Traditional Family Home Scene

This colour woodblock print of the Shōwa period depicts the interior of a traditional Akita family home, with figures arranged around the central living space among the tatami matting, sliding shōji panels, low wooden tables, and household textiles that defined daily life in the rural Akita farmhouse. The print belongs to Katsuhira Tokushi's broader documentary project of recording the domestic interiors of his native prefecture in colour woodblock — a project parallel to and contemporary with the great Akita fūzoku jūdai ("Ten Customs of Akita") cycle held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The composition demonstrates Katsuhira's characteristic attention to the layered textures of wood, paper, textile, and ground in the close interior space, and was produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement. As a record of pre-modern Akita domestic life on the eve of its post-war transformation, the print is among the more ethnographically valuable images in the artist's output.