Hirayama Roko

Hirayama Roko (平山六光, born 1915) was a Tokyo-born Japanese painter and printmaker who specialized in bijin-ga, the traditional genre of pictures of beautiful women. According to the reference work "Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900–1975" by Helen Merritt, Hirayama was a Japanese-style painter and printmaker who focused on portraits of women, working within the shin-hanga tradition of refined figure subjects.

Very few woodblock prints by Hirayama are documented; by far the best known is "Maiko Powdering Her Face," a carefully crafted shin-hanga print from approximately 1950 that depicts a Kyoto maiko — an apprentice geisha — applying white face powder. The print demonstrates the meticulous attention to textile pattern, hair arrangement, and the gestures of feminine grooming that characterized the best bijin-ga work. It appears through specialist Japanese-print dealers, where it is considered quite rare and sought after by collectors of shin-hanga figure prints.

The style and subjects of Hirayama's surviving prints — their focus on intimate moments of female adornment, their precise rendering of kimono fabrics, and their refined printing quality — suggest an artist trained in nihonga who worked within the collaborative publisher system that produced shin-hanga during the early to mid-twentieth century. Beyond the documented prints, details of Hirayama's training, publisher affiliations, exhibition history, and later career remain unconfirmed in English-language sources.