“When I was a child,” Mitsumasa Anno has recalled, “I pictured the world-is-round concept as a rubber ball turned inside out with the people of the different continents living inside the ball. Of course it was a boy’s way of imagining. . . . But this kind of imagination . . . is another sort of eye for perceiving what things really are. And it is the source of all [my] books.”

A robust, barrel-chested man with an intense gaze and mischievous manner, Anno came of age in Japan in the 1970s, at a time when idealistic editors in the United States, Europe, and Japan were eager to publish picture books cooperatively. Hoping to instill a spirit of cultural open-mindedness and tolerance in young children from different parts of the world, the editors also saw an opportunity in such joint ventures to hold down the cost of color printing through the economies of scale to be gained from larger combined print runs. In order for the experiment to work, the picture books these editors championed naturally had to have broad-based appeal. Mitsumasa Anno, with his brilliant knack for visual narrative, his seasoned traveler’s knowledge of the world’s storied locales, and his nuanced appreciation of both cultural differences and universals, proved to be the ideal artist to meet the challenge.

Anno was teaching art to Tokyo schoolchildren when a publisher who was the father of one of his students suggested that he apply his talents to the making of children’s books. His first picture book, Topsy-Turvies: Pictures to Stretch the Imagination, was published in 1970. Anno’s Alphabet (1975), Anno’s Journey (1978), Anno’s Medieval World (1980), and Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar (1983) — the original Japanese titles do not incorporate the artist’s name — all served to enhance his reputation as an innovator and latter-day Renaissance man. In 1984 Anno received children’s literature’s highest honor, the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal, in recognition of his “unique [gift for] communicating to both East and West.”

In Japan, where nearly all youngsters grow up knowing his picture books, Anno is also celebrated for his books for adult readers on mathematics, philosophy, history, and travel, for his striking cover designs for the Japanese equivalent of Scientific American magazine, and for his lively television talks on art and art history.

I first became aware of Anno when I noticed copies of his early books for sale in museum shops around New York. I saw right away that he was an artist of extraordinary inventiveness and originality. I decided I wanted to meet him. The chance finally came more than ten years later. This interview was recorded between the lunch and dinner hours in the restaurant of the Hotel Kitano in New York City on April 22, 1989, with Akiko Kurita serving as interpreter. From time to time throughout our conversation, Anno reached for a pencil and sketched on a legal pad to illustrate his idea.

 

LEONARD S. MARCUS: Adults sometimes assume that young children don’t think abstractly. Judging from your books, you don’t agree.

MITSUMASA ANNO: A young child might not understand Picasso, but if I draw a circle and add a short line at the top for a stem, even a two-year-old will see that it’s an apple. No color is needed, just the outline. This is one of a child’s first steps toward abstract understanding. And if I make a simple drawing with circles for heads and rectangles for bodies and single lines for arms and legs, a child will understand me when I say, “This is Father. This is Mother.” Adults take such leaps for granted. That a two-year-old can do so is a kind of miracle.

Q: Your books seem aimed at challenging preconceived ideas about the world and encouraging independent thinking. Anno’s Medieval World, for instance, concerns the difficulty that people once had in accepting the notion that the world was round.

A: A child’s mind, unlike an adult’s, can absorb anything and accept any number of new ideas. For this reason, it is not always good to teach only “correct” ideas to children. Scientific understanding is important, but imagination should also be encouraged. When some adults see a rainbow, they think they must explain the color spectrum to a child. The sense of wonder at such things should come first.

Recently, I spoke to a group of schoolchildren in Sydney, Australia. I told them that I had been afraid to come “down under” to Sydney lest I fall off the earth on my way. They laughed and then explained to me that “the world is round but there are also some flat places where it is safe.” These children did not yet know the difference between imagination and reality. It is important to let them imagine things in their own way for a while before teaching them differently.

Q: Your first book to become well known in the United States was Anno’s Alphabet. Why did you make a book about the Roman alphabet — the alphabet of Western languages?

A: One day when I was tired I found myself looking at the corner of a table. Just then two converging sides of the tabletop and the leg below began to look to me like a letter T. I made a drawing of what I had seen, and began to wonder whether Westerners, who were used to thinking of a T as a flat, printed symbol, would realize that my drawing of the table corner and leg was also a T. The book evolved from there.

Q: In your Alphabet, as well as in Topsy-Turvies, you seem fascinated by visual paradoxes and illusions.

A: In 1960 or 1961, after having taught school for ten years, I went to Paris. I did not as yet have any intention of making children’s books. I wanted to paint. It was during that time that I first saw the illusionist prints and drawings of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher. Escher’s work greatly excited me. Unlike some modern art, his style is easily understood. I began to think that his images might please children as much as they pleased me, and I realized that no one had done an alphabet using that technique before. At first I thought the letters would make a good picture book by themselves, but my Japanese publisher asked me to add companion pictures for each letter.

Q: Anno’s Alphabet doesn’t simply begin with the letter A, as do most alphabet books. You first show a question mark carved out of wood, then a tree . . . and finally, a carving in the form of a book — an alphabet book. That initial sequence of pages reminds me of the opening credits of a film.

