Iwamatsu was born September 21, 1908, in
Nejime,
Kimotsuki District, Kagoshima, and raised there on the southern coast of
Kyushu. His father was a country doctor who collected oriental art and encouraged art in his son. After studying for three years at Tokyo Fine Arts School (now the Faculty of Fine Arts,
Tokyo University of the Arts), Iwamatsu was expelled for insubordination and for missing a military drill. He then joined a group of progressive artists, sympathetic to the struggles of ordinary workers and opposed to the rise of
Japanese militarism. The antimilitarist movement in Japan was highly active at the time within many Japanese professional and crafts groups. Artists' posters protesting the Japanese aggression in China were widespread. Following the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, however, the Japanese government began heavy handed suppression of domestic dissent including the use of arrests and torture by the
Tokkō (Special Higher Police). Both Iwamatsu and his pregnant wife,
Tomoe, were imprisoned and brutalized for their
opposition to the militaristic government. In 1939, they left Japan for the United States so Iwamatsu could avoid conscription into the Japanese Army and so both Iwamatsu and Tomoe could study art. They left behind their son
Mako (born 1933). After
Pearl Harbor, Iwamatsu joined the U.S. Army and went to work as an artist for the
United States Office of War Information (OWI) and, later, for the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). It was then that he first used the pseudonym Taro Yashima, out of fear that there would be repercussions for Mako and other family members if the Japanese government knew of his employment. After the war, he and his wife were granted
permanent resident status by an act of the
U.S. Congress. Soon after they had another child, Momo, while living in New York City. Iwamatsu was able to return to Japan and bring Mako back to the United States in 1949. ==Career as illustrator and author==