thumb|upright=1.25|A Japanese family collaborating in producing Ōtsu-e Ōtsu-e (, "pictures from Ōtsu") was a folk art that began in 17th century Japan and depended on the busy road traffic of the trade route through the district where it was produced in Ōtsu, near Kyoto. With the coming of railways, especially of the Tōkaidō line in the late 19th century, it largely disappeared.
thumb|upright=1.25|A Japanese family collaborating in producing Ōtsu-e Ōtsu-e (, "pictures from Ōtsu") was a folk art that began in 17th century Japan and depended on the busy road traffic of the trade route through the district where it was produced in Ōtsu, near Kyoto. With the coming of railways, especially of the Tōkaidō line in the late 19th century, it largely disappeared.
== Context == In the early 17th century, Ōtsu, a port on Lake Biwa just east of the imperial capital of Kyoto, lay at a famous cross-roads for trading routes and particularly the important highway to the administrative capital of Edo, where the newly-installed government of the Tokugawa resided. Here and in the villages near it, there developed a tradition of rudimentary folk art that catered to passers-by. It was quickly and cheaply produced, often with whole families collaborating on the work of producing the pictures. Religious and popular themes were originally brushed onto a light clay wash over rough, brownish paper. The pictures were then displayed for sale on roadside stalls and were intended to be attached to doorways or pasted on pillars and sliding doors in the home. Among the techniques used to speed their production was the use of compasses to produce haloes on holy figures and a woodblock to provide the rough outline of a head that was then painted over.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).