She worked in a variety of media, including collage, box assemblage, oil paintings, woodblock prints and drawings.
[1] After her family returned to Japan in the late 1930’s, she attended Kobe College and studied with the painter Ryōhei Koiso.
As a member of Demokrāto, she made the acquaintance of, among others, art critic Sadajirō Kubo and poet Shūzō Takiguchi,[3] whose poems, together with a portfolio of original prints, including Uchima’s, appeared in a 1954 limited edition work titled "Sphinx."
That year she co-founded, with Chizuko Yoshida, Reika Iwami and others, the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai (Japanese Women’s Print Association).
In the mid-1960’s, she turned to collage as a primary medium[1] and, later, also produced box assemblages, using “objects as disparate as antique dolls, postage stamps, seashells, feathers and miniature angelic figures, each with a unique memory and history arranged into a ‘poetic theater’ which tells the story of times gone by and the impermanence of life.” [5] She regularly exhibited her collage and assemblage work in solo and group shows in New York and Japan.