Shoemakers And shoecleaners

This double-figure composition from Wada Sanzo's Showa Shokugyo Emaki pairs two related but distinct trades — the shoemaker (kutsu-shokunin) at his last and the shoecleaner (kutsu-migaki) at his low box — within a single occupational tableau. The grouping reflects Wada's documentary instinct to map the urban economy by adjacency: the artisan who produces footwear set beside the street worker who maintains it. Compositionally, prints in this series tend to balance figures across a horizontal field, with tools, leather scraps, and brushes acting as connective still-life passages. The mokuhanga treatment relies on key-block outlines and a restrained palette — earthy browns for leather, the muted indigo of work clothing, accents of vermillion — printed without heavy [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation, in keeping with Wada's preference for graphic clarity over atmospheric softness. The work belongs to his sustained late-career project of cataloguing Showa-era occupations as Japan transitioned from artisanal production to mass industry, preserving in print what was already vanishing.