Junko Hanahara (born 1958, Osaka) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker with a sustained practice based in Osaka. Her selection in the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 with 'Another Morning Again' (今日も朝から), a 33 × 44 cm woodcut, places her within the established cohort of mid-career Japanese woodblock artists circulating through the principal Tokyo-area juried exhibition channels in the mid-2020s and working in the Kansai-region woodcut tradition.
Hanahara trained under Akira Kurosaki (1937-2019) at NHK Culture Center. Kurosaki was one of the most internationally significant Japanese woodblock printmakers of the late twentieth century — a Kyoto Seika University professor, a sustained advocate for the mokuhanga (water-based woodblock) tradition through international workshops, the founding figure behind the International Mokuhanga Conference framework, and a body of personal work that fused traditional water-based woodblock technique with abstract composition. Kurosaki's NHK Culture Center teaching engagement was a continuing-education channel through which working artists could access advanced woodblock instruction outside the formal university degree system.
The Kurosaki teaching lineage runs through several of Hanahara's contemporaries in the CWAJ-circulating woodblock cohort, including Jiro Inatsugu (born 1934, also studying under Kurosaki and Ichien Tatsuo). Affiliation with the Kurosaki line situates Hanahara within a documented international-mokuhanga pedagogical tradition that has shaped the technical and aesthetic profile of contemporary Japanese woodcut.
Hanahara is a member of the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyokai), the principal national organization for Japanese contemporary printmakers founded in 1931. JPA membership is competitive and is the standard credential for working Japanese printmakers operating across all media; biennial exhibition rights at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum are the principal benefit, and the membership directory functions as a partial census of active Japanese print activity.
Hanahara's chosen medium is woodcut — specifically the mokuhanga tradition transmitted through Kurosaki's teaching. The 33 × 44 cm sheet size of 'Another Morning Again' is a moderate-format woodcut, requiring multiple registered blocks for the colored composition. The title — 'Another Morning Again' (今日も朝から, kyo mo asa kara, more literally 'today again from the morning') — suggests a quotidian-domestic subject characteristic of mid-career Japanese women's print practice, where the pattern of repeated daily activity is taken as a worthy compositional subject. The CWAJ catalog assigned 'Another Morning Again' Print No. 025 in the 68th edition.
Further biographical detail beyond the CWAJ Print Show entry — Hanahara's broader exhibition history, gallery representation, museum holdings, and earlier work in the Kurosaki teaching lineage — is not currently surfaced through the public-facing English-language channels. Kansai-area exhibition records, the Japan Print Association membership rolls, and the Akira Kurosaki teaching-line documentation would be the principal next-step research targets for extending this bio.
Junko Hanahara (born 1958, Osaka) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker with a sustained practice based in Osaka. Her selection in the 68th CWAJ Print Show in 2025 with 'Another Morning Again' (今日も朝から), a 33 × 44 cm woodcut, places her within the established cohort of mid-career Japanese woodblock artists circulating through the principal Tokyo-area juried exhibition channels in the mid-2020s and working in the Kansai-region woodcut tradition.
Junko Hanahara was active born in 1958. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Junko Hanahara's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.