are a genre of Japanese woodblock print, which appear on rigid, paddle-shaped hand fans known as . Ovoid images matching the outline of were printed on rectangular sheets of rice paper, then cut along the margins and pasted onto a skeletal bamboo frame. thumb|Late Edo period print of dancers
are a genre of Japanese woodblock print, which appear on rigid, paddle-shaped hand fans known as . Ovoid images matching the outline of were printed on rectangular sheets of rice paper, then cut along the margins and pasted onto a skeletal bamboo frame. thumb|Late Edo period print of dancers
== characteristics== Unlike folding hand fans, which originated in Japan in the 6th or 7th century, non-folding flat, oval or "bean-shaped" were a Chinese import. In terms of popular usage, had a close connection with Edo urban culture which gained momentum during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Folding fans, known as , or , remained the dominant accessory within the realm of the sophisticated court culture prevailing in Kyoto at the time. thumb|The actor Ichikawa Ebijuro I by Toyokuni I Historically, were an ostensibly feminine accessory, with men more typically carrying folding fans. They were simultaneously fashion accessories and functional items for daily use. They are strongly associated with summer, having been sold only during the summer months, and often decorated with summer imagery. At least one critic argues that, due to their use by women during periods of intense heat, "can have suggestive connotations."
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).