Born at Tsukechi in Ena District, Gifu Prefecture. He entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1900. After graduating he joined a survey expedition to Sakhalin and made sketches, and after his mother’s death returned home for six years and lived much as a woodcutter. Urged by friends who regretted the waste of his talent, he moved to Tokyo and thereafter showed at the Nika exhibition every year. He married in 1922 and had two sons and three daughters, but in poverty lost his second son, his youngest daughter and then his eldest daughter. After the war he became a member of the Nikikai at its founding. When the Order of Culture was decided for him he declined it, saying that he could not have any more people coming to the house, and he declined the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class, as well. His colour was dark and sober at first; after an Expressionist period he established a highly abstract manner of his own, keeping a strong, distinctive outline drawn in red pencil while emphasising planes of colour.