Iwase Yoshiyuki (1904-2001)
岩瀬禎之

Iwase Yoshiyuki (1904 –2001), born in 1904 in Onjuku, a fishing village on Pacific side of the Chiba peninsula, which encloses Tokyo Bay on the northeast. After graduating from Meiji University Law School in 1924, he took up his lifelong pursuits, heading the family sake distillery and documenting the receding traditions of costal Japan. In the late 1920s, young Yoshiyuki received an early Kodak camera as a gift. Since the main livelihood of the town came from the sea, he gravitated there, and soon found a passion for “the simple, and even primitive beauty” of ama divers-girls and women who harvested seaweed, turban shells and abalone from beneath the coastal waters.
His first masterpiece, Around the Fire, shot in 1931, evokes the physical demands of such work. Water temperatures are minimally bearable only between June and September. Large loads were impossible to haul up in strong currents, so tides also had to be just right, limiting diving days to about twenty a year. Ama divers went out three times a day, requiring extensive eating and warming at the fireside between runs. A good harvest required long, cold dives, up to four minutes of hard underwater work on a single lungful of air, so they had to develop and maintain substantial body fat to guard against hypothermia. As such, ama divers were paid enormous salaries, often making more a few week season than the men of the village made in a year. When he began shooting in the late 1920s, there were several hundred ama divers active in the seven harbours of the Iwawada coast (Kohaduki, Oohaduki, Futamata, Konado, Tajiri, Koura and Nagahama). By the late 1960s, they had disappeared. His photography was the most comprehensive document of ama divers ever produced.
As Mr. Iwase’s fame grew, he added to his equipment, alternating between a bellows camera, a Super Six, a Sohoflex and a Rollei. His technique also evolved through his association with other important photographers such as Asano Kiichi, Sugiyama Kira, Hayashi Tadahiko and Akiyama Shotaro. His range of subjects also broadened to include local fisherman and other scenes from his native village and coast. He became a pioneer of the Japanese modernist nude and documented traditional culture in post-war Japan.
Beginning in 1933, he had many solo exhibitions including six in Chiba, one at the Ginza Matsuya Gallery, another at the Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre (1950). In 1976, he was invited to participate in the 100 Years Photo Exhibition at the Seibu Gallery in Tokyo, sponsored by the Photographic Society of Japan. He received numerous prizes for his work, including the 2nd prize in the Rollei International Contest (1949) for Thundering Sea Spray and the Prime Minister’s Prize at the Japan Photo Exposition in (1957) for Konbu Harvest. His work is held in many collections throughout Japan, the most important of which is that of the Tokyo Prefectural Museum of Photography.
Mr. Iwase was a family man, sharing a legendary love with his wife of more than 60 years. He passed away in 2001 at the age of 97, survived by two sons. In his home town of Onjuku, he is fondly remembered as a village elder and prominent contributor to the local folk museum. Two monographs of his work have been published in Japanese, the first in 1983, dealing only with ama divers, by a private press, the second, an expanded version, by Maruzen in 2002.

Selection of Exhibitions, Prizes, and Awards:
1931    “International Photographic Salon”, Tokyo (Awarded)
1933    Exhibition: Gallery Ginza Matsuya, Tokyo
1949    Rollei Photographic Competiton, Tokyo. Iwase receives the second price.
1950    Exhibition in the Ernie Pyle Theatre (now: Takaruzuka Theatre), Tokyo
1957    “International Photographic Exhibition” organized by “Mainichi Newspaper” Iwase gets awarded with the  Prime Minister’s Prize”.
1983    Exhibition: “50 years of Women Ama Divers”, Tokyo (see publication below)

Publications
1936    in: グラフィック(Graphic), September 1936
1957    in: Strache, Wolf (Ed.), Hiroschi Ohchi und Katsuji Fukuda (Contributors), Yoshito Harada (Introduction): Japan. Fernes Land. , Frankfurt/Main 1957, illustration 28 and 29. With 114 mostly full page photographs by Japanese photographers (Shoji Ueda, Seiko Wada, Toshio Iwano, Toshiji Mukai, Yoshiyuki Iwase, Koichi Sako, Kiyoshi Takao, Takeno Tamura, Yoshio Funakoshi et al.)
1983    海女の群像―千葉 御宿 (Groups of Women Ama Divers 1931-1964), Onjuku 1983.
2002    海女の群像―千葉 御宿 (Groups of Women Ama Divers 1931-1964), Tokyo (Maruzen) 2002. With texts by Kira Sugiyama, Akiyama Shotaro, Eiichiro Kanai, Misao Ando, Mitsuru Nishimura. (Second Edition)
2005    日本の写真家 近代写真史を彩った人と伝記・作品集目録 (Biographic Dictionary of Japanese Photography), published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo 2005, No. 87. 岩瀬禎之 1904-2001 IWASE Yoshiyuki