20 Best Japanese Female Photographers You Should Know

by Jes Kalled | ART

© Miwa Yanagi, Elevator Girl House B4, C print, 1998

We live in the age of the photo, rather, the instant photo and the accessibility we give others when we post or send it elsewhere. However, for generations, female photographers have not been able to enjoy this ease of accessibility. Even today at the end of 2019 female photographers are met with an array of difficulties and struggles due to an old world preoccupation with the definition of gender. However, the fight to destroy the boundary of gender is ongoing and very real. Here are 20 incredible Japanese women photographers from the 1940s to today who are changing those perceptions day by day with their ideas, their perseverance, and their lens.

You’ll also want to get to know these other talented female artists in different genres from Japanese painting to manga!

1. Tomoko Sawada

Tomoko Sawada takes pictures of herself. Self portraits upon self portraits of different versions of her that change only in appearance. She is curious about the soulmate that is herself, saying that it is specifically curiosity that drives her motivation to discover what else is inside her; a kind of photo play with the relationship of inside to outside. In some of her stylized photo booth images, the viewer may find that the subject looks like someone they know, an ex-girlfriend or a distant cousin, slightly changed in each frame, but not intentionally portrayed or embodying empathy. Recreations of her school day class photos from the past may cause the viewer to laugh or feel slightly unsettled when they realize each of her classmates faces has been replaced with her own.

This portrait-styled experimentation that Sawada takes part in delights in the change of costume, mood, and stereotype, but gives the viewer a profound accessibility to the constant in the photo: Tomoko Sawada. This opens a myriad of questions that she feels can’t necessarily be answered about culture, identity, gender, feminism, and performance.

2. Mika Ninagawa

© Mika Ninagawa, Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery

Color. Everything in color. Well known and well awarded photographer, Mika Ninagawa, rose to fame in the early 2000’s just after the 90’s wave of onnanoko shashinka, often translated to “Girly Photographers” in English, where women photographers tried to break into the male-dominated field by taking polaroid-like photos of their daily lives, which later turned into nude or semi-nude portraits. As a second generation onnanoko shashinka, Ninagawa comments on her early photos experimenting with nudity in a book called Kickboxing Geishas. She says, “Most people think that because I showed my nudity to the public that meant I like sex and anything goes...I always shoot what I think is pretty, cute, or beautiful. My purpose is never to be sexy…”

Her recent work is extreme close ups of brightly colored objects or people, often paired with a soft bokeh background. A faded white strawberry, or two brightly colored koi fish in contrast to the blue water that surrounds them. Flowers, overexposures, red lips, or a silhouetted hand make up some of her later experiments with what she considers bright, beautiful and lively.

Find out more about some of the inspiring women leading their fields: in ceramics, painting, contemporary art, jewelry and manga!

3. Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi’s photography is reminiscent of poetry, and the Japanese religion of Shinto, where everyday objects have the future potential of becoming godlike. Imagine that the world you live in actually has meaning, even the newspaper you throw away after reading could carry with it something much more eloquent than old trash. All things on earth possess a spirit. It is with this gaze that Kawauchi seems to engage with the mundane watermelon on a plate, or with birds taking flight in undisturbed nature. Her photos feature gentle close ups, tender in the capture of someone’s face, or a delicate egg that is hatching. Landscape images that are slightly overexposed, luminous, or blurry, documenting a kind of effervescent quality of otherworldliness on earth. Her creative process seems to focus especially on book making, saying in an interview in Unseen Magazine, “An exhibition allows a person to enter a location and experience the space, while books connect us to the present – we can decide to flip them open whenever we feel like it.”

4. Mikiko Hara

Taking photos without a viewfinder is how street photographer, Mikiko Hara, documents the world she sees around her. She captures moments, she says, likening her photographs to a memory that someone might have about their childhood, a lost love, or something almost forgotten. Hara immerses herself in trains and crowds of people and takes what almost seems like random photos, save for the fact that the result feels so visually and emotionally rewarding for those consuming her work. Similarly, her photos seem devoid of an attachment to time or place, making it a worthy template of someone’s projection or memory.

Using a German-made Ikonta from the 1930s, the noteworthy photographer has held international exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, L.A., Germany and Denmark. One of her books, These Are The Days features women, children, and snap-shots of atmospheric subjects whom she encounters by chance. In a New York Times article, she states, “They are the photographs of somewhere yet nowhere.”

5. HIROMIX

At the forefront of the first wave of onnanoko shashinka (Girly Photographers) was Hiromi Toshikawa, or Hiromix, who rapidly rose to fame in Japanese media for her work, Seventeen Girl Days, in which she documented her own teenage life in a series of photos that won her the Canon Grand Prize for new photographers. Seventeen Girl Days is a photo diary that predates Instagram in vulnerable 1995, including some provocative snap-shots of her that elicited her sexual freedom as a young woman. Her photos are conceptual by nature and yet seem to capture some of the raw moments of what it life was like for her at the age of 17, a teenager, and a woman, two roles that weren’t widely accepted in the Japanese world of photography.

Her next book, Girls Blue, is perhaps a continuation of her diary concept of young women growing up and experiencing life in Tokyo. Though Hiromix became a popular sensation overnight, she tends to stay out of the spotlight now. However, you can see her cameo in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation if you look carefully.

6. Kumi Oguro

Kumi Oguro’s interest lies between two moments: when you are dreaming and when you are waking from that dream. Her photos are an atmospheric deep dive not into the recreation of her dreams, but of the characters who may have appeared there. Women who may defy logic by floating above ground, one leg painted red, forming shapes with their bodies that are both playful and ominous. A kind of language is born in her images that bridges two worlds, moving and still, asleep and awake.

Born in Japan, but now living in Belgium, Oguro’s work can be found in several solo and group European exhibitions. Her first and only photo book titled, NOISE, was published in 2008 by a Belgium publisher. The photos in NOISE strike the viewer as staged and almost cinematic, with the models’ faces obscured from view, the action or inaction of them carefully displayed and framed: a kind of haunting, incomplete story. In an interview with the online magazine, Musee, Oguro describes her process in one word, “Concentration,” mentioning that her intention in using film over digital has much to do with her love for creating tension, and not knowing what the final image will look like until it’s developed.

7. Miwa Yanagi

Oscillating between documentary, theatre, and carefully crafted realms of architecture and people, Miwa Yanagi is known for creating elaborate images and scenes. Her first project, Elevator Girls, is a body of work that navigates the occupational and cultural restrictions of women in Japan. In this exploration, Yanagi contrasts the diversity of space with the uniformity of the identical costumes worn by her models, who are dressed in red with matching hats and white gloves. Each model is positioned in a rigid or deconstructed pose to show the rather chilling absurdity of just how limited their freedom and mobility is.

Yanagi’s second project, My Grandmothers, is an even deeper immersion into surrealism, also playing with the idea of women and restriction, but this time leaning on elements of documentary and storytelling. Believing that young women are often pressured and molded into limited female roles of society’s creation, Yanagi sought to open up an entirely new future of desire for the young women of Japan. She did this by interviewing several women and documenting only those whose futures as old women seemed most extraordinary and unique. Defined by their striking independence, each portrait is a highly personalized adventure story of a liberated life. After the photo is taken, Yanagi repaints the image digitally making her subjects old and wrinkly. She then pairs the photo with a text that either tells the tale of a woman living with her playboy lover in San Fransisco, or one where a lesbian couple grows old together, their love normalized in the future world of fifty years later.

8. Toyoko Tokiwa

© Toyoko Tokiwa, From危険な毒花 / Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, 1957

Toyoko Tokiwa was born in Yokohama in 1930. She gravitated towards photography despite the profession not being readily accessible to women in that time. In 1945, an American firebombing killed her father and burned down his liquor store. A post war Japan would then begin to reveal itself in her photographs, but she quickly became interested in documenting the lives of women. Her famous book, Kiken na Adaba (Dangerous Poisonous Flowers), turns the lens onto working women, herself included, and the particular stresses they experience in society. The text is comprehensive in its approach with each chapter illuminating a different world in which women must navigate.

Many of the women Tokiwa photographed were prostitutes in the red light district of Yokohama, which was close to one of the major U.S. military bases. A famous photo documents a U.S. soldier holding a Japanese woman, while another soldier in uniform looks away. The photo, taken in Yokohama, is widely known as a symbol of post war occupied Japan; a symbol of the rape, coercion, and control that American soliders exercised over Japanese women during and after World War II.

