Teruko Hiramatsu's father was blessed with designing talent. He engaged in retail display design in Asakusa, a progressive precinct of Tokyo during the Taisho era of the 1910s. When Teruko was born, her father said that he desired her to study in France. However, when Teruko was 2 years old, her father died in the Great Kanto Earthquake and she parted from her mother to be brought up by grandparents in a mountain village of Okayama. The place was quite a rural area contrastive with Asakusa, the most civilized district in the Japan of those days.
Teruko studied painting by self-education while growing up in the bucolic countryside. She issued a collection of works while she lived there. The collection included mostly plant sketches similar to those in botanical reference books, but also included sketches of insects such as butterflies and dragonflies, rodents, crustaceans and other subjects.
It can be quickly observed that these are not common sketches from life. The human eye automatically focuses on the object it wants to see. Therefore, if all details are depicted uniformly, the result will be a mere monotonous pictorial record. However, in this collection of works, perspective, movement and presence of object are expressed by intentionally obscuring the areas not of interest. Her perspective drawing adds depth and atmosphere to the work. This atmosphere and sense of perspective became her special feature, which will be explained later in this text.