Boy's Day

Boy's Day is a contemporary Japanese woodblock print by Takahashi Hiromitsu, dated 2017 and produced in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) manner that defines the artist's career. Born in Tokyo in 1959, Takahashi has built a sustained reputation on a figurative woodblock practice that combines firm contour, broad saturated color, and a deep engagement with Japanese seasonal observances and folkloric subjects. The title Boy's Day refers to Tango no Sekku, the traditional Japanese festival held on the fifth day of the fifth month, originally a samurai-era event for celebrating sons and now folded into the national holiday Children's Day. The festival is marked by the display of carp streamers, koinobori, by the construction of samurai helmets, kabuto, by armor figurines, by the eating of kashiwa-mochi, and by family rituals intended to wish boys strength and well-being. A print bearing this title is therefore likely to organize its composition around one or more of these traditional emblems: the flying carp streamers against a clear sky, the figure of a boy with a kabuto, or a domestic still life of festival foods and ornaments. Takahashi's sosaku-hanga ethos governs the production, with self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed blocks generating the print's material identity. Within his recent output the print belongs to a body of work organized around the annual Japanese festival cycle and other seasonal vocabularies. The work is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hiromitsu-takahashi-boys-day), which preserves a record of the design under the artist's name.