The American Picture Book's Unsung Parent: Japan

New York Times

28-03-2025

In 1938, when the American Library Association introduced the world's first award for children's book art, it named its prize the Randolph Caldecott Medal, for one of Victorian England's most celebrated illustrators, and stipulated that only a U.S. citizen or resident could win. The point was made. America's illustrators owed Mother England gratitude for the glorious picture books created there in past decades, and now the time had come for artists here to put their stamp on the genre. Missing from this Anglophile version of the American picture book's origin story was any mention of the seminal role played by the artists and publishers from another of the world's great visual narrative traditions: Japan's.
Illustrated children's books that blend instruction and delight appeared, independently of one another, in two thriving commercial cities half a world apart: London and Edo (now Tokyo). In both burgeoning urban centers, ambitious middle-class parents embraced such books as steppingstones on their children's path to literacy and a better life.
Japan's earliest illustrated storybooks, from the late 1600s, predated the West's by more than 50 years and were an offshoot of Japan's venerable printmaking tradition. Because these paperbound books were printed from woodblocks on which pictures and text were combined in seamless compositions, they tended to be more animated design-wise than their first English counterparts, whose movable type made for a more efficient printing process but a less fluid result.
Edo during those years remained largely closed to the West, but after U.S. Navy warships steamed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay in 1853 and forcibly opened trade and diplomatic relations, cultural exchanges multiplied. Ukiyo-e prints like those exhibited in Paris in 1867 likely inspired Randolph Caldecott's less-is-more aesthetic and dynamic renderings of figures in motion, unveiled in his experimental 'toy' books. It was those bold and distinctly un-Victorian approaches that prompted Maurice Sendak to hail Caldecott as the modern picture book's veritable inventor — and to regard him as his own indispensable role model.
Among the first Japanese picture books to reach U.S. shores was a series of keepsake volumes from the 1880s featuring traditional tales such as 'Momotaro, or Little Peachling' and 'The Hare of Inaba.' Exquisitely printed in delicate pastels on durable crepe paper, they were issued for export in a handful of Western languages. As Sybille A. Jagusch has shown in her revelatory study 'Japan and American Children's Books,' for decades afterward America's young readers had no shortage of illustrated reading matter about (and increasingly from) Japan. By the turn of the last century, when Japanese translations of American classics such as 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Little Women' became available, Japanese children, too, had a growing library of options for pursuing their curiosity about all things Western. World War II interrupted but did not stem the tide of this intense mutual fascination.
After the war, the pace of East-West picture book cross-pollination quickened dramatically. In 1954, the Rockefeller Foundation invited the Japanese children's literature specialist Momoko Ishii to the United States to study the groundbreaking work of 20th-century American children's book publishers and librarians. When she returned to Tokyo with copies of 'Curious George' and other popular American books for young readers, Ishii opened a neighborhood children's library, or 'bunko,' in her own home, initiating a national tradition.
At the start, she simply pasted her own translations over the printed English-language texts. Later, building on American models, Ishii helped to establish the first of Japan's professionally staffed children's libraries. As the country's publishing industry revived, Japanese editions of 'Millions of Cats,' 'Make Way for Ducklings,' 'Little Blue and Little Yellow' and other American picture books found an enthusiastic readership at these libraries. By the 1960s, some of these books were required reading in Japan's grade school curriculum.
At the same time, American children were being offered fresh picture book glimpses of Japanese art and life. In 1954, as Momoko Ishii toured the United States, 'The Animal Frolic,' a codex adaptation of a merry 12th-century Japanese narrative scroll, landed on The New York Times's list of the year's best illustrated children's books. Two years later, the Japanese American artist Taro Yashima was awarded a Caldecott Honor for 'Crow Boy,' a picture book with thrilling expressionist graphics and a contemporary story about a provincial Japanese schoolboy's struggles to fit in with his peers. Another generation would pass before the horrors of the atomic blasts that ended the Pacific war were distilled for young readers in the Japanese artist and peace advocate Toshi Maruki's 'Hiroshima No Pika,' a picture book simultaneously published in Japan and the United States in 1980; and before the inner struggles of Japanese American immigrants to feel at home on American shores received powerful expression in Allen Say's Caldecott Medal-winning 'Grandfather's Journey,' published in 1993.
Japan's influence was felt in the United States in other meaningful ways as well. In 1968, when the art director turned picture book creator Eric Carle presented his editor, Ann Beneduce, with the concept for an alluring design-forward novelty book for preschoolers called 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar,' she was instantly intrigued but recognized the unfeasibility of manufacturing it domestically (the standard practice then). Fortunately, Beneduce had a global outlook. That summer, she hand-delivered Carle's idiosyncratic dummy, with its array of die-cut holes and different-sized pages, to Hiroshi Imamura, then president of Kaiseisha Publishing in Tokyo, and returned home with an on-budget plan. If not for the determined efforts of Beneduce and her Japanese colleagues, Carle's caterpillar book, which has now reached readers in more than 65 foreign-language editions, might never have happened. Beneduce later introduced Americans to the work of modern-day Japan's greatest picture book creator, Mitsumasa Anno, whose 'Anno's Journey' and other wordless, scroll-like books cunningly blend Eastern and Western narrative art elements for the stated goal of 'bridging' national and cultural divides.
When Carle visited Asia during the 1980s, he was moved to learn that in Japan, unlike the United States, picture book art was not routinely put down as a lower-rung endeavor. Tokyo, he discovered, was in fact home to the world's first full-dress museum devoted to the genre, the Chihiro Art Museum. Carle saw in the Chihiro a milestone validation that America lacked. It was on his second trip to Japan, in 1992, that he and his wife, Barbara, had the idea for what became the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, a monumental project realized a decade later on a 7.5-acre site in Amherst, Mass.
At Tokyo's Itabashi Art Museum, a sprawling Leo Lionni retrospective recently kicked off a much-anticipated two-year tour of Japan. The Carle and Chihiro museums have upcoming plans to swap art installations and online programming. In the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and Korea, other museums featuring children's book art now draw steady streams of multigenerational visitors; the number of such museums in Japan alone is currently about 30. Besides raising the profile of a once undervalued art form, these efforts tell a collective story of grown-ups in far-flung locales striving to do the best for their children, and of a time when the 'twain' of East and West did meet, with memorable consequences.