A: That is exactly what I wanted. I think of all my books as films.

Q: Anno’s Alphabet was published both in Japan and in the West. Did creating a book for such a diverse audience influence your choice of imagery?

A: Very definitely. I drew an angel, for example, to illustrate the letter A. It looked rather like a baby with swan’s wings. But when the American and British editors saw my drawing, they said, “This is not an angel! It’s a cupid.” I replied that it looked like an angel to me. My drawing, you see, was similar to the angel trademark of a well-known Japanese confectioner. The incident underscored for me the fact that pictorial images do not necessarily carry the same associations from culture to culture. I had to give up my angel and replace it with a picture of an anvil.

Then, in the decorative border for the letter B, I drew a type of bean that I thought would surely be recognizable to everyone in the West. I had checked it in an encyclopedia! I knew we had the same type of bean in Japan, so I proceeded to do my drawing. Nevertheless, my American editor objected, “That bean is too short. Make it longer!” Whereupon, I produced my encyclopedia. My editor would still have none of it. “We don’t see our beans in books,” she said. “We see them in the supermarket.” So I had to redraw the entire rather complicated border. Later I found that my book showed an older type of bean that was no longer widely available. Many such changes were necessary.

Q: The border drawings in your Alphabet contain small details that a young child might not notice at first, but that might very well intrigue him years later. Do you intentionally create drawings with different layers that, in a sense, run parallel to children’s education and development?

A: In one of the scenes in Anno’s Journey, I incorporated a rendering of The Gleaners, a well-known work by the nineteenth-century French painter [Jean] François Millet, in which peasant women are seen at work in a field. When a small child sees those women in the book, he doesn’t know the source of that particular image but can make up his own story about them — who they are, what they are thinking about, in what kind of house each one lives, and so on. Later he may see the Millet painting and remember the women.

As a child, I would do much the same thing. I liked to observe people and make up stories about them. If a man walked by, I would decide that he must be a carpenter, or a doctor on his way to see a child in the hospital, or whatever.

Q: In the Journey books you have mixed together imaginary scenes with images from the real world — for instance, in Anno’s U.S.A. (1983), a scene from Shane and landmarks such as the Empire State Building and Independence Hall. What do you want children to learn from this?

A: That imagination, which is about impossibility, and reality aren’t opposites, but complement each other. One might say that reality and imagination differ from each other in the same way that the audience at a play is set apart from the actors. It’s where the two meet that hope is to be found.

In my books, I don’t want to teach. What I have done might better be described as “teaching without teaching”— providing the conditions that allow children to learn for themselves. I once heard about a little boy who excitedly showed the Superman picture in Anno’s U.S.A. to his teacher. She acted surprised, even though she knew it was there. This teacher’s response allowed the child to feel the joy of having made a personal discovery.

Q: In format, the Journey books resemble traditional Japanese picture scrolls, yet the countries depicted in your stories — Britain, Italy, the United States — are all Western.

A: When I made Anno’s Journey, I did not intend to use the traditional picture-scroll form. It simply came out that way. What I had set out to do was to draw pictures from a certain distance — in terms of time as well as of space. You will find many historical details in my pictures. The reader’s perspective on time is expanded as a result. The Journey books also show different portions of the world’s geography, expanding the reader’s sense of space, too.

Q: Why haven’t you made a Journey book about your native Japan?

A: The essence of being human is the same everywhere. Many Westerners have told me, “You know more about Europe and the United States than we do.” But everywhere in the world, if there is a road and a river, there is always a bridge. In making my books, I have been seeking archetypes that transcend any particular culture. I have looked for images that people everywhere would know.

Q: Have you also made some books on specifically Japanese themes?

A: At the moment, I am working on a historical picture book for older children and adults, The Tale of the Heike. It is a classic Japanese war story that was first written down in the thirteenth century. It tells of the powerful Heike clan, who enjoyed prosperity for a time but was then defeated in battle by the rival Genji clan, and faded away into the western sea. The story is a beautiful description of human destiny.

Q: Would you tell me something about the place where you were born?

A: I was born in Tsuwano, a village surrounded by mountains in the west of Japan, on the “sea side,” as we say. Now it has become a tourist town, and is called “Little Kyoto.” But when I was a boy, an airplane would fly over our village maybe once a year. We would catch a brief glimpse of it between the mountains. That, for us, was very exciting.

Because of all the mountains, we could not see the ocean, which to me as a small boy seemed very far away. I couldn’t believe that seawater was salty. I was ten years old when I first saw the ocean for myself, and when no one was looking, I reached down to taste the water.

My parents kept an inn, where I helped out as a child. From that experience, I determined that I would never keep an inn myself!

Q: Did you like to draw as a child?

A: Yes, I began on my own as a small boy, drawing mountains, houses, and ghosts.

Q: How did you know what a ghost looked like?

