Takabatake Kashō

Takabatake Kashō (高畠華宵, 1888-1966) was the preeminent commercial illustrator of Taishō and early Shōwa Japan, the artist whose languid, decorative drawings of schoolgirls, modern girls (moga), and beautiful boys defined the visual idiom of jojō-ga (lyrical illustration) and shaped the look of Japanese popular magazines for two decades. Working at the intersection of nihonga training, Meiji bijin-ga, and the new graphic culture of mass-circulation print, Kashō produced cover paintings and interior illustrations for Shōjo gahō, Shōjo kurabu, Shōnen kurabu, Kōdan kurabu, Fujin sekai, and other major magazines of the 1910s through 1930s, where his elegant, slightly androgynous figures in elaborate kimono and Western dress became the dominant image of modern Japanese girlhood and of the bishōnen (beautiful boy) type that would later resurface in shōjo manga.

Kashō was born on April 6, 1888 in Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, in a region whose distance from the Edo print-publishing capitals had not prevented it from sustaining a strong local culture of literature and painting. He studied first at the Kansai Bijutsuin in Kyoto and at the Kyoto Municipal Specialist School of Arts and Crafts (Kyōto Shiritsu Bijutsu Kōgei Gakkō, today part of the Kyoto City University of Arts), where the curriculum was grounded in nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and in the close observational drawing of the Maruyama-Shijō tradition. He moved to Tokyo and entered the studio of Terazaki Kōgyō (1866-1919), one of the central nihonga painters of the Meiji-Taishō art establishment and a member of the Imperial Art Academy, where Kashō absorbed the conservative academic painting techniques that would underwrite his subsequent commercial career.

His breakthrough was the 1911 advertising illustration for Chūjōtō, a women's herbal medicine produced by Tsumura Juntendō. The poster, depicting a beautiful woman in a kimono in a softly modeled, sentimental style, circulated nationally and made Kashō's name. From that point his commercial work expanded rapidly: by the late Taishō years he was the most sought-after magazine illustrator in Japan, working for the Kōdansha publishing house and rivals such as Tōkyō-sha. His cover paintings for Shōjo gahō (Girls' Pictorial) — including the January 1927 issue (vol. 16 no. 2), the December 1928 issue (vol. 17 no. 12), and the famous Autumn Melodies (秋の調べ) cover of September 1931 — established a visual vocabulary that other illustrators would copy for years afterward: large eyes, slender bodies, elaborately patterned kimono or schoolgirl sailor uniforms (sērā fuku), and atmospheric backgrounds heavy with flowers, ribbons, and seasonal motifs. The phrase "Kashō-gonomi" (Kashō taste) entered the vocabulary of popular culture as a name for this whole decorative-lyrical mode.

At the height of his career in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kashō was a household name in Japan. He worked across magazine illustration, advertising posters (including the well-known 1930 advertisement for the Benibara company's Vincent Footwear product), New Year sugoroku board games (his Success in Life sugoroku of 1924 is preserved at the Edo-Tokyo Museum), book covers, and series of independent figure paintings. His best-known subject was the schoolgirl in sailor uniform, an image so closely identified with Kashō that the iconography is often credited to him: the long pleated skirt, the white blouse with navy collar, the round hat, the wind-blown hair, the calf-deep wave at the seashore in pieces such as Wave Kicking (波を蹴って). At the same time he developed a distinct repertoire of bishōnen (beautiful boy) imagery for boys' magazines such as Shōnen kurabu, where his slender, elegant young heroes in samurai or Western dress carried a frank homoerotic charge that scholars have since identified as one of the formative influences on later shōjo manga and on the bishōnen tradition in Japanese popular culture.

Kashō's relationship with Kōdansha and his publishers cooled in the late 1930s, and the rise of wartime austerity and propaganda-aligned illustration pushed his decorative aesthetic increasingly out of fashion. He retreated from the Tokyo magazine world, traveled, and continued to paint independently. He died on July 30, 1966, by which time the world of Taishō and early Shōwa magazine culture in which he had been a star was already a matter of nostalgia. His reputation was substantially rebuilt in the decades after his death by collectors and scholars who recognized the centrality of his imagery to twentieth-century Japanese visual culture. The Kashō Museum (高畠華宵大正ロマン館, Takabatake Kashō Taishō Roman-kan), founded in Tōon, Ehime Prefecture in 1990, holds some 4,300 of his works along with letters, photographs, and personal effects, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) has made its Database of Visual Images in Modern Japanese Popular Magazines from the Kasho Museum Collection openly available online. Among collectors of modern Japanese prints and illustrated books, Kashō stands as the central illustrator of the Taishō-chic moment and as one of the principal architects of the modern Japanese visual repertoire of girls and young women.