Lantern Pole (Sao-Toh)

This 1938 colour woodblock print is among Katsuhira Tokushi's most reproduced and celebrated images, depicting the Sao-Tō (lantern pole) of Akita city's Kantō Matsuri — the great August festival in which long bamboo poles, hung with up to forty-six paper lanterns each, are balanced on the foreheads, shoulders, and hips of festival participants in a coordinated display down the city's main streets. The composition isolates the dark night against the warm yellow glow of the rice-paper lanterns ascending the pole, and treats the festival figure beneath as a small dark silhouette in counterpoint to the great vertical of the festival apparatus. Produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement, the Sao-Tō print is among the most often anthologised examples of regional festival imagery in mid-twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, and it documents the Kantō Matsuri in its pre-war form — a festival historically celebrated as a petition for an abundant rice harvest and continued today as one of the principal summer festivals of Tōhoku.