Small Thatched Roof

A small thatched-roof structure — perhaps a gatehouse, outbuilding, or modest farmhouse — presented as an etching from 1980. The thatched roof (kayabuki) was once ubiquitous across rural Japan but had become increasingly rare by the time Tanaka began recording it, requiring specialized craftsmen and expensive materials to maintain. His repeated return to this subject across decades constitutes a sustained act of documentation and elegiac appreciation for a disappearing architectural form.