It is Good to Harden the Teeth

A woman uses a knife to cut dried rice cakes, with New Year decorations behind her. At the beginning of the new year, eating hard things like dried rice cakes was something with which one would make the teeth harder and thus also prolong life. With two poems. The prints from this series relate to the belief that the first activities of the new year were particularly special. The red cartouche on the prints refers to almanacs indicating which activities could or should not be undertaken on certain days by people born in a specific year.