Raising Silk Worms for a Thousand Ages of Prosperity (Chiyo no sakae kaiko no yashinai)

A color ōban woodblock triptych of 1877 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this Raising Silk Worms for a Thousand Ages of Prosperity (Chiyo no sakae kaiko no yashinai) belongs to Kuniaki II's body of Meiji-era sericulture prints — a small genre celebrating the industrial silk production that became one of the foundations of Meiji-era export earnings. The title phrase chiyo no sakae ("a thousand ages of prosperity") invokes the auspicious congratulatory vocabulary of the imperial Meiji state, casting the silkworm cultivation depicted in the composition as a national contribution to the prosperity of the new regime. The triptych likely pictures women workers tending silkworm trays during the spring rearing season, an activity that combined household-scale traditional practice with the rapidly industrializing factory production that absorbed much of rural Japan's female workforce during the 1870s and 1880s. The 1877 dating places the print in the same productive year as Kuniaki II's silk-reeling-machine triptych for the National Industrial Exposition, and the two prints together constitute a small portfolio of sericulture documentation aimed at the Meiji popular market.