Junko Yokota is legally blind in one eye. At first, her parents thought she was just a clumsy child who occasionally bumped into things.
Yokota said it wasn’t common to test children’s eyesight in the 1950s and 1960s, so nobody thought much of it until she had to read in school. Her doctors patched her stronger eye, hoping that the bad eye would eventually grow to compensate, but it never developed.
“I see the world two-dimensionally most of the time,” she said. “So I think I’ve always been fascinated by that aspect of wanting to see and appreciating seeing.”
Now, the Evanston-based academic and creative spends her days in pursuit of photography, capturing streets, people and vistas across the world.
Yokota bought her first DSLR camera to document a 2013 trip to the Galapagos Islands with her late husband, education Prof. William Teale of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and some friends. She set the camera settings to automatic and began snapping away.
However, her artistic journey started much earlier. Yokota has donned many hats throughout her lifetime — a university academic studying children’s literature, an elementary classroom teacher and a librarian — but she has long harbored a passion for visual storytelling.
When Yokota was 10 years old, her father gifted her an Olympus Pen-EE. With the SLR camera, she took pictures of family and friends, vacations and whatever was in front of her. Since the camera was half-frame, she could fit twice as many photographs into a standard roll of film.
“I wouldn’t say they were particularly artistic,” Yokota said of her first pictures, “but I think I’ve always been keenly attracted to the visual world.”
In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yokota never left the confines of her home. Instead, she spent the year taking pictures of the wildlife that frequented her backyard.
During that time, John Liberty, the owner of Gracie’s, a local women’s clothing and jewelry shop, delivered some orders for Yokota.
“As things loosened up with COVID, we met on that porch with masks, and I would drop things off, but we would chat a little bit, and she happened to mention that she was taking photographs of birds in her yard,” Liberty said.
Just a few years later, Yokota’s photographs adorned the walls of Gracie’s.
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Born in Tokyo to a family of diplomats and educators, Yokota grew up on an American military base in Okinawa, where her father worked as a civilian employee for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. There, Yokota attended English-language schools run by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Both sides of her family were “very international in outlook,” Yokota said. She pointed toward her maternal grandfather who, as a banker involved in internationalizing Asian banking systems in the early 20th century, moved his family to Shanghai in the 1920s.
Yokota’s grandfather worked with Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China, to help organize funding for the 1911 Revolution, which ended China’s last dynasty.
When the Communists won the Chinese Civil War, her mother’s family was forced to move back to Japan.
After high school, Yokota moved to the United States on her own. Originally, she planned on attending George Washington University, where she had accepted a scholarship.
However, when the University found out Yokota was a woman, it rescinded her scholarship. At that time, Yokota’s father had also recently passed away, prompting her family to move back to Tokyo.
“We were suddenly finding ourselves returning to Tokyo with no money, no house, no furniture,” Yokota said, “I decided that a guaranteed college four-year term was my ideal, so I went to Baylor.”
Yokota graduated from Baylor University in 1979 with a degree in elementary education. She said she stayed in the United States because Japan in the 1970s and 80s provided few opportunities for women to combine a “fully developed life as a career woman” and a family.
She received a master’s degree in literacy education in 1980, again from Baylor, before completing a PhD in the same field from the University of North Texas in 1988.
Yokota knew early on that she wanted to work with children. Both of her grandfathers were college professors after their careers in diplomacy. Her grandmother ran a kindergarten, and her uncle is a professor of international law in Japan.
“I was very interested in the lives of children. I babysat every opportunity I could,” she said. “I was interested in how children’s minds develop, what childhood meant, and all of that.”
From 1979 to 1980, Yokota worked as an elementary school teacher in Waco, Texas, before moving to Arlington to work from 1980 to 1989. During her last two years in Arlington, she was a school librarian.
In 1989, Yokota accepted a position as a literacy professor at the University of Northern Iowa, where she taught for five years before finally moving to Chicago’s National Louis University.
Now, Yokota is a professor emeritus of reading and language at NLU, where she directs the Center for Teaching through Children’s Books.
Throughout her academic career, Yokota has spoken at conferences worldwide, served on the Caldecott and Newbery Award committees and was the president of the U.S. National Section of the International Board on Books for Young People.
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After her trip to the Galapagos, Yokota poured significant time into her passion for photography, joining online communities and challenges to self-study the craft.
Her first real commitment was 365 Project, an online platform where members commit to taking a picture a day for a year. Yokota missed only two days the first year she participated and considers this her first artistic community.
“My photography community has expanded to where I now have friends from many different walks of life, but we’re all keenly interested in figuring out how to capture the beauty of the world around us,” Yokota said.
Yokota has met more than 20 people from the platform in person, arranging meet-ups in cities as far as Sydney and Berlin. She said photography has allowed her to bond with friends that she would not have met within her professional community, such as company executives and police detectives.
Yokota believes Evanston Made, an Evanston non-profit that provides programming in the local creative community, to be the nexus for artists located near the shores of Lake Michigan.
