Inaka shibai (Country Theatre), from Ichimoku-shu (First Thursday Collection), Vol. 6

Inaka shibai (Country Theatre), a 1950 color woodblock print held at the British Museum, is the sheet that Yamaguchi Susumu contributed to volume 6 of the Ichimoku-shu (First Thursday Collection), the portfolio that the Ichimokukai produced through the postwar Showa years. By 1950 the Ichimokukai had been meeting monthly at Onchi Koshiro's Tokyo home for over a decade, and the Ichimoku-shu — hand-assembled, with each member contributing an original print — had become one of the principal documents of postwar Japanese [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga), recording the survival and reinvention of the creative print movement after the war. Where most of Yamaguchi's recorded output addresses the Japan Alps and his native Nagano landscapes, the Country Theatre sheet records a moment of rural performance, a subject that reflects the broader interest of postwar sosaku-hanga artists in the texture of Japanese village life. The print uses the thick saturated water-based pigment, the dampened torinoko paper, and the grain-exposed blocks that defined his signature style, and the figural composition is treated with the bold contours and the disciplined chromatic restraint that contemporary critics likened to Georges Rouault. The British Museum impression preserves the layered registration and exposed woodgrain that distinguish strong sheets of his Ichimoku-shu work and that place him among the central figures of the postwar Showa creative print revival.