Gathering seaweed on the shoal

A figural seascape showing workers harvesting seaweed from a shoal at low tide — a subject that returns Ono to the labor themes that had animated his prewar practice, now relocated from urban factories to the coastal economy. The composition likely places small bent figures across a broad tidal flat, exploiting the same horizontal armature Ono used in his pure seascapes but now populating it with human activity. Mokuhanga technique suits this subject well: figures can be carved as compact dark masses that read clearly against the wet sand and water, while bokashi handles the soft transitions of a damp shoreline under overcast light. The print connects to a long lineage of meisho-e and labor imagery in Japanese printmaking but is treated in the reduced, planar idiom of postwar sosaku-hanga rather than the descriptive detail of the earlier ukiyo-e tradition. For Ono, who had produced stark images of urban workers in the 1930s under the influence of leftist social realism, coastal labor offered a way to continue picturing working life through a quieter, less polemical register.