Norio Nagayama

Norio Nagayama is a Japanese master calligrapher, born in Ibaraki in 1956 and a 1980 graduate of Daito Bunka University in Tokyo. An advisor to the Japan Educational Calligraphy Federation and to the Nihon Shodō Bijutsukan, he presides over Bokushin, the school of Oriental calligraphy he founded in Italy in 2000, today one of Europe's leading centres for shodō, with regular courses and seminars held in Italy and Switzerland.

Shodō, literally "the way of writing", is the Japanese art of brush-and-ink calligraphy, practised as a discipline that is at once aesthetic and spiritual. Nagayama's teaching method, developed with Western students in mind, has trained many practitioners, whose works have been exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo (2014) and at the Granai di Villa Mimbelli in Livorno (2015) in the exhibition "Shodō italiano".

For Digital Index he is the author of Shodo, la via della calligrafia (2012), an interactive digital book with photographs and video lessons for learning Japanese calligraphy, and of its English edition, SHODO. The Way of Calligraphy (2014).