Gyo Fujikawa

Gyo Fujikawa (November 3, 1908 – November 26, 1998) was an American illustrator and children's book author. A prolific creator of more than 50 books for children, her work is regularly in reprint and has been translated into 17 languages and published in 22 countries. Her most popular books, Babies and Baby Animals, have sold over 1.7 million copies in the U.S.^[2] Fujikawa is recognized for being the earliest mainstream illustrator of picture books to include children of many races in her work, before it became common to do so.^[3][4][5]

Biography

Page from Babies, Grosset & Dunlap, 1963.

Gyo Fujikawa was born in Berkeley, California, to Japanese parents, Hikozō and Yūko Fujikawa (藤川幽子).^[1] The masculine name, Gyo (pronounced "ghee-o"), is after a Chinese emperor her father admired.

Gyo Fujikawa moved to Los Angeles to attend Chouinard Art Institute in 1926, having received a scholarship, and befriended Japanese dancer Michio Ito and many fellow Nisei writers and artists.^[6] After graduating and spending a year in Japan, she was on the Chouinard faculty from 1933-37.^[6][7] She worked for the Walt Disney Company in California as a promotional artist, before moving to New York in 1941. Fujikawa avoided the forced internment of West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II as she was living in New York at the time. Her family, however, spent the war in the concentration camp at Rohwer, Arkansas.^[6] From 1943-51 she worked for pharmaceutical advertising agency William Douglas McAdams.

In 1951 Fujikawa became a full-time freelancer, producing a dozen front-cover illustrations for Children's Digest and other periodicals, and about five years later was approached by juvenile editor Debra Dorfman at Grosset & Dunlap to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses". This was her first published children's book, in 1957. Babies, the first book both written and illustrated by Fujikawa in 1963, was also one of the earliest children's books to use multi-racial characters, a consistent feature across her body of work.

Fujikawa's books have been reprinted for mass-market and published worldwide. Her most popular books, Babies, Baby Animals, A to Z Picture Book and Oh!, What A Busy Day!, unfailingly represent a happy, detailed version of childhood. Her joyous illustrations remain sweet and nostalgic, without ever becoming overly saccharine. Her paintings of children are recognizable for round happy faces, rosy cheeks and simple dot eyes. Discussing her respect for her audience, she said:

"In illustrating for children, what I relish most is trying to satisfy the constant question in the back of my mind--will this picture capture a child's imagination? What can I do to enhance it further? Does it help to tell a story? I am far from being successful (whatever that means), but I am ever so grateful to small readers who find 'something' in any book of mine."

Fujikawa died on November 26, 1998, in New York Hospital. Although she had been engaged at the age of 19, she never married.^[8]

Other work

Fujikawa's notable commercial clients included Upjohn Company vitamins, Beech-Nut baby food and Eskimo Pie, creating the round-faced child icon for the ice cream treat. She created six stamps for the United States Post Office, including the 1997 32¢ "yellow rose" self-adhesive stamp and the United States-Japan Treaty ratification centenary stamp of 1960.^[8] Fujikawa was a life member of the Society of Illustrators.^[9]

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  United States-Japan Treaty centenary stamp

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  Plant for a More Beautiful America Cherry Blossom stamp

Bibliography

Written and illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa

Illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa

• I Like Automobiles, 1931, by Dorothy Walter Baruch
• A Child's Garden of Verses, 1957, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Night Before Christmas, 1961, by Clement C. Moore
• Mother Goose, 1968
• A Child's Book of Poems, 1969
• Fairy Tales and Fables, 1970
• Poems for Children, 1980
• Baby Mother Goose, 1989
• Poems for Small Friends, 1989

References