Artist and illustrator, Setsuko Tamura (田村セツコ, Tamura Setsuko) is truly the living embodiment of kawaii! Known for her playful illustrations of bright and cheery girls, Tamura has been spreading joy and happiness through her creative endeavors for over 50 years. Since the 1960s, her illustrations have been gracing the covers of numerous girls magazines. Even today in her 80s, she continues to overflow with positive energy, creating art and illustrations from her studio in Harajuku, Tokyo.
Setsuko Tamura was born in Tokyo in 1938. From a young age, she loved illustration and would fill her days drawing her favorite storybook characters and scenes from popular radio dramas. In high school, Tamura participated actively in her school’s art club, and like many young artists was filled with lofty dreams of becoming a professional illustrator. Inspired by a magazine article encouraging its young readers to send a letter to a respected teacher for career advice, Tamura sent a postcard to her favorite artist, Katsuji Matsumoto asking for tips on how to become a magazine illustrator. Not expecting a response, Tamura was quite surprised when Matsumoto replied requesting samples of her work. He must have been impressed since shortly after Matsumoto brought her on as an apprentice while she finished up her last year in high school.
Soon after graduating high school in April 1956, Tamura started a secretarial position at a bank in Tokyo, while still continuing to meet with Matsumoto about once a month. Under Matsumoto’s guidance, her illustrations quickly caught the eye of many publishers and in August of that same year, she landed her first paid assignment providing illustrations to the readers’ column of the Shojo magazine, Shogakusei no Tomo. Encouraged by her early success, Tamura left the bank in May the following year to pursue illustration full time. However soon after she quit her stable bank job, requests for illustration work quickly dried up. It would be almost a year before she was able to land any major gigs. In an interview with Kera magazine, Setsuko discusses how difficult this point in her life was, trying to scrape by with barely enough money for train fair and questioning her decision to quit her practical and steady paying bank job. However, a breakthrough came early the following year when she got a request for a rush job to provide illustrations for a story in Shojo Club, one of the most popular Shojo magazines. Apparently, the original illustrator couldn’t complete the job on time, and they needed someone S.T.A.T. Tamura jumped at the opportunity and quickly completed the job. The editors were so happy with her work, they soon hired her to regularly provide illustration designs.
Tamura’s success and prominence within the magazine illustration world continued to grow. In 1960 she landed a gig with the popular girl’s manga magazine Ribon, illustrating the serialized page ‘Konnichiwa O-Jousan” (trans. ‘Hey Girl!’) focused on fashion and style. In 1963, she did illustrations for her first bounded book, Daddy Long Legs, and in 1965 started contributing to Nakayoshi (Ribon’s main competitor) with a similar serialized section on fashion and style. Through the 60s, jobs for magazine covers and manga illustrations just kept coming. Fancy goods featuring her illustration also became quite popular referred to specifically as “Setsuko-goods.” By the mid-1960s there were about 10 specialty shops across Japan specializing in these immensely popular Setsuko-goods.
Tamura was not only known for her illustrations, which appeared in countless magazines, storybooks, and manga but was also quite prolific in writing essays and poems often accompanied by her own drawing. One of her longest-running gigs has been as a columnist for Sanrio’s monthly publication, Ichigo Shimbun (trans. ‘Strawberry News’), starting in 1975 and continuing until today! Tamura is also the author of numerous books, on both her career and also life philosophy of finding joy, happiness, and embracing self-love.
Similar to Ado Mizumori, another female kawaii artist popular during the 60s and 70s, Tamura’s illustrations added in a distinctive feminine flair to her kawaii art, contrasting with her male counterparts. While Mizumori added in that dash of flirty romance, many of Tamura’s much-loved designs had elements of domestic life and overflowed with simple happiness. In her illustrations of smiling girls, you can almost hear the laughter and giggles flowing out of the page. Her fun scenes of things like cooking, cleaning, and watering flowers were familiar and easy to identify with for young girls and women of the 60s, and they could see a bit of themselves in the familiar domestic images.
Today, Tamura’s illustrations may hit a more nostalgic tone but still continue to be quite popular. In 2018 she launched an adorable collaboration with Sanrio, and her latest book on living the happy live as an ‘obaasan’ (affectionate term for old woman) just came out in 2019. More recently, she has been into collage making and illustrated journaling and even teaches a course at the community college in Ikebukuro where she teaches illustrated journaling for adults (life goals!!).
Tamura herself has been described as cheerful, sparkly, and optimistic. Despite being in her 80s, she exudes youthful energy and joi de vivre. Maybe a love of kawaii really is the secret to eternal youth. Surprisingly, Tamura is much less known in the west than some other earlier kawaii artists featured on this blog so far. I was surprised how little English language info there was about her (and even no wiki page!). Hopefully, some of the information in this post will spur a new love for her wonderful illustrations work.
If you would like to learn more, there is a great 10 post interview with Tamura on Kera (in Japanese with auto-translation): kera.com
