Untitled (hiyoshi-mamoru)

A twentieth untitled print by Hiyoshi Mamoru. His compositions depicting traditional Japanese craft practices — the straw sandal maker, the fishing basket, the cormorant fishing — form a documentary record of occupational knowledge being displaced by industrialization. The woodblock print's own status as a traditional craft was itself under pressure from photomechanical reproduction during this period, giving these prints a reflexive quality: traditional craft documenting the disappearance of traditional crafts through a medium that was itself facing similar pressures.