Harvesting

Harvesting subjects in shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga prints typically depict rice cultivation, the central agricultural activity of rural Japan. Kasamatsu's composition would set figures—commonly women in indigo work clothes and straw hats—within paddy fields cut to stubble, with bundled sheaves drying on horizontal racks called hazakake. The tonal register draws on muted earth tones, the warm yellow of straw against blue-green distance, with bokashi gradations softening sky and ridgeline. Though Kasamatsu trained in Kaburagi Kiyokata's bijin-ga studio, he turned early toward landscape and the figured genre scene. Genre prints of this kind situate his work within a broader interwar interest in rural lifeways, shared with photographers and folklorists of the period. The mokuhanga process—multiple key and color blocks struck in sequence on washi paper—suits the atmospheric stillness of the harvest field, where labor is registered through arrangement of objects rather than narrative incident.