Shinobu Kanazawa, 51, pleaded guilty to three charges, including the possession and transmission of child pornography, and using a carriage service in an offensive manner.

The former teacher, who left his school before the subject offences were committed, was sentenced in the ACT Supreme Court on Monday.

The court heard he had been viewing exploitation material almost daily from 2006 until the time of his arrest in 2012.

But the offences he is charged with stem from 2011 and 2012, which relate to hundreds of explicit images.

The majority of those images were deemed to be in the least serious category in a national scale of child pornography.

In March 2011, Kanazawa registered with a photograph hosting website, posting that he only liked ''girls five to 14 years old''.

He indicated he was happy to swap ''p for p'', which he understood to mean password for password.

Kanazawa later uploaded 12 photographs of a girl that he took covertly.

In September last year, Kanazawa's home was raided by police, who located his laptop and other items such as hard drives.

They stopped Kanazawa at the airport, where he was about to leave for a two week holiday to Japan.

He made full admissions to police, and helped facilitate the course of justice, the court heard.

Kanazawa - also a former ambassador for the Australian-Japanese alliance and for the Nara-Canberra sister city program - gave evidence about his feelings of remorse and guilt on Monday morning.

He said he was under stress from his teaching job at the time of the offences.

But he told the court he would "never" reoffend, and felt very guilty, and very sorry to all the people who trusted him.

"I feel it's a horrible material, a very immoral thing," Kanazawa said.

"I do think it has victims, the children in the pictures, they were the victims of whoever produced them, whoever took them," he said.

He told the court he knew how hard it was to remove the pictures off the internet, once they were uploaded.

"That means those children have to live with them for the rest of their life, so the children are the victims," he said.

Kanazawa was handed a combination of prison sentences on Monday, which were fully suspended.

Chief Justice Helen Murrell put him on two good behaviour-type orders, which will require him to undergo counselling, among other things.

Chief Justice Murrell said, regrettably, the volume of images was low compared to other cases, while noting it was not a ''trivial number''.

She said she was impressed with Kanazawa's evidence and his insight into his offending behaviour, finding he was a low risk of reoffending.

But she noted that his stress and depression were ''no excuse for allowing one's moral compass to waver''.

The court heard he had already lost a great deal because of his crimes, including his jobs, reputation, and income.

Kanazawa said earlier on Monday he had sought counselling, which was helping him develop strategies to cope with stress.

He said he did not sell or pay for the images, or show them to anyone else.

"It's a horrible experience, but before that I feel sorry for these victims as well as my family, who are affected emotionally," Kanazawa said.

"My behaviour caused so much trouble for everyone," he said.

The court heard the offender was raised in a rigid, inflexible environment in Japan, which had an impact on his personality.

He was described as ''introverted, introspective'' and ''unassertive and quiet''.