Doshun Mori

Doshun Mori (森道春, 1909–1985) was a sosaku-hanga printmaker who documented Japanese folk customs and regional festivals through woodblock prints during the mid-twentieth century. Born in 1909 in Takayama, Gifu Prefecture — a mountainous city known for its preserved Edo-period streetscapes and elaborate festival traditions — he apprenticed under Onchi Koshiro, the pioneering figure of the creative print movement.

Mori's prints predominantly depicted matsuri (festival) scenes and folk customs from across Japan's provinces. He contributed a design to Nihon Minzoku Zufu (Pictures of Japanese Native Customs), a collaborative portfolio of twelve woodblock prints produced in 1946 by a group of sosaku-hanga artists — among them Umetaro Azechi, Hide Kawanishi, Kiyoshi Saito, Senpan Maekawa, Junichiro Sekino, and Masao Maeda — that recorded traditional customs and rural life in the immediate postwar period. The series captured scenes of regional festivals, agricultural rituals, and communal celebrations that were already beginning to fade from daily practice, giving the prints a documentary significance beyond their artistic merit. Mori's contributions drew on the festival traditions of his native Hida region and other provincial subjects, reflecting the sosaku-hanga movement's interest in vernacular culture outside the cosmopolitan centers of Tokyo and Kyoto.

Mori worked within the sosaku-hanga principle of designing, carving, and printing his own blocks, giving his festival scenes a directness and graphic energy that suited their lively subject matter. He died in 1985 at the age of seventy-six, leaving behind prints that serve as a visual record of Japanese folk practices during a period of rapid social change.