Silkworm Cultivation (Kaiko yashinai gusa)

This 1865 woodblock print (nishiki-e) by Utagawa Fusatane, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (object 494888), is titled Silkworm Cultivation (Kaiko yashinai gusa) and belongs to the Bakumatsu and early Meiji genre of didactic prints documenting the stages of sericulture — the cultivation of silkworms and production of raw silk that had become Japan's principal export industry after the country's forced opening to foreign trade in 1859. Sericulture prints typically illustrated the complete process from egg-hatching through the feeding of larvae on mulberry leaves, the spinning of cocoons, the boiling and unwinding of the silk filaments, and the spinning of thread, all conducted in the standard Japanese rural household format. The genre served partly as practical illustration for sericulture manuals and partly as celebration of the industry that was rapidly enriching Japan's silk-producing provinces (Gunma, Fukushima, and Nagano in particular) through exports to the European luxury market, especially during and after the 1860s disruption of French silk production by the silkworm disease pébrine. Fusatane's print shows the labour of silkworm cultivation conducted by women, the customary workforce of the industry, and is one of his most direct documentary statements on the economic transformation of late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan. It is preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of Japanese prints.