Hearth (Irori), from the series 'Ten Customs of Akita (Akita fuzoku judai)'

This 1939 colour woodblock print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts the irori — the sunken hearth around which the rural family of northern Japan gathered through the long winters of the Tōhoku region — and constitutes the opening sheet of Katsuhira Tokushi's ten-print series Akita fūzoku jūdai ("Ten Customs of Akita"). The composition centres the iron pot suspended over the hearth on its jizai-kagi adjustable hook, with figures arranged around the recessed fire pit in postures of warming, cooking, and conversation. The series, produced between 1938 and 1944 in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-designed, self-carved, self-printed) tradition of the sōsaku-hanga movement, undertook to record the seasonal customs of Akita Prefecture as a complete ethnographic cycle. The Irori print foregrounds the central physical fact of life in the Akita farmhouse: the hearth as the focus of warmth, cooking, family ritual, and the long winter sociability that Katsuhira spent his career documenting. The Chicago impression preserves the careful registration of multiple colour blocks and the warm umber-and-vermillion palette characteristic of the series.