Kan Kozaki was born in 1942 in Kumamoto prefecture and graduated from the Pacific School of Art in 1966. Kozaki received the grand prize at the Nichido Exhibition in both 1978 and 1979 and opened Kan Art Gallery, a museum devoted to his work, in 1993. He is well known throughout Japan for his series Gassho, commissioned in commemoration of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1988, Kozaki started his Santoka series, which illustrates the poems (mainly haiku) of the Buddhist monk Santoka Taneka (1882-1940). In 2001, he had an international solo exhibition that traveled to six cities in Germany and Switzerland.