Nakao Tozan

[2] His father was a merchant and his mother an accomplished shamisen player who knew Sōetsu Kondō, himself the founder of a shakuhachi school.

[3] At the age of nineteen Rinzō Nakao was initiated as a komusō, a Buddhist monk and practitioner of suizen, at Tōfuku-ji temple in Kyōto.

He then spent two years as a komusō wandering through south Japan before returning to Ōsaka in 1896 where he founded the Tozan-ryū, or Tozan school, on 15 February 1896.

In his compositions, the shakuhachi moved away from its roots as traditional komusō suizen practice and became part of bourgeois music performance.

The Tozan school was characterised by its willingness to accept students from a wide variety of social backgrounds as distinct from the earlier exclusively samurai tradition of the komusō.