A: Years later, when I was doing the illustrations for Anno’s Alphabet, I drew a devil to illustrate the letter D. My British editor looked at it and said, “That’s not a devil!” And so I asked this person, “Have you seen a devil yourself?” He replied that he had not, but that in his own mind he was sure how a devil would look. He proceeded to make all kinds of gestures in order to show me his idea of a devil. From that exchange I realized that there are many invisible things that have never actually existed, but which nonetheless exist in people’s minds as quite specific images.

Q: What pictures and images influenced you as a young artist?

A: It was thanks to my parents’ inn that as a child I saw all kinds of magazines that were left around for the guests. Looking through those magazines, I was exposed to all sorts of pictures, from classical to modern in style. Even as a child I thought that an artist should be free to work in any number of styles to suit his purposes. Now I have my own style, but I still think it is important for an artist to feel that freedom.

Q: Did the art teachers you went on to study with feel the same way?

A: Not at all. But then later, when I myself taught drawing and painting to children, I realized that, aside from technique, drawing and painting cannot be taught. Most people think that the technique is the art. That is a great misunderstanding.

Q: Were there books you especially liked as a child?

A: Lots of books. I had no picture books, though — only the magazines. I read Mark Twain in Japanese.

Q: Did you find that teaching children was more or less what you expected it would be like?

A: School did not totally prepare me for what lay ahead, but in any case I wanted to experiment in my teaching. On the first day of class, the cherry blossoms were all out, and I asked each child to bring a flower into the classroom. When I was a child of eleven, my teacher had shown me how to draw this flower. So now I sketched the same drawing on the blackboard for my students. I showed them the stamens and pistils — the female and male parts of the flower. I explained that everything in nature is made up of female and male parts. In my drawing — my teacher hadn’t done this — I added a bee heading straight for the flower.

In the classroom there was also a camellia, which has a great many petals. The children said, “This camellia has no pistils!” To which I replied, “No, you are not correct.” Then in order to prove it, I opened all the petals — and found no pistils, just stamens.

Q: At least you taught them well. They had really looked.

A: Yes, but I was vexed because what I said had not been true!

Q: That’s often the case with teachers. [Laughter.]

A: Later when I was visiting a museum in Tokyo I asked someone why this was so and was told that the pistils become the camellia’s petals. That’s why camellias have so many.

Q: What else did you do to engage their interest?

A: One day I had planned to take the children outdoors to draw in the wheat fields. I was thinking of a particular painting by Van Gogh with crows flying over a wheat field, and wondered how the children would draw such a scene. Suddenly, however, it began to pour, and so the children had to stay indoors. Abandoning our original plan, I went outdoors myself and picked a single stalk of wheat from the field and brought it back to the classroom, where I drew a picture of it on the blackboard. I explained that the wheat field was really just a collection of stalks like the one I had brought in, and that they could draw the whole field by seeing only a single stalk. And so they did.

The next day I had another group of children. This time the weather was fine, so we went outdoors to sketch in the fields. When you look at such a field, it’s like looking at a toothbrush. You can’t see each individual bristle or stalk, and so you can’t draw it effectively that way, either. But that is exactly what those children tried to do — with so many upright strokes that their pictures were all black! Their pictures didn’t look at all like the field. The children who stayed indoors produced pictures that were more abstract, that picked out only the important details. Ironically, the children who stayed indoors were the ones who could draw the real field.

Q: The drawings in your books are beautiful, as well as imaginative. What role does beauty play in children’s books?

A: All beautiful things encourage a child’s sense of wonder — and everything that encourages a child’s sense of wonder is beautiful. In my three Math Games books and several others, I have tried to show that mathematics is beautiful and not necessarily difficult — that math is primarily a way of thinking about things.

Q: One of the unusual aspects of Anno’s Counting Book is that you start not with the number one, as is typical, but with zero. Did you have a hard time deciding how to express the concept of zero pictorially?

A: Zero is not simply “nothing” but “something missing.” A boy with a severe learning impairment was once looking at the book. He started at the end, where the number twelve is illustrated in a scene with twelve houses, twelve trees, twelve reindeer, and so on. “Oh, there are many houses,” he said. Then as he turned the pages and there were fewer and fewer of everything, he said, “Getting lonely.” When he turned from the picture for the number three, with three houses, to the picture for two, he said, “House disappeared.” Finally, when the boy came to the picture for zero, which is just a snowy field through which a river is running, he sighed and said, “Now we have nothing.” I was very moved by this child.

Q: In your Math Games you present a series of mathematical ideas, starting with simple ones and progressing to more challenging concepts. Are these books to be read through all at once?

A: There may well be some concepts that a younger child will not be ready to understand, and in that case the parent should skip those pages and wait until the child is ready. But, as I show in those books, there are many real-life illustrations of mathematical ideas in a child’s own world, and all one has to do is point them out to the child and he will understand — without having to be taught.

Q: So the world can itself be viewed as a kind of picture book, as a series of illustrations from which a child will learn?

A: Yes. For instance, if you have two brothers at home, and one of them is a “bigger quantity” and the other is a “smaller quantity,” a child immediately knows the difference. That is mathematics. Children can of course be taught such things in the traditional manner. But their joy is always much greater when they make the discovery for themselves.