(b Kumamoto Prefect., 23 Dec 1917). Japanese printmaker. He studied in the department of oil painting at the Tokyo Art School (now Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music) from 1934 to 1939, when he was conscripted into military service; in 1940 he was dispatched to China. Despite a brief military discharge, he was reconscripted but was sent home in 1945 because of his injuries. In 1949 he became a member of the Jiyu bijutsuka kyokai (Independent Artists’ Association), and he continued to exhibit with them until leaving the group in 1959. He gained recognition with the series Elegy of the New Recruits, which he worked on from 1950. The series was based on the experiences that occurred to one soldier during his military service. Unable to erase the experiences both of military service that paralleled his own suffering and of the absolute obedience and absurdity of the miserable conditions that characterized the war, he expressed these sentiments in his work in monochromatic etchings. In 1956 Hamada exhibited Sentry, a representative piece from the series Elegy of the New Recruits (1951), for which he received a prize. From that time the humanistic strain as illustrated in this series remained part of his work. He continued to create works that are sarcastic and that occasionally are criticisms containing jokes and scathing comments towards society and government. In 1975 the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art opened an exhibition of his etchings, which displayed all 99 of his works produced between 1938 and 1975.

• Hamada, Chimei
  • Japan, §IX, 3(iii)(g): Prints, after c 1900
  • Japan, §IX, 3(iii)(g): Prints, after c 1900