Ageless Beauty : Portraits: Photographer captures a sense of power in Japan’s centenarians, who are unbowed by their frailty.

Photographer Shoichi Ono is only 31. But he finds beauty and poetry in the lives of his centenarian subjects. “I have the impression that these people have the universe in their time,” he said. “Light and life.”

Light, in fact, is what drew the free-lance photographer to spend two years photographing people more than 100 years old, from all over Japan.

Once he saw a cedar said to be 7,200 years old. What impressed him the most, he said, was imagining the light the tree must have been bathed in over the centuries.

In his collection of portraits of 104 centenarians, Ono looks for that light.

To find his subjects, Ono scoured newspapers in libraries, finding the names of local centenarians. Japan leads the world in life expectancy, with nearly 6,000 citizens aged 100 and over.

He spent weeks with some subjects, visiting their homes, talking to their families. He learned their lives; he spent time where they had spent theirs.

Ono, who has the soft manner and contemplative air of a philosopher, said he was humbled by his subjects’ grace and fascinated by their life stories. But the strongest impression, he said, was a sense of power beyond human reach in the frailest bodies.

Taken with a 4x5 view camera, Ono’s portraits speak of light and shadow. In a century-long life in Japan, his subjects have lived through war, deprivation and finally prosperity.

Death is an unacknowledged companion, but most of his subjects have enjoyed extraordinarily good health. Ono attributes his subjects’ longevity to their attachments to friends and relations, and their pleasure in life.

Even small tasks, like weeding the garden or chanting a sutra, give a sense of meaning, he said. One of his subjects plays gateball, a kind of croquet. That same man told Ono he likes to hang out with younger people.

“And he is talking about people in their 70s,” said Ono.

His past works include a series of photos of a dancer, Kazuo Ohno, and a collection of pictures of a Tokyo garbage dump. For his next project, Ono wants to photograph the centenarians with their great-great-grandchildren.

He said he is refreshed by the freedom and fearlessness of his subjects.

“One guy told me, ‘Once you hit 100, there is nothing to fear at all,’ ” he said.