Kotatsu, from the Winter Print Collection (Fuyu no Hangashū)

This 1939 colour woodblock print depicts a kotatsu — the low table with a heat source beneath and a heavy quilt draped over its frame, around which the Japanese family gathers in winter for warmth and conversation. The print is one of the five sheets of the Fuyu no hangashū ("Winter Print Collection") that Katsuhira Tokushi issued as a folio in 1939, in which he treated the heating, cooking, and seasonal-food customs of the Akita winter as a concentrated documentary cycle. The composition isolates the kotatsu and its surrounding family figures in a close interior view, recording one of the most characteristic objects of the Japanese winter and one of its defining social rituals. Produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-designed, self-carved, self-printed) procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement, the Kotatsu print belongs to one of Katsuhira's most cohesive published series and exemplifies the small-format intimate side of his work alongside the larger festival and landscape prints for which he is better known.