Cooking Stove, from the Winter Print Collection (Fuyu no Hangashū)

This 1939 colour woodblock print depicts the kamado — the traditional wood-fired Japanese cooking stove built into the kitchen of the rural Akita farmhouse — and is one of the five sheets of Katsuhira Tokushi's Fuyu no hangashū ("Winter Print Collection") of 1939. The composition treats the kamado as both a piece of vernacular architecture and as the focus of the household cooking ritual, with the great cast-iron pot of winter stew on its bed of glowing charcoal. Produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement, the print belongs to one of Katsuhira's most cohesive published cycles and exemplifies the artist's documentary attention to the cooking and heating customs of pre-war Akita. The kamado, once central to the rural Japanese kitchen, had largely disappeared from Akita farmhouses by the late twentieth century, giving the print additional historical value as a record of a vanished vernacular tradition.