His parents divorced when he was about four, and he was brought up by strict grandparents and an uncle. As a child he resolved to become a painter; in his loneliness, painting was his one comfort. After leaving Otsu Prefectural Middle School in 1929 he moved to Tokyo and studied drawing in the Western painting section of the Kawabata Painting School. In 1931 he entered Takeji Fujishima’s class in the oil painting course of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He was drawn to Ryuzaburo Umehara, a painter with whom he could share the question of what oil painting by a Japanese should be. He showed at Umehara’s Kokugakai and was selected in his third year at the school. Graduating in 1936, he took a post as art teacher at Kutchan Middle School in Hokkaido. In 1938 he moved to Shimonoseki Girls’ High School in Yamaguchi Prefecture and married. In 1940 he came to know Ryuzaburo Umehara and the collector and dealer Shigetaro Fukushima and was elected a member of the Kokugakai; but in 1943 he was called up and posted to the small town of Hailar in Manchuria. After the defeat in 1945 he was interned in Siberia and set to forced labour for two years, living through the extremity in which his companions fell one after another from hunger, cold and overwork. After returning to Japan he showed “Burial”, based on his Siberian experience, at the Kokugakai exhibition, and afterwards showed work influenced by Cubism. Following a journey to Europe in 1956 he showed one work after another on that theme — the “Siberia Series”. In the 1960s he began to make small works with mother and child as their motif, and “toys” made from whatever was to hand. He also decorated Hagi ware and other pottery.