He moved to Tokyo in 1931 and studied under Kibo Kodama. He painted literary subjects and city manners, and received a special prize at the second Shin-Bunten. Evacuated during the war to the province of his birth, he recognised anew the beauty of the landscape close at hand, and from then on worked chiefly as a landscape painter. Joining the colour of modern European painting to the tradition of ink painting, he established a manner of his own — a “new moroetai” of high spiritual quality — in the Japanese landscape. Working mainly through the Jitsugetsu-sha and the Nitten, he showed major works in succession and holds a settled place as a senior figure of the Japanese-painting world. The particular red known as “Genso red” is characteristic of his work.