Actual Sketch of A Good Catch in Drag-Net Fishing at Kujukuri Beach in Kazusa Province — 上総九十九里地引網大漁猟正写之図

Actual Sketch of A Good Catch in Drag-Net Fishing at Kujukuri Beach in Kazusa Province carries a title that announces its claim to documentary observation, a deliberate gesture by Takahashi Shotei toward the Meiji-era taste for 'true views.' The print is preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database compilation of museum and dealer images, and its busy panorama of fishermen hauling a long seine net at Kujukuri, the immense sandy coast of Kazusa now Chiba Prefecture, draws on first-hand reporting rather than purely literary precedent. The composition follows a long horizontal sweep typical of fishery scenes, multiplying small figures against the band of surf so that the cooperative labor of net-hauling becomes the subject in its own right. Shotei, who signed many sheets as Hiroaki, was firmly embedded in the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) ecosystem under the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, and even when working at sizes larger than the standard [chuban](/glossary/chuban) landscape he carried the movement's atmospheric sensibility into his designs, building dunes and surf out of carefully wiped [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi). The 'actual sketch' rhetoric of the title also locates the print near the older meisho-zue and shinkei tradition that Meiji publishers updated for new audiences hungry for accurate scenes of regional industry. Kujukuri itself was famous for the iwashi sardine catches that fed both Edo and the wider Pacific coast economy, and Shotei's choice of subject reflects the shin-hanga revival's interest in everyday provincial labor as well as in landscape proper. As an impression collated through the Japanese Art Open Database, the work helps fill out a side of Shotei's output less often shown alongside his lyrical Tokyo and Fuji scenes.