Gyo Fujikawa

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 "gyoh") 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 internment 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.

After the success of "A Child's Garden of Verses," Fujikawa became one of the first artists to contract for Royalty payment, refusing to perform work unless her publisher agreed to pay her royalties. [8]

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.[9]

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.[9] Fujikawa was a life member of the Society of Illustrators.[10]

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  United States-Japan Treaty centenary stamp
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  Plant for a More Beautiful America Cherry Blossom stamp

Playwright Lloyd Suh scripted a one-act play imagining a dialogue between Walt Disney and Fujikawa titled, "Disney and Fujikawa." It was performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City in 2017 and was reviewed by the New York Times. [11]