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What are they doing on this print from Hokusai from the 100 Fashionable Comic Verses series ?

That's an abacus between them. This looks to me like a negotiation. The person on the left has just made some kind of an offer, and used the abacus calculator to justify that offer. The offer is being laughed off by the person on the right. I think it's early in the negotiation. Eventually, they'll come to terms somewhere in the middle.

Hokusai was an acute observer of human behavior, and a skillful renderer of caricatures. Nice print!

My assumptions about the situation,
Version 1,
Discussion over interest between lender (left) and borrower (right) using an abacus.
Vesrsion 2,
The price of something is being negotiated. The seller (right) shows the intended selling price and the buyer (left) shows the intemded buying price on the abacus in turn. A traditional way of bargaining in Japan.
etc.

With regards,
I.Nagy

Thank you for the information

My opinion: Since I see no item to be negotiated, I think another option would be teacher and student. I can remember looks like that in school, especially if students made fun of the teacher.

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