Wakoku Shoshoku Ezukushi

Wakoku shoshoku ezukushi—Pictures of All the Trades of Japan—is an illustrated book by Hishikawa Moronobu held at the Art Institute of Chicago. The volume catalogues the working occupations of late seventeenth-century Edo and provincial Japan: carpenters, sword-polishers, ink-makers, weavers, fishermen, charcoal burners, sake brewers, sandal makers, tofu sellers, and dozens of other trades each appear in a dedicated picture with a short identifying label. Moronobu, the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) founder, treats the project as a visual encyclopedia, and in doing so he produces one of the earliest sustained depictions of ordinary working life in printed Japanese imagery. Each scene is built around the tools and gestures specific to the trade. A swordsmith stands at the anvil with hammer raised, an apprentice working the bellows behind him; a paper-maker leans over the suketa frame; a fisherman draws his net up the side of a small boat. Moronobu makes the technical details legible without sacrificing the breezy linear style that defines his work. The result is a book that functioned simultaneously as reference, social document, and entertainment—an early example of how early Edo ukiyo-e began to picture the city's economic life as well as its pleasures. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the volume as part of its early ehon holdings. Wakoku shoshoku ezukushi remains a touchstone for understanding how Hishikawa Moronobu pushed printed imagery beyond classical and theatrical subjects into the daily working world of his contemporaries.