A Salt Terrace

This print is depicted by Utagawa Hiroshige, an ukiyo-e artist known for "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road". The ukiyo-e like this is called uchiwa-e (fan print), because it was used to decorate a Japanese fan (uchiwa). People in the Edo period enjoyed uchiwa-e by cutting it along the margin of the fan and pasted it onto a bamboo frame. The women depicted are working in a salt terrace. Since no salt mines nor salt lakes exist in Japan, people in those days made salt concentrating the seawater at such a salt terrace and then boiling down the concentrated saltwater in a iron pan.