Toyoko Tokiwa

Toyoko Tokiwa was born in Yokohama in 1928. She experienced the Yokohama air raid of May 1945, and her father died from burns sustained during the bombing. After graduating from Tokyo Kasei Gakuin in 1950, she worked as an announcer for a communications company in Yokohama; her encounter with the photographer Yasuhiro Okumura, later her husband, became a direct trigger for her interest in photography^*1. While learning photography through the Yokohama Amateur Photo Federation and the Shirayuri Camera Club, she also absorbed from the realism photography movement promoted by Ken Domon a practical orientation toward the people and social conditions of her own time^*4. After Japan’s defeat, central Yokohama was requisitioned and filled with U.S. military personnel; around Magane-chō and Isezakichō, occupation, poverty, entertainment districts, and sex work overlapped within the everyday routes of the city^*2. From around 1953 Tokiwa repeatedly visited this area, moving from photographing people in the streets to a sustained concern with the lives of women in the akasen red-light district^*3. Her first solo exhibition, Working Women, held in 1956, presented women in fourteen occupations, including department-store clerks, nurses, nude models, women professional wrestlers, and women in the akasen; in the same year, her akasen photographs appeared in the July issue of Camera and were also covered in weekly magazines^*1.

Crossing “working women”

Working Women did not reduce women’s labor to a single occupation or class. It placed service work, medicine, sports, modeling, and sex work within one series. AWARE notes that the 1956 exhibition included fourteen occupations, such as “shop girls,” fashion models, nurses, women in the akasen, women professional wrestlers, nude models, and dancers^*3. Women’s Professional Wrestling, a 1955 work in the collection of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, presents the trained female body as a site where athletic skill, entertainment spectacle, and occupational strain overlap^*6. In Tokiwa’s series, women’s bodies are not limited to objects of looking; they are shown as the conditions through which wages are earned, expertise is exercised, and institutions or audiences impose expectations. The breadth of Working Women lies in the way it understands labor not as something bound to one industry or place, but as women’s bodies and lives crossing service work, medicine, sports, modeling, and sex work.

From photographed women to a woman who photographs

In postwar nude shooting sessions, a shared arrangement placed male camera users around a female model^*5. The photo historian Kelly Midori McCormick focuses on Tokiwa’s decision to photograph not only the nude model but also the men photographing around her, arguing that these images respond to the assumption that women belong in front of the lens while men occupy the position behind it^*5. McCormick’s study considers nude shooting sessions, magazine coverage of women photographers, and postwar realism together, asking who was recognized as a photographer and who was positioned as a photographic subject. According to an Aperture essay, photographic work by women in postwar Japan was often described as a temporary and flexible job before marriage, while a woman such as Tokiwa, who continued photography as a profession, appeared as an exception^*18. Tokiwa herself stood behind the camera as a woman with an occupation, placing within the theme of “working women” both the work of photographed women and the work of the woman who photographed them^*5.

Dangerous Poisonous Flowers: first-person writing and time spent approaching lives

Published by Mikasa Shobō in 1957, Dangerous Poisonous Flowers is recorded in the National Diet Library catalogue as a 244-page book with 64 pages of plates, combining photographs with extended first-person prose and short captions^*7. The book begins by asking whether being a woman rather than a man was a disadvantage in taking photographs, treating the labor of a woman photographer not as a separate issue from the women she photographed but as part of the same problem^*8. Tokiwa’s first solo exhibition was praised for showing places men could not enter because she was a woman, but she was not comfortable with the implication that women photographers would be recognized only when they selected such subjects^*18. Her photography in the akasen was not intimate from the beginning. AWARE records that she first photographed women from behind objects, then began speaking to them because she wanted to approach their lives, and eventually photographed inside their rooms^*3. Yokohama Civic Art Gallery also describes how repeated visits to the same area helped her build relationships of trust^*4. Oroku’s Room, made indoors in 1956, is one example of this movement from street distance toward living space^*10. Her prose supplements the photographs with time that an image alone cannot show: how she entered the site, how she spoke with the women, and how her own resistance and judgments changed. MoMA Post’s examination of the copy in MoMA’s collection notes that the book moved from its first printing on October 20, 1957 to an eleventh printing by November 10, indicating that it reached readers beyond the audiences of photography journals and exhibitions^*8. What Tokiwa tried to communicate was not sex work as a sensational custom, but the women who worked, tired, rested, fell ill, and had hours hidden from customers as people with individual lives. By combining photographs with first-person prose, Dangerous Poisonous Flowers became both a record of the akasen and a photo-essay that let readers follow a photographer who admitted her own prejudices and changed her way of seeing through relationships with her subjects.

