Harvest Scene

This colour woodblock print of the Shōwa period, held by the Harvard Art Museums, depicts a harvest scene in the Akita countryside, with figures at work in the rice fields under a typical autumn sky. The composition belongs to Katsuhira Tokushi's broader project of recording the agricultural cycle of his native Akita Prefecture in colour woodblock prints produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-designed, self-carved, self-printed) procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement. Harvest subjects appear repeatedly in his work as a counter-point to the deep-winter prints of the Fuyu no hangashū and the festival prints of the Kantō and Bonden cycles, completing a documentary atlas of the Akita year. The Harvard impression is held in the Carpenter Collection of Japanese prints, the principal American institutional home of mid-twentieth-century Japanese sōsaku-hanga, and is among the more substantial representations of Katsuhira's harvest imagery outside Japan.