Baseball

Baseball depicts the American sport that arrived in Japan in the 1870s and grew into a national pastime by the Showa era. Wada renders the players and the geometry of the diamond with the flat colour areas and crisp keyline contours characteristic of his postwar woodblock production, figures arranged for clear silhouette reading rather than illusionistic depth. Uniforms, glove, and bat are picked out in a controlled palette typical of the carved key block and limited colour blocks issued through the Adachi workshop. The print belongs to Wada's extended series documenting Japanese occupations and contemporary life, the body of work often known as Showa Shokugyo Emaki. Where earlier sheets in the series recorded older trades such as charcoal-makers, lantern-makers, and rickshaw pullers, the baseball compositions register the mid-century shift toward Western leisure and a new consumer culture, treating organised sport with the same observational seriousness Wada brought to traditional crafts.