Fuchū: Tea Picking, the Famous Abe Tea (Chatsumi, meisan Abe cha), cut from sheet 5 of the series Cutouts for the Fifty-three Stations (Gojūsan tsugi harimaze), also called Cutout Pictures of the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō harimaze zue)

This small Utagawa Hiroshige landscape print was originally part of sheet 5 of the harimaze series Cutouts for the Fifty-three Stations (Gojusan tsugi harimaze), also called Cutout Pictures of the Tokaido Road. The full sheet combined several smaller compositions on a single page, designed so that collectors could either keep them intact or scissor them apart and rearrange them. This vignette depicts Fuchu, the Tokaido station near present-day Shizuoka, with women picking the locally celebrated Abe tea in the surrounding plantations. The Edo ukiyo-e harimaze format demanded that each smaller image be self-contained, with a strong silhouette and clear narrative cue, and Hiroshige answers with figures bent over the bushes, their bright kimono accents standing out against the green hedges. The Abe River valley around Fuchu was one of Japan's most famous tea-growing regions, and tea-picking scenes were closely associated with the station in guidebooks and prints alike. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the saturated greens and the crisp keyblock outlines that the cut-out format required if the small piece was to read clearly once detached from its parent sheet.