“Spring breeze in rice field”

A seasonal landscape showing a flooded or newly planted rice paddy under spring conditions, almost certainly depicted at a low horizon with the water surface dominating the lower register and a band of distant trees, hills, or farmhouses behind. Mibugawa frequently treats rice fields as mirrors, exploiting the reflective surface to double the sky and increase the role of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations — pale blues and greens pulled across the paddy with the [baren](/glossary/baren). The 'breeze' of the title would be implied rather than drawn, perhaps through faintly disturbed rows of young rice or a tilt in adjacent foliage. The print is mokuhanga on [washi](/glossary/washi), in the soft pastel register that distinguishes his editions from the saturated palette of classical [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga). Rural Japan, particularly the agricultural landscapes of Kyushu where Mibugawa was raised, recurs throughout his output and links his work to the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) and rural-scene strands of the early-twentieth-century shin-hanga movement that Unsōdō helped sustain.