Market in the Snowy Country

This colour woodblock print depicts a snow-country (Yukiguni, 雪國) market — a winter market held in the heart of the Akita snow season, when the towns of the Sea of Japan coast are sometimes buried under several feet of snow and market life continues in narrow trenches cut between the snow banks. The composition exploits the great visual contrast between the dark figures and goods of the market and the surrounding whiteness of the deep snow, treating the scene as a study in winter colour and human resilience. Katsuhira Tokushi's snow prints constitute one of the most extensive bodies of winter imagery in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, and his snow-market subjects in particular are among the most evocative records of how commercial and social life continued through the great Tōhoku winters of the early Shōwa era. The print was produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement.