Shoji Hano (羽野昌二, Hano Shoji in Japanese order) says he first hit a drum at four years old, on a traditional Japanese drum at the festival in Kokura, the old castle-town district of Kitakyushu in Fukuoka Prefecture, where he was born on 1 March 1955. The festival taiko stayed with him. Critics writing about him decades later keep coming back to it as the source of a style that is powerful and polyrhythmic but also idiosyncratic. He took up the Western drum kit at 15 and listened to Max Roach, Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones, then moved to Kyoto in 1974.

Kyoto is where he became a free-jazz drummer. In 1975 he began playing avant-garde jazz with the pianist Yoshito Osawa, and around then he met the trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, who introduced him to the martial art Shintaido, whose philosophy would later shape his playing. Hano, Kondo and Osawa formed a trio in 1976 and toured western Japan the next year. In 1978 and 1979 he gave a run of monthly solo drum concerts at the Kyoto club Zabo, and in 1980 he formed a band called Odowara and ran a year of monthly concerts at Kyoto University. In 1981 came the Easy Music Band, with Kondo, the guitarist Haruhiko Gotsu and the bassist Tetsu Yamauchi, and after it broke up in 1982 he joined Kondo's Tibetan Blue Air Liquid Band. By then his list of partners included the alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe, the saxophonist Mototeru Takagi, the trombonist Masahiko Kono, Henry Kaiser, Eugene Chadbourne, Hans Reichel, the cellist Tristan Honsinger and the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, whom he first met in Japan in the early 1980s. Those Kondo and Abe associations come from biographical accounts of his early career rather than from recorded credits.

Frustrated with where his career was going, he then stopped playing for about two years. He returned in 1985 with a style built on Shintaido, formed the band OPE with Yamauchi and Gotsu (1986 to 1989), and in 1988 and 1989 ran a bimonthly series called Shintaido Performance and Drums, playing solo and with dancers. Recordings from the 1988 solo performances became the cassette KI-Improvisation Drum Solo (E.G.G. Records, 1989), his first release under his own name.

In May 1990 he left Japan for the first time. From June to August he toured Switzerland, Austria and Germany with Hans Reichel and the guitarist Wadi Gysi, played the Moers New Jazz Festival with two of Reichel's groups, and took part in the FMP Workshop Freie Musik in Berlin, where a trio with Brötzmann and the guitarist Nicky Skopelitis was recorded at the Akademie der Künste on 27 and 29 June 1990. Konnex issued the recording in 2002 as Organized Chaos.

The Berlin meeting set up the partnership that defines his discography. Hano invited Brötzmann to Japan for a duo tour in the autumn of 1991, and two live records were taped on consecutive nights. On 9 October 1991, at Shinjuku Pit Inn in Tokyo, Brötzmann, Hano, Yamauchi and Gotsu recorded the quartet album Dare Devil for DIW. The next night, 10 October, the duo played Aku Aku in Tsukuba, a concert Hano first issued on cassette in 1992 as Funny Rat (E.G.G. Records) and which Improvised Music from Japan reissued complete on CD in 2003. They toured Japan and Germany together every year from 1991 to 1994 and again in Japan in 1998, and the Funny Rat/s series continued with two more albums, in 2008 and 2009. Brötzmann passed away in 2023.

From 1991 Hano travelled to Europe or the United States almost every year and brought visiting players to Japan: Chadbourne, Keshavan Maslak, Johannes Bauer, Hans Koch, Dror Feiler, Billy Bang and the Swiss saxophonist Werner Lüdi, with whom he recorded Ki: East Tokyo / Ki: West Zurich (Intakt, 1998) in Zurich in November 1995 and at Shinjuku Pit Inn in April 1996. He also played on one part of William Parker's Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra record Flowers Grow in My Room (Centering, 1994). In 1994 and 1995 he took his own groups to Russia and Lithuania, including the Vilnius Jazz Festival. At home he led the Poly Breath Percussion Band, begun in 1992 as the Kamadoma Poly Breath Percussion Orchestra, an improvising ensemble of drum kit and Japanese drums; The Instinctive Awakening (E.G.G. Records, 1994) is its first recording.

His range goes well past the Brötzmann duos. In 1998 he joined the Japanese psychedelic rock band High Rise, with the guitarist Munehiro Narita and the bassist and singer Asahito Nanjo, and toured the United States, England and France with them in October and November 1998. He recorded The Strange Face (2000) as a duo with the guitarist Keiji Haino, and Shadows (DIW, 2000) as a trio with Haino and Brötzmann, live at the Schlachthof in Wels, Austria, on 31 March 2000. On 10 June 2000 he recorded Fish with the guitarist Derek Bailey at Moat Studios in London (P.S.F., 2001). Later partners include the Berlin guitarist Olaf Rupp (their Noomiso was taped at the Moers festival on 27 May 2007), the violinist Billy Bang (Four Seasons: East Meets West, 2009), the Russian singer Elena Belyaeva, and the Australian saxophonist Kris Wanders and guitarist Yusuke Akai.

A solo drummer is the other half of his story. 48 (Improvised Music from Japan, 2003), taped live at Bin Spark in Tokyo on 12 March 2003, is his first CD of unaccompanied drums, and Drums (recorded in Hiroshima in October 2007) followed. In the liner notes to 48 he describes himself as in a period of transition, stepping back from the aggression of earlier years, and insists he is "a drummer, not a percussionist."

He remains active. On 1 March 2024, his 69th birthday, he released a numbered edition of 69 cassettes of solo drums called 69, the first release on the Beijing label UFO Creations and its sub-label Society of Shoji Hano's Creations. He played a solo concert at the Goolugatup Heathcote Gallery in Perth on 20 April 2024, issued as Live in Perth Australia 20 April 2024, toured China in 2024, and has since made records with the saxophonist Ryoko Ono, the guitarist Mitsuru Tabata, and as a member of the trio Doku-Ebisu with the guitarist Makoto Kawabata and Tabata. He turned 71 in March 2026, and a vinyl reissue of Funny Rat/s 2 appeared that year.

Hano's drumming starts from the taiko of the Kokura festival and from the American drummers he studied as a teenager. In the liner notes to 48 he names Max Roach and Elvin Jones as early influences. The result is playing built on very large dynamic range: long stretches of floor toms and cymbals, played with a physical, almost martial control, and then silence that carries as much weight as the noise. Reviewers of Funny Rat/s 3 in The Wire described him pacing and framing Brötzmann's soloing with calm rather than matching it for volume.

Shintaido, the martial art that Toshinori Kondo introduced him to in the 1970s, is the other pillar. The liner notes to 48 tie the physical side of his playing to Shintaido, and in the late 1980s he performed Shintaido and drums together with dancers. The same discipline shows up in his solo records, where he says he is trying to reach a sound that comes from his unconscious rather than from answering other players.

He is a free-jazz and free-improvisation drummer first, with a catalogue of duo records against horn players (Brötzmann, Lüdi, Chadbourne, Bang, Bailey on guitar) and against guitarists (Haino, Rupp, Narita). The rock side of his work, High Rise and the Narita duo Kyoaku no Intention, sits at the edge of that world: it is real and it is documented, but the great majority of his records are free jazz and improvised music, and that is how Discogs classifies the bulk of his output.