Interior of House with Family and Family Shrine

This 1943 colour woodblock print, held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, depicts the interior of a rural Akita farmhouse with members of the household gathered before the butsudan or family Buddhist altar built into one wall of the principal room. The composition is one of the most ethnographically dense in Katsuhira Tokushi's output, recording with documentary care the layered textures of tatami matting, wooden cabinetry, hearth equipment, hanging scrolls, and family figures arranged in the close interior space of the traditional Akita farm dwelling. The print belongs to the artist's broader project of recording rural life in Akita Prefecture across the late 1930s and 1940s in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement, and it is among the most often-cited examples of how Katsuhira used the print medium as a form of cultural documentation. The Honolulu impression is part of the museum's extensive collection of twentieth-century Japanese prints and serves as the canonical American holding of this important image of Akita domestic life.