Japanese Picture Books - Part 1

This week I’m launching two new series for Red Balloon. On Mondays for the next five weeks I’ll be looking at the status of children’s literature on the world’s largest continent in 'Asian Literature Mondays.' At the end of the week we’ll have 'Anniversary Fridays,' in honor of all the books, shows, characters, etc., that are completing prestigious birthdays in 2008.

It’s a little tricky addressing Japanese children’s literature because it’s a subject about which, frankly, I know nothing from firsthand experience. As I’ve started digging into children’s literature, however, I’ve grown increasingly curious about the field outside my own western/English-language culture, the same way I’ve turned to international music and cinema in recent years. I was therefore quite pleased to discover an article in the January-February 2008 issue of The East, a magazine for Japanese ex-patriots in the West, written by Doi Yasuko and entitled “Children’s Books Today” (actually a reprint from Japanese Book News Number 52, published by the Japan Foundation). Doi is a researcher at the International Institute for Children’s Literature, Osaka and wrote the most cogent and intelligible article I’ve seen in The East in many, many months.

That’s the good news, so let me follow it immediately with the bad, which is that none of the authors or titles he discusses are available in my local library system which, given that I live in New York City, is fairly extensive. There were a few exceptions, but they were in Japanese and held in reference collections not particularly close to my apartment. I was therefore unable to physically handle any of the books he mentions, so I’m speaking from hearsay. (I’m assuming, by the way, that Doi is a man, begging forgiveness if not and pleading extreme ignorance of Japanese language and names.)

Japan has a venerable tradition of visual and narrative arts, of course. Noh, kabuki, and other traditional storytelling methods combined with traditional painting and woodblocks to create a natural environment for children’s picture books in the twentieth century. I’m no expert on manga, but I know that it grew dramatically after World War II and that to a large degree it stemmed from this rich tradition of illustrated texts. Today Japan is arguably the world’s leading country in its acceptance of graphic novels and comic books as appropriate material for adult reading. It is also the only country in the world, by the way, where the animation industry is larger than the live-action film industry, another consonant result of this national tradition. One would think that such a culture would create a vibrant children’s book industry, perhaps even an overabundant one. Doi doesn’t address picture book output in relation to other cultures, but instead gives a cursory history of the past few decades followed by a detailed discussion of top talent working today.

Japanese picture books flourished from the 1960s through the 1980s before a sharp decline in the ‘90s. There are surely many reasons for this, but one possibility that came to my mind was the sharp increase in anime production in the 1980s changing both the market and the available workforce by the next decade. Again, Doi doesn’t address causation, but he does deem the ‘90s as a largely fallow decade. Happily, though, a renaissance is now underway, with 5,064 books published in 2005 alone. Surprisingly, the number of authors has not gone up as dramatically as the number of books each is producing; it seems, to an extent, that Japan is the land of the prolific children’s author.

“The trend,” he writes, “may be in part due to recent legislation passed as a result of anxiety about children abandoning reading: a December 2001 law promoting reading among children and a July 2005 law that aims to promote the culture of the written word. A widespread movement to encourage reading is now underway, exemplified by the ‘10-minute morning reading exercise’ commonly carried out in elementary and middle schools….” This exercise consists of a volunteer, not the teacher, visiting schools and reading aloud for ten minutes each day, an excellent way to start the school day in any country. The program is so successful that publishers have begun to take it into account in their formatting, producing picture books that can easily be read in that setting and in a ten-minute time frame.

The first author Doi discusses is Cho Shinta. A member of the old guard, his first book was published in 1958. He followed it with an astounding four hundred additional books, give or take, before his unexpected death in June 2005. Doi mentions his works Goro-goro nyan (Cats That Travel by Plane: Fukuinkan Shoten, 1984), Kyabetsu-kun (Little Cabbage: Bunken Shuppan, 1980), and Gomuatama Pontaro (Rubber-Headed Pontaro: Doshinsha, 1998). In English translation apparently Cho’s most available book is The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts. As such a title might suggest, his work is often liberated and nonsensical, a trait which has drawn him both praise and criticism. Doi describes Cho’s illustrative style as colorful and childlike; his text includes “insistent repetition,” simple vocabulary, and frequent onomatopoeia.

Next is Sasaki Maki, author of nonsense picture books. Doi sites a recent work, Sora tobu teburu (The Flying Table: Fukuinkan Shoten, 2002), which “tells the story of a young girl and her canine friend, who discover a strange flying table and travel to places including the South Pole, a maze, a railroad bridge, and the sea, making friends with all kinds of animals on the way”; this summary sounds more like a traditional narrative than nonsense in the vein of Lewis Carroll, but then Carroll had his traditional narratives too. Sasaki, born in 1946, has illustrated comics, novels, and other media.