9. Momo Okabe

Momo Okabe’s work is both intimate and tragic, but colorful and pure. Her photobook, Dildo, tells the incredibly personal story of Okabe’s transgender lovers, Kaori and Yuko, their transition process, identity struggles, and social isolation. At first look, Okabe’s work may seem chaotic and promiscuous to some, but at its core it’s tender and painful. The subjects of each photo are outsiders in Japan. The title, Dildo, signifies (for some transgender people) a body part they may never have, or pleasure they don’t have access to. Essentially, Dildo, is photo after photo of how society and environment has impacted Okabe’s friends and lovers, documenting their experiences as they happen in real time. Not conceptualized, but actualized trauma on colorful pages.

When describing her work, Okabe mentions “psychological landscapes.” The photographer tends to pull from memory. Threading vivid images from her past and present into the selfbuilt darkroom that extends from her apartment in Tokyo. For her, trauma and tragedy turn into something more magical when she is able to use her camera, a kind of therapeutic tool in turning something sad into something beautiful in its vulnerability and brave honesty.

10. Yoshino Oishi

For half a century, photojournalist Yoshino Oishi has been documenting victims of war in Japan and around the world. In an interview with NHK, Oishi says that in every country she has traveled to, victims of the conflict “stand in front of her camera as if to say: I never want another war.” This is the message that Oishi wants to be heard. In July of 2019, the 75 year old photographer held a photo exhibition called “The Scars of Nagasaki” in Tokyo. The photos are of the victims and survivors from the atomic bombing of August 9th, 1945. About 74,000 people were killed in the aftermath.

Her exhibition is a collection of photos she began taking in 1997. Years of documenting victims and sharing their stories has developed in Oishi a deep desire for peace, and an intimate relationship with those she photographs. “I think, or I hope, that in a single photograph you can capture someone’s present and past condensed together.” This the goal that Oishi strives for as a documentarian.

11. Monika Mogi

Monika Mogi is perhaps the fashion photographer of this moment. Currently living in Tokyo, the self-taught photographer is driven and focused. She has worked with big name brands such as American Apparel, Tony & Guy, and Nylon. The young photographer’s images are dreamlike and dark, mysterious and cool. Her series, Shion, explores the depths of vulnerability and nostalgia with photos she has conceptualized from lonely memories. A girl reflecting while eating yakisoba noodles, a silhouetted hand against the backdrop of a window high above the ground--all cast in black in white. “These are all personal events of mine that I made my friends re-enact,” she says in an article by the art magazine It’s Nice That.

Of a similar mold to her friend and photographer, Petra Collins, Mogi characterizes fashion through her own lens. Her work often highlights and trys to normalize a feminine and feminist perspective. In an interview with Metal Magazine Mogi explains that she’s more interested in spreading a message to the mainstream, than being part of the mainstream herself. “...honestly I’m not that interested in fashion.” She says. “I don’t think the editors realise, but I always intend for my shoots to convey a message. I don’t change the way I shoot depending on which magazine I’m shooting for.” One of her fashion shoots, aptly titled “Fuck OL Culture” (OL is short for office lady), Mogi shot model, Yuka Mizuhara, spitting into tea. A not-so-subtle “f u” to the duties of a “pink collar” office lady.

12. Lieko Shiga

Mythical and expressive are two words that best describe Lieko Shiga, who does not hesitate to take her photos to an altogether different world. Her photos are made up of serene landscapes cast with uncertainty, and forlorn bodies that carry with them a sadness in their posture. Usually shooting in the calm of dark, Shiga’s photos have a signature flash vignette that accentuates the center of the photograph where the subject is located. There are shadows, double exposures, and unknown objects that obscure identities and dislocate these places from what the viewer may find familiar. The photos go as far as to even make the viewer uncomfortable.

One of her photobooks, Rasen Kaigan, or Spiral Coast, was taken before and just after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11th, 2011. The small town of Kitakama, where Shiga was living, was heavily damaged and the town suffered many deaths. Shiga’s own studio was completely destroyed. Originally, Shiga had been invited to Kitakama to document the town’s customs and culture, the importance of this increased tenfold when the natural disaster demolished so much of it. Shiga’s photos seem to mirror the tragedy that happened there with images that are half missing. Like a bad dream you can’t completely remember.

