Kimura Toshi

[Print] Japanese Soy Sauce Factory

Tokyo, Seikosha Printing, [ca.1896].
Print

[Print] Kimura Toshi. Japanese Sauce Factory monochrome lithograph. Seikosha Printing: Tokyo, [ca.1896]. Single leaf, (220x330mm) verso blank. Near Fine

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TOSHI, Kimura (engraver)

[Print] Japanese Sauce Manufactured by S. Iwasaki City - Fujioka, County - Shimotsuga, Province - Shimotsuke

Tokyo : Seikosha Printing, undated circa 1896. Single leaf, (220x330mm) monochrome steel engraved linear perspective lithographic illustration, verso blank. Small imperceptible pin hole, otherwise near fine.

¶  A crisp and unusually informative late Meiji-period illustration depicting the grain merchant and shoyu brewer Seishichi Iwasaki at Fujioka Village, Tochigi Prefecture, north-west of Tokyo.

Iwasaki was an entrepreneurial grain merchant and brewer who imported soy beans from Hokkaido, both for his own production and for wholesale distribution. The Iwasaki family business remains active as a grain merchant, an example of the uniquely Japanese tradition of continuity of family businesses over many generations.

The carefully rendered scene presents the brewery at centre, with grain storage buildings behind and rows of barrels undergoing maturation in the distant sheds. The composition offers an uncommon visual record of the scale and organisation of a regional Japanese shoyu enterprise during the late nineteenth century.

Uncommon.  An excellent copy

Item #11424

Price: $300.00 AUD