“I think that what they do on behalf of the artists in Evanston is really a work of dedicated commitment and love and community building,” Yokota said.
Since 2022, Yokota has served on the board of FreshLens Chicago, a non-profit that provides free photography courses for under-resourced Chicago students.
FreshLens founder and executive director Shirley Nannini met Yokota in 2021. She said Yokota’s aesthetic was advanced from the beginning, given that she spent her academic career working with imagery.
“Photography is an interesting medium, right?” Nannini said. “It’s an expression without words. And so I really feel like her imagery really transports you to where she’s taken it.”
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Prof. Emeritus Miriam Martinez from the University of Texas at San Antonio has been a collaborator and friend of Yokota since the 1990s. They worked together to write two textbooks on children’s literature.
Martinez said Yokota was one of the first to examine picture books and illustrations for their role in storytelling, as opposed to the multimodal analysis other researchers were focused on.
“She really picked up on it and thought about what that means for teachers (and we service teachers), and what they need to know if they’re going to engage children in picture books,” Martinez said.
In her academic career, Yokota has held several fellowships, including being a Fulbright Scholar in Poland and undertaking research fellowships in Munich and Berlin. However, she wanted to pursue artistic fellowships to grow her craft as well.
With no official photography credentials and no formal art schooling to apply for these opportunities, she looked to demonstrate her abilities and interest in other ways.
“Those kinds of opportunities enrich your life, because you step outside of your everydayness and immerse yourself totally into that world, and you grow in ways that are exponential,” Yokota said.
Two years ago, Yokota began exhibiting her work to build a photography CV. Most recently, Yokota had a solo exhibition titled “Thin Spaces” at Gracie’s in December 2024.
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During a recent trip to Cuba, Yokota photographed the Cuban National Ballet alongside a married couple of photographers. The husband works with street photography, and the wife is a photographer for the National Ballet.
Yokota picked 10 shots from the hour they spent photographing the ballerinas for her friends to review.
“(The couple) got into a discussion — quite heated, I might say — about the fact that he was looking at it from an artistic feedback point of view. And she wanted the ballet positions that I was photographing to be correct,” Yokota said. “He was looking to evoke something that was dynamic and had a mood.”
Yokota was just looking for a visually interesting pose. The fact that all three photographers aimed to capture something different in a single scene struck Yokota.
“As artists, you see and you create and you respond by what your personal goals are, and I think I’m still developing what that might mean for me,” Yokota said. “I’m very new at looking at all this from a position of being a creator instead of a consumer and analyzer.”
At Yokota’s first professional photography review, she walked out of the critique session, feeling frustrated by the reviewer’s repeated response: “I don’t get the point of your work.”
That experience pushed her to rethink what she was doing and better express the heart of her creative outlets. In that moment, Yokota didn’t have a response ready.
Afterward, she wrote the reviewer a thank you note.
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In 2012, Yokota retired from teaching on a University package that included two more salaried years. During that period, she kept busy with international speaking and consulting commitments and originally planned to apply for another professorship.
However, her husband prompted her to reconsider whether she really wanted to return to academia. In the end, Yokota chose to continue juggling her photography and commitments outside of teaching.
Although she retired from university work over a decade ago, she is still involved in the children’s literature world, serving on panels, speaking at conferences and conducting research.
Yokota has traveled all over the world, visiting more than 50 countries. She has taken photography trips to Namibia, Vietnam and Patagonia, among other places.
On trips to Argentina and Mexico that Martinez took alongside Yokota and her late husband, Martinez took note of Yokota’s “obvious interest in photography” and the production of local art.
“Travel is a key component of what I do, but what I’m trying to do more is less of, ‘Oh, beautiful building, but rather, how does it feel for me to be somewhere?’” Yokota said.
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In her spare time, Yokota volunteers at the Japanese program at Evanston Township High School, where she has helped organize and chaperone trips to Japan for the past 20 years.
Recently, Yokota was invited to participate in “Reservoir,” a project with the Los Angeles Center of Photography, exploring “the global crisis of loneliness.” She will work with a cohort under George Nobechi, a bilingual and bicultural photographer.
“He’s having us explore concepts that are Japanese as well as international,” Yokota said. “And all of these are going to be things that are both a part of my Japanese identity as well as our identity as humans.”
Over the coming months, she plans to immerse herself in this new exploration. Already, Yokota’s friends have begun sharing books, poetry, music and articles that they associate with loneliness. According to Yokota, “Reservoir” will be on exhibition in the first few months of 2026.
In the meantime, Yokota is scheduled to serve as a jury member for the Bratislava International Book Festival and speak in Japan. After this year, she plans to cut back on her academic commitments so she can dedicate more time to her photography.
“I want to explore the world by being fascinated by what I see,” Yokota said. “I don’t like to do tours and things like that when I travel, because I don’t want someone else to tell me what’s interesting. I want to discover on my own.”
Email: yong-yuhuang2026@u.northwestern.edu
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