Sweet Cakes Wrapped in Bamboo Leaves (Sasamaki), from the series 'Ten Customs of Akita (Akita fuzoku judai)'

This 1942 colour woodblock print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts sasamaki — sweet glutinous-rice cakes wrapped in bamboo leaves, a seasonal food of the early-summer Tango no Sekku festival in the Akita countryside — and is part of Katsuhira Tokushi's series Akita fūzoku jūdai ("Ten Customs of Akita"), produced through the late 1930s and early 1940s. The composition treats the bound bundles of bamboo-leaf-wrapped cakes as both a culinary subject and a visual one, exploiting the geometry of the wrapping and the soft greens of the bamboo against the warm tones of the rice within. The series followed the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-designed, self-carved, self-printed) procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement and aimed to record the seasonal customs of Akita Prefecture as a regional cycle in the manner of the older Edo "customs of" series. Within Katsuhira's work the print stands as an example of his interest in the foodways and material culture of rural Akita rather than its landscape or festival subjects — a documentary attention that aligns his sōsaku-hanga practice with the parallel mingei (folk craft) movement of the same years.