folk-customs prints should be read: a Japanese woodblock that records observed life while quietly translating it into the flat shapes, deliberate carving marks, and restrained palette of mid-century sosaku-hanga, rather than into the layered illusionism of older ukiyo-e traditions. Specific iconographic details, scale, and production information for this individual sheet are not available in the cited source.