Aramasa Taku

Who is Aramasa Taku?

Taku Aramasa is a Japanese photographer.

Born in Tokyo on 15 August 1936, Aramasa moved with his family to Manchukuo in 1940. In 1948 he moved to Sakata, Yamagata. He graduated from Musashino Art School in 1960, and set up a design company in which he was an art director, but became a freelance in 1970. He worked as a fashion photographer in Paris from 1973 to 1976. In 1980 he met his parents, from whom he had been separated, and started work on a photographic contribution to the effort of reuniting Japanese war orphans and their biological parents. This work branched into the photography of people of Japanese descent in Hawai'i and South America.

A Portrait of Japanese Immigrants to South America won the Domon Ken Award in 1986; Aramasa subsequently won various other awards.

Aramasa has taught at Musashino Art University from 1993.