"Thirty-five years ago, I really can't think of another children's book that was integrated," said Ginny Moore Kruse, director of the children's library at the University of Wisconsin School of Education. "It was so unusual. She saw the world the way it was. She was a pacesetter."
Very rarely did Fujikawa portray adults. Her books, aimed mainly at the preschool to second-grade set, show flocks of tots scrambling across leafy vistas and snowpacked hills. She often explored children's emotions, such as loneliness and anger. Although she never married or had children of her own, she had a gift for speaking to young children at their level. One local children's bookshop owner enjoys telling about the child of a customer who so identified with the picture of a crying baby in "Babies" that she tucked her own blanket between the pages to comfort the poor thing.
Some reviewers were not so enchanted by Fujikawa's work. They complained that her pictures were sugary and too busy, and that the plot, when there was one, was pablum. But few failed to understand her appeal. "She paints the most winning little children," a 1978 review of "Let's Grow a Garden" said, "and shows them always engaged in zesty adventures."
Fujikawa was the only daughter of an immigrant farmer and an aspiring social worker who started their family in Berkeley, later moving to the San Pedro area. Her father, hoping for a boy, named her after a Chinese emperor. When she was born instead, Fujikawa recalled in an autobiographical sketch, "he was so mad he stuck me with the name anyway."
Her first name was not the only thing that made Fujikawa an atypical Nisei woman. While most of her peers were getting married and starting families, the San Pedro High School graduate was attending Chouinard on a scholarship. She was briefly engaged to be married in 1929, but broke it off and spent a year in Japan at the urging of her mother, who found the thwarted nuptials too embarrassing. In Japan, Fujikawa soaked up the works of the artists Utamaro, Hiroshige and Sesshu. She adored the subdued colors in kimonos worn by Japanese women over 40, which may have influenced her palette of hazy pinks, ambers, blues and grays.
After completing her studies at Chouinard in the early 1930s, she worked on murals and displays for department stores in Los Angeles and San Diego. A friend recommended her to Disney Studios, where she got a job in the promotions department. There she worked on her first book, based on the movie "Fantasia," and went on to design others under Walt Disney's watchful eye.