Intimacy and hidden cameras: the limits of approach

Tokiwa’s approach was not based on the same method or level of consent in every photograph. Yokohama Museum of Art’s text on Twilight in the Red-Light District explains that she blended into a Bon festival procession and secretly photographed women in the akasen^*9. In the Clinic, in the collection of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, is a 1956 work^*11. Based on the account in Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, MoMA Post reports that Tokiwa hid a camera under a white coat and posed as a doctor’s assistant when photographing in the clinic^*8. Tokiwa found meaning in photographing women’s lives and vulnerability outside the view of male customers, and in making visible the negative side of the prostitution system^*8. At the same time, the materials checked here do not establish how far the patients understood the conditions of photography and publication. Recent writing has described Tokiwa’s approach as an “empathetic gaze,” but within the same body of work intimacy produced by repeated visits coexists with methods that did not announce the act of photography^*8.

Protection and reorganization after the akasen

The Anti-Prostitution Act was enacted in 1956 and included both the punishment of acts that promoted prostitution and measures for protection and rehabilitation^*13. Tokiwa did not end her work with the closing of akasen businesses; she shifted attention to clinics and women’s protection projects. The sixteenth issue of the Yokohama Archives of History bulletin includes an article on photographs of postwar women’s protection projects in Kanagawa taken by Tokiwa^*12. Through this development, Working Women came to include not only the sites of sex work, but also women’s lives placed within inspection, treatment, protection, and rehabilitation.

From Yokohama to Okinawa: a subject continued across base towns

In 1959 Tokiwa spent an extended period in Okinawa under U.S. military administration and presented Okinawa no Bishō (Okinawa’s Faint Smile)^*1. The Yokohama Archives of History retrospective placed Yokohama’s akasen, Yokosuka, Okinawa, and women’s protection projects within a single account of her activity^*2. By expanding her locations from Yokohama to Okinawa, Tokiwa’s subject moved beyond the record of a single entertainment district toward multiple regions where military bases entered women’s work and daily life. Rather than recording only streets or institutional exteriors, she continued the theme of “working women” by following the time of women who worked and lived in those places.

Magazines, exhibitions, and television: the route to becoming a woman photographer

Tokiwa did not begin as an editor at a photography magazine. After working as an announcer at a communications company, she built her photographic practice through camera clubs and magazine submissions. Her first solo exhibition, Working Women, in 1956 and the publication of her photographs in the July issue of Camera brought public attention; the following year saw the publication of Dangerous Poisonous Flowers and a two-person exhibition with Imai Hisae^*1. An Aperture essay notes that Working Women appeared in the June 1957 issue of Fujin Kōron, and that women’s magazines became a major venue for the series^*18. Publication not only in photography journals but also in women’s magazines gave the work a route beyond the internal world of photography, toward general readers including working women themselves. In 1958, Tokiwa, Imai, and twelve other women photographers founded the Japan Women Photographers Association and held its first exhibition^*1. Tokiwa later photographed Yokosuka, Okinawa, and other towns with U.S. military bases, presented work in magazines and exhibitions, and produced the television film series Working Women from 1962 to 1965^*1. The process by which she established herself as a woman photographer was therefore not formed by a single photobook alone, but by sustained movement across magazines, solo exhibitions, general publishing, a women photographers’ organization, and moving images.

The Eyes of Ten and another route for women photographers

In 1957 Tokiwa participated in the first Eyes of Ten exhibition organized by Fukushima Tatsuo, showing work in the same context as Shōmei Tōmatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Eikoh Hosoe, and others^*14. The exhibition became an important step toward VIVO, but Tokiwa did not become a member of that group. Her path ran through a photobook from a general publisher, publication in women’s magazines, a two-person exhibition with Imai Hisae, the Japan Women Photographers Association, Yokohama-based reporting, and television film^*1. This history shows that postwar photography was not shaped only by avant-garde photographers’ groups; it was also expanded through publications addressing social problems, professional networks for women photographers, and records rooted in specific local histories.

Archives and international reconsideration

In 2018 prints, negatives, cameras, and other materials left by Tokiwa and Okumura Yasuhiro were donated to the Yokohama Archives of History, and the museum’s exhibition reconstructed Working Women, the akasen district, Oroku, Okinawa, and women’s protection projects as parts of one career^*2. The museum now publishes 159 photographs of postwar Yokohama in its official archive^*15. Aperture’s 2024 publication I’m So Happy You Are Here includes portfolios by twenty-five artists, together with artists’ writings, interviews, and bibliographies, offering a cross-generational framework for reconsidering women photographers in Japan^*16. In the 2025 Fotomuseum Den Haag exhibition, Tokiwa was also presented as part of an international project reconsidering how photography has represented women’s experiences and Japanese society^*17. Through Aperture’s publication and essays, her work is being reconsidered not only as testimony from the akasen district, but as a body of work connecting women’s labor, the professional formation of women photographers, photobooks and prose, and changing distances between photographer and subject^*18.