Katayama Ken writes for babies and infants using warm watercolors and distinctive figure drawings. Ki wa nannimo iwanai no (The Tree Says Nothing: Gakushu Kenkyusha, 2005) is about a young boy and father in the park, the boy pretending the father’s a tree in order to climb all over him.

Horror film aficionados will recognize the name Suzuki Koji from the films Dark Water and The Ring (both done in Japan and followed by American remakes), but while it is tempting to believe that the Suzuki Koji who authored the stories on which these films are based could also be the author of many children’s picture books, from what I can tell that sadly doesn’t seem to be the case (corrections are welcome, though). There is very little online material about author/illustrator Suzuki Koji, but Doi gives as an example of his work Gattan Gotton (Clickety-Clack: Heibonsha, 2006), a story about a reindeer driving a railcar through a town, volcano, and other places.

Among those authors who first published in the boom of the late 80s are Arai Ryoji and Kondo Kumiko. Arai is internationally known, partly because a 2001 British exhibit entitled “The Art of the Japanese Picture Book” assisted in his winning the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2005. One recent book is Rufuran Rufuran (Refrain Refrain: Petit Grand Publishing, 2005), about a “strange and colorful world” in which a young girl befriends a prince in a forest. As might be expected of many Japanese illustrators, Arai has recently branched into animation, and his film The Country Between the Worlds won the Best Animation award at the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival (where I suspect there’s some stiff competition). His Japanese-language website can be found here. 

Kondo Kumiko is one of the only authors mentioned who I am able to determine to be female, given my aforementioned lack of Japanese. She generally deals with nature, with a good dose of humor. Suku-suku nohara (Growing Field: Alicekan, 2001) is akin to The Very Hungry Caterpillar but evidently for slightly older children as the scientific content is a little more advanced. It “begins with two pages of life-size drawings of the eggs of various insects that live in the fields. Following this, the lives of these insects are shown page by page.” To enliven the text with play, there are also hidden objects on each page.

Doi then discusses picture books for youth over ten, something we probably need more of in the West (who says picture books are just for kids?), using the examples of Obachan wa ki ni natta (Granny’s Turned into a Tree: Poplar, 2002), a photo-illustrated book by Onishi Nobuo about a group of people staying in their village right until it’s submerged by a dam (akin to what’s happening with the modern Yangtze River next door in China), and Hoshi-gaki (Dried Persimmons: Akane Shobo, 2006), a book about the traditional Japanese dish, with text and photos by Nishimura Yutaka. Both of these books are photo-illustrated, so it would be interesting to learn to what extent drawn illustrations are used in Japanese books for older children and adolescents.

The article is extremely enthusiastic but ends with a qualifier and a plea. The former is a statement that despite the high volume of current picture books coming off the presses, “it is extremely difficult to find works of outstanding value among [them].” We should assume, then, that the titles he has mentioned are among this cream of the crop. Then comes the plea: “The number [of books] being translated into foreign languages, particularly for young readers, is still small, but I believe that many books would be just as enjoyable to foreign readers as they are to their Japanese fans. I very much hope that as many as possible of the titles described here will be translated before too long.”

I hope so as well. As I mentioned at the outset, in writing this post, which obviously owes itself entirely to Doi’s informative article, I was virtually unable to locate anything, either in my local libraries or online, about the books and authors under discussion. I do not think it is culturally or ethnically illegitimate for authors of one culture to respectfully produce something about another culture (here, Americans writing picture books about Japan), but I also think that such efforts should be balanced with authentic works produced within the culture itself. In other words, I would like my daughter to be able to read the same picture books that children in Japan, or Russia, or Saudi Arabia are reading—like we are already often able to do with books from English-speaking countries like South Africa and Australia. Translating and marketing such works is a tall order for publishers, I know, but with emerging digital technologies and on-demand publishing, we should be able to increase access over what’s been available in the past. Simply reading a book from a foreign culture to your child will greatly increase her respect and understanding of it, as it shows we respect people enough to listen to their own voice; the same is true of music and visual media.

Much thanks to Doi Yasuko for his enlightening and informative article, and kudos to The East, a general-interest magazine not usually interested in literature, let alone children’s literature, for reprinting it. If you’re interested in finding out more, you won’t be disappointed by the websites for the International Institute for Children’s Literature, Osaka or the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Tokyo Chapter.