Yamamoto Kanae is credited as the founder of sōsaku hanga as well as the developer of The Farmers' Art Movement and The Children's Free Drawing Movement, all of which have retained lasting legacies up to the present day. However, while some scholarship exists on his work with these individual projects, there is a paucity of research connecting these seemingly disparate, yet deeply entangled, movements. This thesis divides Yamamoto's career into three periods, looking at how his experience in Moscow particularly informed his ideological approach to art. By examining Yamamoto's life and work within the context of his contemporaries and concurrent political and cultural events, this thesis seeks not only to provide a comprehensive English-language monograph of the artist's activities, but also to use this analysis as a case study to discuss broader issues concerning local-translocal relationships in rural art and negotiating urban-rural binary frameworks that persist in contemporary arts discourse.