Harvesting

A genre scene depicting rural laborers, likely at the autumn rice harvest, when fields turn gold and figures bend to the work of cutting, bundling, and stacking sheaves. Kasamatsu's harvest subjects participate in the shin-hanga interest in a rural Japan being reshaped by industrialization, a thematic territory shared with Yoshida Hiroshi and Kawase Hasui. The composition typically places small figures within an expansive landscape — a meisho-e structure adapted to anonymous countryside rather than to named locations. Bokashi gradation in the sky and middle distance softens the transition between cut stubble and standing crop, and the printer's restraint with color keeps the figures legible without dramatizing them. The print reflects Kasamatsu's preference for atmosphere and quiet incident over narrative drama, distinguishing his treatment from the more documentary harvest scenes produced by sosaku-hanga artists carving and printing their own blocks during the same decades.