442: Gyo Fujikawa fought to illustrate babies of all races and backgrounds

When you’re young and absorbing the big, frightening world, picture books can be foundational literature for a child’s development and empathy. Rudine Sims Bishop's 1990s essay “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” demonstrates an ethos of children’s books: “When there are enough books available that can act as both mirrors and windows for all our children, they will see that we can celebrate both our differences and our similarities.”

Decades before the publishing industry’s "#WeNeedDiverseBooks” movement, nisei writer-illustrator Gyo Fujikawa (1908-98) did exactly that in her work and was frequently credited for depicting multiracial harmony among babies in mainstream picture books.

Fujikawa was born in Berkeley, California to migrant laborer Hikozo and poet and labor rights activist Yū Fujikawa. As a child, she felt isolated as the only Japanese American girl in a predominantly white school. Luckily, her high school teacher noticed her talents and helped her successfully apply to the Chouinard Art Institute (known as CalArts today) in Los Angeles. Fujikawa subsequently studied brush drawing in Japan in 1932 and found her inspiration in artists Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Hiroshige and Sesshū Tōyō.

In the early 1940s, Walt Disney Studios hired Fujikawa for the advertising art department, and she designed promotional materials for the 1940 animated film Fantasia. According to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, she also took delight in identifying herself as Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actress, to get bigoted anti-Japanese suspicions off her back. In a 1994 interview with animation historian John Canemaker—archived in Walt’s People Volume 16: Talking Disney With the Artists Who Knew Him—Fujikawa recounts how Walt Disney, concerned with how World War II was impacting Japanese Americans, checked in on her. She told him she dealt with ignorant people like this: “I tell them the truth or I give them big lies, like half Chinese and half Japanese, or part Korean, part Chinese, and part Japanese.”

Newspaper pieces about Gyo Fujikawa from 1935 (left) and 1958.

CartoonBrew

She says Disney replied, “Why do you have to do that? For Christ sakes, you're an American citizen. Next time anybody asks you that, just tell them it’s none of their business.” She took Disney’s advice. Fujikawa’s account of her conversation with Disney also inspired Lloyd Suh’s one-act play Disney and Fujikawa. In the same interview with Canemaker, Fujikawa mentions being familiar with Asian American animators from Disney’s Golden Age, such as Ty Wong and Chris Ishii, the latter of whom was interned during World War II.

Because she was transferred to the Disney’s merchandise unit in New York, Fujikawa personally avoided the United States’ illegal and unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans, but the government sentenced her family to the Rohwer camp in Arkansas, where she visited them. “I felt guilty that I was free in New York and they were in camp,” she tells Canemaker in the book.

After designing for a pharmaceutical advertising agency, Fujikawa started freelancing full-time and produced front-cover illustrations for periodicals like Children's Digest. In 1951, she illustrated a new edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (the original copy was first published in 1885). After being paid a flat fee for the Stevenson edition, Fujikawa turned down future work that didn’t pay her royalties—true to the “know your worth” business adage and her mother’s labor activist background. “I just wouldn’t work for Golden Press because they didn’t pay well,” she tells Canemaker. She also boasts, “I was one of the first children’s book artists to demand royalties. They said they never heard of that.”

In 1963, Fujikawa found literary independence when she illustrated and wrote her first original book, Babies. This and her following books bore her signature gouache-watercolor pastel illustrations of cozy children with dotted eyes and rosy cheeks. They were uncorrupted, often tumbling into the joys of playtime and making new friends in bucolic environments of soft greens, tender snow, and bubbling streams. They also happened to be multiracial children, mainly white, Black, and light-skinned Asian children.

Keep in mind that Fujikawa rendered this picturesque interracial harmony while the Civil Rights Movement’s protests against segregation were happening. With Babies, the publishers, Grosset & Dunlap, tried to convince her to erase the Black children to appease sales in the segregated South, but she remained adamant that her books starred “an international set of babies–little black babies, Asian babies, all kinds of babies.” Published before the Civil Rights Act banned segregation, Babies proved to be a bestseller and sold more than two million copies. Fujikawa’s literary contributions include more than 50 children's books, translated into 17 languages and published in 22 countries.

A stamp designed by Gyo Fujikawa.

U.S. Postal Service; National Postal Museum

Her artistry also extended to stamps, including a 1960 stamp of the Washington Monument with cherry blossoms to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan trade agreement. In 1964, she drew another stamp with cherry blossom trees, this time at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

Fujikawa lived a long life. She died in New York at the age of 90. The New York Times obituary features her quote: “Although I have never had children of my own, and cannot say I had a particularly marvelous childhood, perhaps I can say I am still like a child myself. Part of me, I guess, never grew up.”