February 16, 2005

Kodomo no kuni Children's books in 1920's Japan. A gallery of illustrations and songs.

Kodomo no kuni was one of the leading artwork-featuring journals for children founded and published in 23 volumes and 265 issues from January1922 to March 1949.The magazine included pictures, stories, children's songs, dances, plays, and articles on handicrafts for young children. In format and content pioneering the totally new genre of artistic children's magazine, it was published by Tokyosha.

posted by islander 19 years ago
  • I love this. It was on my "to post" pile... An earlier post you might be interested in: Children's books of the early Soviet era.
  • Thanks, dng, I hadn't seen that post.
  • Some of these illustrations are beautiful. Thanks!
  • wow. many thanks for posting this!
  • Beautiful, thanks!
  • This is great stuff, and interesting. To my untutored eye, while the Japanese graphic tradition seems to have influenced a few of the pictures noticeably, in general they seem much less conservative than the sort of thing I remember seeing in comparable Western illustrations of the same sort of period - do you think that's true?
  • Wonderful stuff, islander, thanks! I wish they offered larger versions of the illustrations...
  • Plegmund, I'm not sure how you mean conservative in this context but while some show traditional Japanese influence, others, like this or this, would be hard to distinguish from a Western illustration, if one didn't know the source. Depends on the artist, I guess.
  • Theres a coloured fellow in one of the stories! I always find it interesting how African Americans are dipicted. I have one polish kids book where theres African fellow dipicted rather comically.
  • Plegmund: The pictures/style is almost directly inspired from 19th cen. Japanese paintings. Even the present style of Japanamation has evolved from the 19th cen. style.