Keirin bicycle race

This print belongs to Wada Sanzo's Showa Shokugyo Emaki (Picture Scroll of Showa Occupations), a sustained documentary project recording the working life of postwar Japan. Keirin, the velodrome cycling sport legalized in 1948 as a means of municipal fundraising, quickly became a fixture of Showa popular culture, and Wada turns his attention here to the racers themselves rather than the gambling crowd. The composition typically isolates cyclists in their racing posture — bent low over the handlebars, helmeted, clad in the numbered jerseys that distinguish each rider. Flat planes of color and confident outline drawing, carved by trained block cutters and printed with the [baren](/glossary/baren) on [washi](/glossary/washi), give the figures a graphic clarity inherited from [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) practice while retaining the legibility Wada favored. The print extends his long-running interest, visible across his oil paintings and woodblock work alike, in the dignity of ordinary modern labor — placing the professional cyclist alongside the carpenter, the fisherman, and the street vendor as a representative figure of mid-century Japan.