Mount Fuji from the Tea Plantation of Katakura in Suruga Province (Sunshū Katakura-chaen no Fuji)

From the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji of around 1830, this Katsushika Hokusai print depicts Mount Fuji as seen from the tea plantations of Katakura in Suruga Province, where rows of tea bushes carpet the foreground hills and workers move among the plants in the calm rhythm of the seasonal harvest. The composition uses the patterned regularity of the cultivated tea fields to lead the eye toward Fuji, which rises in the middle distance with its summit dusted in snow. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the sheet is one of the most explicitly agricultural images in the Fuji series, celebrating the tea industry that provided both daily refreshment and cultural identity for Edo-period Japan. Suruga Province (today's Shizuoka Prefecture) was already established by Hokusai's time as one of the country's premier tea-producing regions, and the print documents the labor that supported that economic specialization. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an impression of the print within its Hokusai collection. The composition demonstrates Hokusai's mastery of pattern: the curved rows of tea bushes function like contour lines on a topographic map, simultaneously suggesting the rolling form of the land and creating a strong decorative rhythm across the picture plane. The workers themselves are rendered with quick economy, their bent postures suggesting the picking gesture without belaboring it. The use of Berlin blue in Fuji's silhouette gives the mountain the same crisp visual weight as the carefully cultivated foreground, a subtle equation of natural and cultivated landscapes that runs throughout the Fuji series. The print continues to reward attention for the precision of its observation and for the way it integrates economic geography into Hokusai's larger vision of the country.