Plate 6 (Examining the Newly Spun Cocoons), from the series "Kaiko Yashinai-gusa"

Plate 6 from Katsukawa Shunsho's series Kaiko Yashinai-gusa, Silkworm Cultivation, depicts women examining the newly spun cocoons, one of the central stages of sericulture. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to the late 1760s, the print belongs to Shunsho's notable departure from the yakusha-e that ordinarily preoccupied the Katsukawa school. The series documents the sequence of silk production from the rearing of silkworms through the reeling of thread to the weaving of cloth, a subject with deep iconographic roots in Chinese painting transmitted to Japan through Tang and Song models. Shunsho's Edo ukiyo-e treatment domesticates that long tradition by setting the work in a contemporary Japanese house and dressing the women in eighteenth-century kimono. The Examining the Newly Spun Cocoons plate captures the moment in the cycle when the cocoons, having been spun by the silkworms over several days of intensive feeding, are sorted and inspected by experienced hands. The technical accuracy of the implements and the attentive depiction of the women's labor argue for direct observation, and the series stands as a Katsukawa school document of female productive work in the silk economy. Sericulture as subject matter would be revisited by later Edo ukiyo-e designers, but Shunsho's Kaiko Yashinai-gusa is among the most thoughtful early treatments and a useful corrective to the assumption that the Katsukawa school confined itself to theatrical print production.