His health was not good, and he is said to have been nudged toward ophthalmology by his own professor, who believed that the relatively stable working hours of an ophthalmologist would be better for Toriyama.
Toriyama was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class, in 1971, and Upper Fourth Rank (正四位), in 1994.
[4] Ryūichi Kaneko points out that the work of JPS changed with the times: from a start that rejected certain painterly influences on photography but that embraced the subject-matter and composition of traditional Japanese aesthetics, it moved to include the portrayal of urban scenes and fragments.
Kaneko says that, influenced by Rosō Fukuhara, Toriyama went further; for example, in his photography of plants "his emphasis on the sculptural qualities of leaves, stems, and branches is fresh even today"; further, that his style is similar to that of Shōji Ueda, Akira Nomura, and other photographers of the generation who emerged in the late 1930s and are thought of as modernists rather than pictorialists.
[5] Following this, Toriyama's family and ophthalmologists from Showa University discovered further large numbers of photographs and had selections of these published.