Stonemasons

Stonemasons belongs to Wada's Showa Shokugyo Emaki (Occupations of Showa Japan), produced in the 1930s and 1940s as a documentary record of Japanese trades. The print likely shows one or two figures squatting or standing at work with chisel and mallet, dressing a block of granite or shaping a stone lantern, with rough-hewn surfaces conveyed through careful keyblock cutting and minimal color overprinting. Wada's compositional convention in this series places the worker at center and reduces the surrounding environment to flat planes, allowing tools and posture to define the trade. The mokuhanga technique likely uses earthen palettes — sandstone greys, ochre browns, and the dark indigo of work jackets — with the textured surface of the stone itself serving as a natural site for grain-print effects. Stonemasonry was central to Japanese construction of temples, walls, lanterns, and graves, and Wada's documentation of the trade extends his project of recording the manual occupations that sustained traditional and modern Japanese life alike.