A viral clip made Hamasaki Hirotaka famous for chalk. The real story is Japan’s national blackboard art championship — the one he keeps entering, and losing.
Entries for the 11th Nichigaku Blackboard Art Koshien close on September 1. It is a national championship for Japanese middle and high school students whose canvas is the classroom blackboard and whose only medium is chalk, and its name borrows the stadium where the country’s high school baseball finals are played — a deliberate insistence that a drawing club deserves the same reverence as a pitching rotation. Roughly 300 schools enter each summer. Results are posted in mid-October; the winners are honored at a ceremony in November. The Associated Press sent a photographer into a Kumagaya girls’ high school art room in July to watch a team plan its entry.
The viral clip, and what it leaves out
Most Americans meeting this world do so through a recycled video: a Japanese teacher rendering van Gogh or Hokusai across a blackboard in colored chalk, then wiping it away. The clip has circulated since 2016 under a dozen aggregator accounts, usually with no name attached. The name is Hamasaki Hirotaka, a visual artist and art instructor from Nara Prefecture, who posts as @hamacream.
A Japanese teacher creates a new piece of artwork for his students every day, only to erase it once the school day ends.
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) August 21, 2026
Hirotaka Hamasaki, a high school art teacher in Nara, Japan, creates elaborate chalk masterpieces on his classroom blackboard. Using colored chalk, he… pic.twitter.com/b1k6cK2jC3
How Hamasaki’s blackboard art actually started
The origin story is smaller and better than the caption. According to Asahi Shimbun’s withnews, a former student texted him a photo of a chalk copy of Picasso’s Guernica she had made, with a dare attached: you could do better. He had chalk on hand for an unglamorous reason — a chalk manufacturer was closing and he had bought up stock at his own expense. He began after classes ended, working alone in the art room. His board of the anime film Your Name took three days, about ten hours of drawing, and seven colors of chalk; it drew more than 100,000 bookmarks online and made him briefly, uncomfortably famous. He told the paper he could not afford to let it change him. Blackboard art, in his framing, is not art at all. It is an extension of writing on the board, and the point of it is to make a teenager curious about a subject they did not choose.
That distinction explains what he has done since. Hamasaki, now 38, moved to Nara Prefectural Takada High School and began entering his art club in the Koshien. They took a judges’ special prize on their first attempt, then a Kinki regional prize. In 2024 they submitted “Tefu Tefu” — a schoolgirl surrounded by butterflies in drifting color — against 293 works from 177 schools, and placed nowhere. The club showed it at the culture festival instead, to parents and returning alumni. Then they erased it, swept up the chalk dust, and bottled it for every member: not the sacred dirt of the baseball stadium, but the powder of theirs.
Where blackboard art sits in the ephemeral tradition
There is a whole aesthetic argument sitting in that jar. Every serious tradition of ephemeral art — the sand mandala, the mas camp costume built for one night of Carnival, the funeral altar assembled and dismantled in a day — makes the same wager: that meaning is not stored in the object, and that the discipline of building something you have agreed in advance to destroy is a different discipline than making something to sell. A Caribbean reader recognizes this immediately. Months of wire-bending and feather-setting walk the road for a single day and are gone by Ash Wednesday, and no one calls that a waste.
There is no auction for a blackboard. The reward has to be the making.
The rarest thing in art education
What the Koshien adds is the rarest thing in art education: stakes without a market. There is no auction for a blackboard. A student cannot build a portfolio of objects, only of photographs, and so the reward has to be the making and the collaboration. One Saitama art teacher told the AP that the medium appeals precisely because students can experiment more freely than in established forms. Of course they can. Nothing is permanent enough to be precious.
Hamasaki keeps the ledger honest. He was, by his own account, a student who stopped showing up — a father lost, an injury that ended basketball, one class a week worth attending, which happened to be art. He teaches on the theory that the drawing is the pretext and the student is the work. Everything else gets wiped off the board.
Sources: Nichigaku Blackboard Art Koshien official guidelines; The Associated Press, July 25, 2026; Asahi Shimbun / withnews; Sankei Shimbun, December 2024.