My favorite part was simply daydreaming about all those people, animals, and buildings that came to life after filling in the colors. But more importantly, I suppose dabbling with them was how a lot of us got our wobbly start in the wild and wooly practice of decision making. After all, you were required to make a dizzying number of choices, including choosing which colors to use and whether a pencil or crayon would be appropriate for the task at hand, depending on whether you were shooting for, ahem, impressionism or realism. For a gloriously befuddled child such as the one I was back then, it was a great way, I'm sure, to combat ADHD and learn a lesson or two about the importance of focus, just before Speed Racer or Ultraman demanded my undivided attention around 3pm, when steamy yakisoba noodles were served together with a tall glass of lassi and, occasionally, popcorn. But, yes, I digress.
In Japan these days, coloring books are undergoing a bit of a renaissance, not just as a pastime for children, but apparently for adults as well. There’s a series enjoying explosive popularity titled, “The Coloring Book Series for Adults,” and there’s even a museum that has been established in Tokyo, dedicated to promoting the history and culture of coloring pictures. The visionary founder is Ms. Masa Kaneko, a former executive of Japan’s world-renowned cosmetics brand, Shiseido, where she collaborated with the French art director, Serge Lutens, to create the company’s color palette for the world.
Ms. Kaneko believes the appeal of coloring books not only lies in their aesthetic merits, but in their ability to double as a mental workout, an appeal apparently not lost among the elderly in Japan.
Today, she serves as the curator of the coloring-book museum in Tokyo and actively works towards exposing Japan’s unique brand of coloring-book art to the world. To this end, it certainly helps having as an uncle Kiichi Tsutaya, a legendary artist of the genre, whose impact is especially felt in the works of many contemporary shojo manga (girls’ comics) artists. Mr. Tsutaya also created during postwar times around one hundred hanging scrolls displaying portraits of American soldiers stationed in Japan's Tsukiji district.
To date, Ms. Kaneko has staged exhibitions in New York as well as in Paris, and has co-authored the book, Nurie: The Fascination of Coloring. For more information on this rare look into an underrated art form, visit here and read an interview with the author. For more information about the museum, check out here.
