Two Children by Farm House Door

This colour woodblock print of the Shōwa era, held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, depicts two children standing beside the entrance of a rural Akita farmhouse — a quiet domestic scene typical of Katsuhira Tokushi's documentary project of recording the everyday life of his native Akita Prefecture across the late 1930s and 1940s. The composition places the children in heavy padded winter clothing against the dark vertical of the entry timber and the snowy ground at the threshold, exploiting the contrast between the textile pattern of the small figures and the rough plank wood of the doorway. The print belongs to Katsuhira's mature jiga-jikoku-jizuri output as a sōsaku-hanga printmaker — self-designed, self-carved, and self-printed in the strict tradition of the movement — and its presence in the MFA Boston collection reflects the strong American institutional interest in Akita regional printmaking during the postwar period when the museum's Japanese print holdings were significantly expanded.