Small Bird shop

This print belongs to Wada Sanzo's celebrated postwar series Showa Shokugyo Emaki (Occupations of Showa Japan), a sustained documentary project cataloguing the trades of mid-twentieth century Tokyo. The composition depicts a small bird shop, a traditional urban storefront where caged songbirds — uguisu, mejiro, and finches — were sold to hobbyists who prized morning birdsong. Wada typically frames such genre subjects with a flat, decorative treatment derived from his yoga training under Kuroda Seiki, but rendered through the line-and-flat-color logic of mokuhanga. Stacked rectangular cages, the shopkeeper's apron, and the patterned awnings are reduced to clean color planes printed from carefully cut blocks. The Birds & Flowers tag situates the work loosely within kacho-e tradition, but Wada inverts the convention: the birds are not romanticized in nature but commodified within the daily commerce of the city. The print sits squarely within his broader documentary mission to dignify the small trades that defined urban Japan as it rebuilt after the war.