With the dissolution of the old domain he worked from childhood while studying Western painting under Kinkichiro Honda and Chinese painting under the nanga painter Hobokusai. In 1893 he returned to Ushiku and, while farming, published satirical cartoons in the Ibaraki newspaper “Ibaraki” and in Shusui Kotoku’s “Heimin Shimbun”. In 1917 he was elected a member of the Japan Art Institute, and thereafter showed work in a new nanga manner at the Inten. He painted farming villages and landscapes, and poetic, fanciful ink and light-colour works on the theme of the kappa, opening a pictorial world close to the Japanese land. Self-taught in Japanese, Chinese and Western learning, he also left fine work as a calligrapher, essayist and haiku poet.