Seller of Bonden

This colour woodblock print of the Shōwa period, held by the Harvard Art Museums, depicts a seller of bonden — the brightly decorated rice-straw and paper offerings carried during the Akita Bonden Matsuri held at the Miyoshi Shrine each New Year as petitions for an abundant harvest. The composition shows a bonden vendor at his stall with the tall, lantern-like festival offerings rising behind him, recording one of the most distinctive festival objects of the Akita ritual year. Katsuhira Tokushi devoted a significant part of his career to documenting the seasonal festivals of his native city in colour woodblock prints produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-designed, self-carved, self-printed) procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement, and his bonden subjects are among the most ethnographically important images in his output. The Harvard impression is held in the Carpenter Collection of Japanese prints and is one of the most accessible American documents of the Akita festival cycle as it existed in the mid-twentieth century.