Takei Takeo

Takei Takeo (武井武雄, 1894-1983) was the central figure of twentieth-century Japanese children's picture-book illustration (dōga, 童画) and one of the most inventive private-press woodblock artists of the Shōwa period. He occupies an unusual position in the history of Japanese hanga: a working illustrator whose commercial magazine and book commissions in the 1920s helped invent the modern category of children's art in Japan, and an obsessive bibliophile-printmaker whose hand-bound Kanhon (刊本) series, produced in tiny editions from 1935 until his death, is now regarded as one of the most original sustained projects in twentieth-century Japanese book art.

Takei was born on June 25, 1894 in Hiraide, a hamlet within what is today the city of Okaya in Nagano prefecture's Suwa basin, the eldest son of a wealthy landowning family connected to the local silk-reeling economy. The Suwa region — its lake, surrounding mountains, and the rural festivals of his childhood — would become a permanent reservoir of motifs in his art. He moved to Tokyo to study Western-style painting (yōga) at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, today the Tokyo University of the Arts), graduating from the Western painting department in 1919. His classmates and immediate juniors included a generation of artists who would shortly remake Japanese print culture, among them Maekawa Senpan, Kawakami Sumio, and the slightly older Onchi Kōshirō and Yamamoto Kanae, the founders of the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement.

Takei's decisive turn came in 1922, when the publisher Tōkyōsha invited him to contribute to the children's magazine Kodomo no Kuni (コドモノクニ, 'The Land of Children'), which had been launched that January and which would become, until its closure in 1944, the most artistically ambitious children's magazine ever published in Japan. Takei joined a roster of illustrators that included Okamoto Kiichi, Kawakami Shirō, Hatsuyama Shigeru, Murayama Tomoyoshi, and Takabatake Kashō, and rapidly emerged as one of its defining voices. It was in connection with this work that he coined and championed the term dōga ('child-picture'), which he insisted on as a distinct artistic category separated from mere illustration: a dōga, in his definition, was a self-sufficient picture made for children that should hold its own as an artwork, rather than a decoration subordinated to a text. The term entered general usage in Japanese art-publishing within a few years and remains the standard word for the genre to this day.

In 1927 Takei co-founded with Okamoto Kiichi, Kawakami Shirō, Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shimizu Yoshio, Fukazawa Shōzō, and others the Nihon Dōga-ka Kyōkai (日本童画家協会, Japan Society of Children's Picture Artists), the first organised professional body for children's illustrators in Japan. The group exhibited annually at Mitsukoshi and other Tokyo department-store galleries, lobbied publishers for higher production standards and better remuneration, and effectively established the social and economic infrastructure of dōga as a profession. Takei was its leading theorist; his essays in the contemporary press, later collected, argued that dōga should be approached with the same artistic seriousness as oil painting or sculpture and should resist both commercial sentimentality and didactic moralising.