The Tea Plantation of Katakura in Suruga Province (Sunshu Katakura chaen no Fuji), from the series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)"

This ôban nishiki-e from Katsushika Hokusai's series Fugaku sanjûrokkei (Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published c. 1830–1832 by Nishimuraya Yohachi) depicts tea cultivation at Katakura village in Suruga Province, now Shizuoka Prefecture. Mount Fuji dominates the upper portion of the composition, its cone rendered in Hokusai's characteristic silhouette style, while the foreground shows cultivated tea bushes in diagonal rows with workers engaged in harvesting. Suruga Province was one of Japan's principal tea-producing regions, and this print stands among the series' most explicit depictions of agricultural labor framed against the mountain. The sky employs Prussian blue (bero-ai), a synthetic pigment introduced to Japan in the 1820s that enabled the deep, stable blue tones found throughout the series. The diagonal rows of tea plants establish perspectival depth while keeping Fuji as the organizing form above. The human scale of the workers against both the agricultural terrain and the distant mountain creates the characteristic spatial compression that distinguishes Hokusai's treatment of Fuji from prior landscape conventions.