Festival of Ōtori Shrine (Ōtori jinja sairei)

Festival of Ōtori Shrine (Ōtori jinja sairei), painted by Kimura Shōhachi in 1943, depicts the celebrated Tori-no-Ichi rooster fair held at the Ōtori Shrine in Asakusa, one of the great seasonal events of the late-autumn Tokyo calendar. Held on each of the Tori-no-hi (Days of the Rooster) in November, the fair was famous for its sale of kumade rake-amulets festooned with treasures, masks, and emblems of good fortune, and the crowds that thronged the shrine precincts each year provided a quintessential subject for Tokyo genre painters. Kimura's composition arranges the festival-goers, lantern-lit stalls, and shrine architecture in a warm, slightly compressed space of saturated reds and ambers, capturing the way the gas-lit and electric illumination of the prewar fair gave it a uniquely modern atmosphere. The painting belongs to Kimura's mature 1940s manner, when he turned with particular intensity to subjects of urban festival and ritual life as the city around him was reshaped by wartime austerity and impending destruction. Now held in the Fukutomi Tarō Collection Materials Room, the work is among the most evocative documents of prewar Tokyo seasonal ritual and shows Kimura at his most compositionally ambitious, choreographing scores of figures across a complex shrine-precinct setting while maintaining the intimacy of observation that defined his Tokyo painting throughout his career.