Toyomitsu Higa was born in Yomitan Village, Okinawa, in 1950 and graduated from the Department of Arts and Crafts at Ryukyu University. He began his career by participating in the establishment of Photo Plaza Aman Jaju Gallery in 1976. In 1997, he established a group to record the Ryukyu Islands and began the work of recording Okinawa's native language through video and photos. To date, he has recorded the oral statements of nearly 1,000 Okinawans. Since 2013, he has been publishing Okinawa’s critical magazine “時の眼-沖縄” and photo collections such as “赤いゴーヤー”, “Light Ruinamu no God”, and “骨の戦世”.
Consider Higa Toyomitsu's books of photographs, The Luminous Gods of Nanamui and The Red Bitter Gourd 1970-1972, alongside his documentary film War Stories Told in Shima Kutuba. At first, it seems each consists of "records" of three unrelated times and places. What links them is that none of the events recorded has been "historicized". The history of Okinawa is a "continuous present" that consists of several layers of time. By keeping his attention on the things that are in the process of occurring, Higa manages the extraordinary feat of recording actual events, while at the same time, energizing them. Perhaps he is best described as an exceptionally contemporary video anthropologist-cum-artist, rather than as a photographer.