Rice-planting in early summer

Taue, the planting of rice seedlings into flooded paddies, takes place in late May and June and is among the canonical subjects of the Japanese seasonal calendar. A print of this subject would typically place rows of stooped figures in the foreground paddies, with banked earth and distant hills receding into the upper register. The flooded fields offer a natural opportunity for bokashi gradations: the silvery sheen of standing water, the soft greens of the seedlings, and the hazy summer atmosphere of the background slopes. While Kotozuka's catalog is anchored in temple and garden subjects of Kyoto, rural genre scenes of this kind situate his work within the wider shin-hanga interest in the Japanese countryside, paralleling the rural images of Kawase Hasui and other landscape printmakers who treated agricultural labor as part of the seasonal landscape rather than as straightforward genre.