Gathering Tea Leaves at Uji

Gathering Tea Leaves at Uji is one of two Hamada Josen designs catalogued under his alternate reading Hamada Nyosen, prepared as an illustration for the long-running illustrated magazine Fuzoku Gaho (Customs Illustrated, 風俗画報), the Tokyo monthly published from 1889 to 1916 that documented the manners, customs, and visible texture of Meiji-Taisho urban and rural life. The composition shows tea farmers in the historic tea-producing region of Uji, south of Kyoto, harvesting the first picking of new tea leaves in spring — a subject classically titled Uji no haru, the spring of Uji. The Japanese title appears alongside the image and identifies the scene precisely. Josen positions the workers across a sloping hillside of tea bushes rendered in a soft graduated green, with the dark roof line of a tea processing building anchoring the lower left and a distant view of the Uji River and mountains beyond fading into a delicate atmospheric perspective. Fuzoku Gaho commissioned designs from a wide range of late-ukiyo-e and Meiji print artists, and Josen's contributions fit naturally within the magazine's broader project of representing Japanese local life through hand-printed illustration. The print is documented through the Japanese Art Open Database from the Ohmi Gallery research files, where the image is preserved at high resolution and identifies the artist as Hamada Nyosen. Comparable Fuzoku Gaho contributions by Josen appear scattered through volumes of the magazine across the 1900s.