Edo period (17th century)

The lid is decorated with three small playing cards of a type introduced to Japan by Portuguese traders in the second half of the sixteenth century. The first indigenous Japanese deck of cards appeared in the Tensho era (1573–92). The Tensho card game consisted of 48 cards in four colors, some with imagery (two crossed spears, for example) representing numbers. The dragon motif here, a feature of the original Iberian set, must have been particularly popular in Japan. European-style playing cards, known as unsun karuta, a subset or derivative of karuta (cards) appear on an Edo-period box for poem slips in the Suntory Museum, Tokyo, and on a four-tier food box with striped decoration, formerly in the collection of the Nihonga painter Maeda Seison (see lot 306 in this catalogue), sold at Christie’s, London, 5 December 2017.
The interior of the writing box is decorated with a highly detailed and realistic scene of transplanting of rice seedlings in a paddy field in late spring—a tedious and time-consuming process. Laborers typically suffer from back problems. Their sleeves are tied up to keep them from getting wet when they reach down into the flooded rice paddy. Some wear straw capes for warmth. Food is being delivered and some take time out to eat and drink. A mother with a baby strapped to her back reaches for some round rice dumplings. The moon has just come into view behind the clouds, distracting a number of workers who pause to point toward the golden disc.