13. Hiromi Kakimoto

© Hiromi Kakimoto, The Time of the Cocoon

Hiromi Kakimoto carefully thinks about a project and doesn’t begin photographing until it is fully conceptualized, each frame containing the depths of an entire story beneath its surface. Her photo series, Little World, expresses the kind of warm loneliness of a world seemingly inhabited by one, or just a few. A bathroom filled with pink balloons, floating just above the ground of which the viewer knows they will eventually fall to; a singular desk perched in the sand, a beach ball mid-bounce.

Kakimoto describes her process as a conscious one. Using the first photo in a series to inspire the rest that follow. “I am interested in the process of devising a story.” She says in her biography on her website. Her images seem calm and peaceful, with soft pastel colors, and some overexposed light. Sunlight is a friend, and so is symmetry. Kakimoto is one of twelve female photographers exhibited at the IBASHO gallery’s annual exhibit, Female Force from Japan, in Belgium that aims to showcase contemporary photography from Japan. Other members include Mikiko Hara, Tokyo Rumando, and Kumi Oguro to name a few.

14. Sayaka Maruyama

London based photographer, Sayaka Maruyama, blends her models, embedding their bodies with flowers, paint, and illustration. Maruyama’s work is not limited to an image taken with a camera, she also explores other mediums of art such as drawing, film, installation and performance. Regardless of which medium she works within, her concept is defined by its examination of beauty and the beholder of beauty. In her Japan Avant Garde series, she disrupted her photographs with digital impressions and manipulations using watercolor and collage. Portraits of Japanese women with layers of color and collage, challenging the viewer to look deeper, to think twice about which layer is which, and to perhaps understand beauty as a literal construction.

Maruyama’s Sakura series follows a similar theme of layered beauty, this time shrouding or placing her models with sakura (cherry blossoms) and branches. These portraits are graceful and composed, as if beauty can only be captured in the stillest of moments. If the subject moves, does beauty fall away or get distorted? Like a ripple in a peaceful pond.

15. Miyako Ishiuchi

© Miyako Ishiuchi, Yokosuka Story #61, 1976

Born in Gunma prefecture but raised in Yokosuka, Miyako Ishiuchi is recognized as an essential political photographer of post war and occupied Japan. In her project, Yokosuka Stories (1976-1977), Ishiuchi takes on the role of architectural photographer in that she concentrates her camera on the buildings, structures, and the streets that she grew up in. This work is observant of the remains of the occupation, the strange remnants that the American military left behind even years after the war, and the struggle between past and present. For over ten years, Ishiuchi took photos of locations, empty rooms, and urban life. The result of this focus shows the viewer a kind of time capsule of blurry, grainy black and white images. Nostalgic in atmosphere, and yet cold and somber in mood. Despite the lack of a literal self portrait in her collection of work, interestingly, she describes her work as “totally personal […] My very own skin, born in the darkroom.”

In a her photobook, APARTMENT, Ishiuchi portrays the slow disappearance of Japanese communal homes. Again focusing on the passing of time, this photo essay seems to question the change in the 1970’s from communal apartment to private home, a western influence, an economical one? The photobook isn’t devoid of people. Ishiuchi goes inside these living spaces and documents the people living inside, the interior area, a hanging umbrella, even the posters on the walls.

16. Yurie Nagashima

© Yurie Nagashima, Self-Portrait (Brother #34), 1993

Yurie Nagashima is recipient of Japan’s most prestigious photography prize, the Kimura Ihei Award, for her work that engages with family, feminism and censorship. In one of her earlier works, titled Kazoku (family), Nagashima photographed her and her family naked in their house. She expresses that it wasn’t difficult to do because she is Japanese. Feeling comfortable whilst naked is a traditionally Japanese and shared-living notion, whilst private spaces is more of a western concept.

