Background
Dr. Kyo Koike was born on February 11, 1878, in Shimane Prefecture, Japan.
naturalist Photographer physician poet
Dr. Kyo Koike was born on February 11, 1878, in Shimane Prefecture, Japan.
Kyo trained as a physician in Japan
Dr. Koike set up medical offices in Seattle upon his arrival there in 1917. He soon took up photography and from then on devoted himself to the craft. Incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, after Pearl Harbor, he served as the camp doctor. After returning to Seattle, Koike continued to practice both medicine and photography. He published his photographs in various journals in Germany, The Netherlands, France, Poland, England, and America, including American Photographer, Camera, American Annual of Photography, Salon Internationale d’Art, Pictorial Photography of America and Photofreund.
Under the pen name of Banjin, Koike contributed poetry to Japanese publications. He also translated some thirty volumes of Japanese literature into English between 1919 and 1924, was a stamp collector, and collected and classified wildflowers from the Cascades and Mt. Rainier area.
In 1923 Koike co-founded the Seattle Camera Club, editing its bilingual monthly bulletin, Notan (“dark and light"), from 1923 to 1929, when the club ceased to exist. Kyo founded the still-functioning Rainier Ginsha, a haiku society, in 1934, and served as a teacher and poet.
Koike was a pictorialist whose work was close to that of the modernists. His photography was exhibited in salons all over the European continent and the United States.