Dr. Kyo Koike

Japanese-American, 1878 - 1947

BiographyDr. Kyo Koike was born in 1878 in Shimane, Japan, and died in 1947 in Seattle, Washington. He was the central figure of the Seattle Camera Club, and an internationally-renowned Pictorialist photographer.

Dr. Koike was trained by his father in Chinese herbal medicine and attended Western medical school before immigrating to Seattle in 1916. His picture-making began in Japan, but over the course of a decade in Seattle, he earned dozens of photo awards, mounted solo exhibitions in several prominent venues across the U.S., and periodically wrote for photography magazines as a critic and columnist. He founded the Seattle Camera Club in 1924 (along with Hiromu Kira and 39 other initial members) and served as its first chairman and permanent editor of its weekly, bi-lingual newsletter: Notan. Though the SCC was majority Japanese-American, it attracted and welcomed a multi-ethnic cohort that included Ella McBride, Wayne Albee, and Virna Haffer.

Through Notan and other publications, Dr. Koike was a vocal spokesperson for Japanese-American photographers, taking on racist critics who claimed that artists of Japanese heritage shouldn’t be included in “American” salons, and encouraging his fellow issei and nisei to embrace “our peculiar point of view.” A man of many talents, he was also a poet, naturalist and mountaineer.

In 1942, Dr. Koike was interned in Minidoka, Idaho. In addition to serving—at age 64—as the camp’s lead medical staff, he created a haiku club that included in 158 poets. The concentration camp took an irreparable toll on his health however, and he died only two years after being released.

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