In an interview with Tokyo Art Beat, Nagashima talks about how difficult it is to navigate as a woman in the patriarchal world of photography. “I think I got my start by taking risks and making mistakes. Photographing myself naked, for instance. (Laughs).” She continues by saying that many people encouraged her to act more feminine in order to find a man to marry. “But I wanted to fail these tests. I made the choice to break out of those constraints.” Nagashima’s master thesis concerns the debate of onnanoko shashinka (Girly Photographers), specifically the ways in which other male photographers have co opted the name to mean something frivolous less worth while. Nagashima was part of the movement herself and felt that the name itself misrepresented the work of her and her peers who were jumping into the photography scene.

17. Yuki Onodera

© Yuki Onodera, Eleventh Finger #26, 2014

Yuki Onodera was born in Tokyo but now works from her studio in Paris. She is experimental and her work is quirky and unique. Some of her images are up to 8 meters high, and cannot only be considered “photography.” Often pushing the boundaries of the examination of such definition, Onodera has used materials like sand or marbles in her camera lenses, and at times paints onto the photos themselves. Her work is tangible and best viewed in person at one of her exhibitions. The mere height of some leaving a lasting impression on the viewer. The content of her work varies, as does her experimentation with it.

In her series, Eleventh Finger, she tries to capture the “unconscious gestures” and movements of her subjects without looking through a viewfinder. The result is a sometimes blurry or grainy photo to which she adds a detailed paper design to its surface. The paper design is intricate and unique and in stark contrast to its moving counterpart.

18. Tsuneko Sasamoto

© Tsuneko Sasamoto, Hiroshima Dome, 1953

Born in 1914, Tsuneko Sasamoto is Japan’s first ever known Japanese photojournalist, she is now 105 years old. Sasamoto began her career as an illustrator at what is known now as the Mainichi Shinbun. Eventually she was promoted and began documenting Japan’s post war occupation as a photographer, and is known for taking key photos of Japan’s history, including photos of Hiroshima after the bombing, and even a photo of the delegation of Hitler youth who visited Japan in 1940. She also documented coal miner strikes, and the protests of the Japanese student movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Now, Sasamoto is working on a new project called Hana akari (Flower Glow), in honor of her beloved friends who have passed away. Her curiosity in taking photos is synonymous with her mantra, often saying that people should never get lazy. In an interview with NHK she says that for the last thirty years she enjoys a glass of red wine every evening with the moon. In the same interview she recollects that before WWII women were treated very poorly. Part of her documentation and photography process aims to show women who have achieved success, women whom she respects and admires. She pulls from her own experiences and observations throughout her active creative process, keeping notes in a journal and newspaper clippings of things she finds interesting.

19. Tokyo Rumando

Tokyo Rumando is a former model and stripper turned photographer. Her first solo exhibition, I’m only happy when I’m naked, grabs the viewer’s attention by directing it where she wants it to be directed. There is a power in being the one holding or directing the camera. Her photos feel simultaneously impromptu and yet carefully staged, most importantly characterizing a strong sense of subject and self. In an interview with Federica Sala, Rumando says “We keep on putting on more and more masks, but the true liberation stands in stripping them off and getting close to the slightest piece of skin underneath.”

In her work Orphee, we see a woman standing next to a mirror that portrays reflections of different women, none of them the woman who is standing before it. The photo series consists of several different women whom the viewer is almost meant to think of as one, taking on themes of testing the limits of identity, boundary, and projection.

20. Kayo Ume

Everyday life, condensed and expanded in a single moment. Photographer Kayo Ume wants to capture every special, surprising moment of simplicity, or absurdity. Whether it’s a child laughing with friends, a child crying over an accident, or her grandfather with a cucumber placed on his head for a hat, Ume is there to document the illogical and loveable. She has an ability to bring out the deeper consequence of what seemingly appears to be an insignificant moment, giving life and its stream of moments more meaning, frame by infinitesimal frame.

Her photos series, Long Live Grandpa!, featuring her own grandfather at 98 years old, was made in a desire for him to just keep on living. This series is potent with family intimacy and even more prevalently, humor! Ume is unique in that her photos may prompt a viewer to smile or even laugh out loud. Ume-me, a very successful photobook collection of funny photos, sold over 100,000 copies in Japan when it was published in 2006. Her photos lack judgement and seem to welcome a viewer’s projection. The curiosity of Ume’s camera and her appreciation of her subjects is readily palpable.