Children's Author Dared to Depict Multiracial World

It was Disney who Fujikawa said changed the way she handled bigots during World War II. Unlike her parents and younger brother, she escaped internment because she was living in New York; only Japanese residing on the West Coast were sent to the camps. But Fujikawa traveled frequently, and when people became suspicious of her, she often told them she was really Anna May Wong, the Chinese American actress. According to her nephew, Fujikawa took secret delight in this masquerade.

But when she told Disney that she often lied about her heritage, he exploded. "Damn it! Why should you say that? You're an American citizen," he said.

"From that moment on," Fujikawa recounted recently, "that's exactly what I did tell them."

She never explained why she bucked convention to portray children of many races early in her career, nor did she make a big deal of it. But being Japanese in a white-dominated society surely had something to do with it. As a girl she was shunned by white schoolmates, and later, as she struggled in the commercial art world, she encountered clients who assumed she could only draw people with Asian features.

"She was a crusty old lady," Ron Fujikawa, a Century City attorney, said of his Aunt Gyo, who lived most of her life in a book-lined apartment on Manhattan's East Side. He said she would have continued working on books in her 80s if she had not developed glaucoma and Parkinson's disease.

Her longtime agent, Bernard Kurman, said Barnes & Noble is interested in reprinting several of her books, including her 1961 version of Clement Moore's "The Night Before Christmas" and her favorite, the 1976 "Oh, What a Busy Day!"

"I am flattered when people ask me how I know so much about how children think and feel," Fujikawa told an interviewer several years ago. "Although I have never had children of my own and cannot say I had a particularly marvelous childhood, perhaps I can say I am still like a child myself. Part of me, I guess, never grew up."