Flag Merchants

Drawn from the Showa Shokugyo Emaki, this print depicts a vendor of flags — the small printed banners and paper streamers sold for festival days, school events, and national holidays in mid-century Japan. The composition typically arranges the merchant amid a dense vertical thicket of flagpoles, each pennant providing the colourist with an opportunity for a discrete printed shape. Wada Sanzo exploits the graphic possibilities of the subject: each flag is registered from its own carved block, set against the muted ground of the stall and the worker, so that the upper register of the design becomes a near-abstract grid of pattern and colour. The figure of the vendor, drawn with the same restrained line as Wada's other tradesmen, anchors the composition at street level. Within the wider series the design connects to a strand of prints concerned with itinerant and seasonal commerce — kite sellers, paper-lantern makers, festival-goods vendors — and underlines Wada's interest in occupations that punctuate the calendar rather than fill the working day.