Toys

Toys draws on the mingei-adjacent interest in folk craft objects that ran through the sosaku hanga movement, connecting Kanamori's generation to artists like Munakata Shiko who celebrated vernacular Japanese material culture. Traditional Japanese toys—spinning tops, daruma, kokeshi dolls, papier-mâché animals—carry strong regional identities and offered printmakers bold shapes with saturated colors suited to the woodblock medium. Kanamori, raised in Toyama Prefecture, may have drawn on that region's distinctive folk toy traditions. The sosaku hanga approach transforms the documentary impulse into personal expression: objects are arranged as a still-life composition, their solid forms and decorative painted surfaces rendered through flat color separations and deliberate key-block outlines. The result situates ordinary objects within a framework of artistic attention that echoes the mingei philosophy of finding beauty in everyday, handmade things.