[6] Noda is most well-known for his visual autobiographical works done as a series of woodblock, print, and silkscreened diary entries that capture moments in daily life.

Personal snapshots are rigorously reworked to become subtle mementos of universal significance: ‘what’s in a life?’ we are constantly prompted to ask.

It is a visual autobiography and the motif is a comment on his daily life - his family, people he knows, his children’s growth and scenery along his way.

[49][50] On the concept of visual autobiography, Robert Flynn Johnson stated, "To think that one's life is important enough to make it the focus of one's art can be an act of pure folly and egotistical pride or it can involve a humbling and sincere self-examination that draw on observation of small universal truths.

It is clear that in a career of nearly forty years of creating an artistic world made at paper and ink, Tetsuya Noda has followed the latter, quieter path.

In 2016, a newspaper pointed out "In this era of social networking, it isn’t unusual for our friends to frequently post photos of the mundane happenings of our lives—a laughing baby, a just-read book, our lunch, a selfie—on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat.

But for renowned contemporary Japanese artist Tetsuya Noda, documenting the ordinary details of his daily life is something he has done for almost 50 years.

"[52] When asked about how he found his theme; "Diary as an opportunity", he replied, "at the university I was not at all satisfied with the assignment of painting nudes, it did not seem the right way to express myself."

Regardless of their minimal images, his works during this period reveal a further deepening of his expression that enriched the viewers' impression and their lingering memory.

Rather, the works of Noda from that era are pictures that utilized printing, with the aim of reaching into the minds and consciousness of the viewers, through their going back and forth between sets of ideas: the usual and the unusual, the individual and the universal, and reality and fiction.

Next Noda takes a sheet of handmade Japanese paper which he uses for all of his prints and applies subtle color through traditional woodblock technique.

In 1998 Noda came to Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies to teach mokuhanga to New York area printmakers.

"[58] Lawrence Smith, formerly Keeper of Japanese Antiquities at The British Museum wrote, "He is a master in at least four artistic genres , all of them closely related to painting.

[51] Steven Co, art collector wrote, "Tetsuya Noda’s Diary Series is a visual map of temporal, personal, experiential, and lyrical moments.

The result and effect are quiet and understated accounts of memories revisited, reassessed, and repeatedly asserted through this labor-intensive process.

Ehrlich stated that, "Noda Tetsuya’s large-scale diary pages based on family photographs, with their seemingly mundane, yet resonant, themes."

"[66] Emmanuel Madec, on his analysis of Tetsuya Noda's work, the photographer and curator wrote, "At first sight, his approach is that of a diarist.

Diary; Feb. 14th '92 shows us an ashtray cluttered with many cigarette butts, which obviously is of great triviality; but the point of view adopted for the photograph makes it graphically remarkable.

Noda's images thus pose as hybrids, the fruit of interbreeding between photography and engraving, propitious to probing into the profound essence of existence.

"[67] Joey Ho Chong I, art curator, wrote "Noda's Diary series reminds me of an adapted quote from Qing dynasty poet ZhaWeiren: what used to be the zither, chess, wine and flowers in calligraphy and painting; is now the rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea.

Known for being a representative of the long tradition of printmaking in Japan, and as an innovator for the further development of the long-practiced genre, Noda's work combines photography, traditional Japanese woodblock printing, mimeograph duplication and silkscreen printing in a self-invented and precisely controlled process of layering... Thematically, Noda represents landscapes, domestic scenes and still-lifes, as well as - and more importantly - portraits of himself, family and friends, which are markers of specific moments in time, such as the more recent diary illustrations for March 13th and May 10th, created during the pandemic.