Katsuhira Tokushi

Katsuhira Tokushi (勝平得之, 1904–1971) was a Japanese sōsaku-hanga printmaker whose entire artistic life was bound to a single place — Akita Prefecture, on the snow-coast of northern Honshū — and whose work constitutes one of the most sustained regional documentary projects in modern Japanese printmaking. While the better-known sōsaku-hanga masters of his generation gravitated to Tokyo or Kyoto, joined the great print associations there, and developed careers that ranged across subject and style, Katsuhira chose instead to remain in his native Akita city and to spend four decades carving and printing scenes of the agricultural and festival life of the Akita countryside. The result is a body of work — between roughly 1928 and the late 1960s — that has become, for both art historians and Japanese folklore scholars, an indispensable visual record of pre-modern rural life on the cusp of its postwar disappearance.

He was born Katsuhira Tokushi in 1904 in Akita city, the third son of a sake brewer, and educated locally. He came to woodblock printing entirely on his own initiative, without the formal apprenticeship or art-school training that supported most printmakers of his generation. From around the early 1920s he taught himself the techniques of carving and printing from books and from such examples of the new sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement as he could obtain in Akita, and by 1928 he had developed his own characteristic method of self-designed, self-carved, and self-printed colour woodblock work in the jiga-jikoku-jizuri tradition that the sōsaku-hanga movement had codified since its founding by Yamamoto Kanae, Onchi Kōshirō, and others in 1918. Unlike Onchi or Hiratsuka Un'ichi, whose lineage ran back through Yamamoto and the literary print magazine Hōsun, Katsuhira's craft was essentially an autodidact's reinvention, and the slightly archaic precision of his line — closer to early shin-hanga than to the avant-garde of the Onchi circle — is one of its distinguishing characteristics.

His subject was Akita: its rice paddies and irori-warmed farmhouses, its kamakura snow-huts and bonden festival poles, its Sanjō and Kantō festival nights when twenty-foot bamboo poles hung with rice-paper lanterns are balanced on the foreheads and hips of young men in long lines down the city's main streets. The Kantō Matsuri of Akita, a Tanabata-related festival held each August to pray for an abundant harvest, became a recurring subject of his prints from the late 1930s onward, and his image of the Sao-Tō (lantern pole) of 1938 — included in many anthologies of the sōsaku-hanga movement — remains the single most reproduced rendering of that festival in the print medium. The bonden, the brightly decorated rice-straw and paper ritual offerings carried in the New Year's Bonden Matsuri at the Miyoshi Shrine, are the subject of another important early print. Together with his recurrent depictions of the irori (the sunken-hearth around which rural families gathered through the long Akita winter), of village markets in the snow, and of the seasonal foodways of the Akita countryside, these works compose a remarkably complete ethnographic atlas of regional life as Katsuhira knew it from his own walks through the city and surrounding villages.