Illustration (sashie)

Sashie are pictures placed in text-based media such as magazines, newspapers, and books, for example to help readers understand. In the Edo period, ukiyo-e artists drew black-and-white illustrations for kusazōshi and yomihon; after the Meiji Restoration, ukiyo-e artists were hired to illustrate newspaper serial novels, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and his pupil Mizuno Toshikata established that genre. In the 1900s, as printing moved from woodblocks to photomechanical plates, it became easier for Western-style painters to take up illustration, and when the magazine Shirakaba featured Aubrey Beardsley in 1911, many illustrators were influenced. From the late 1920s, as magazines spread, painters such as Nakahara Jun'ichi and Fukiya Kōji worked as illustrators full-time. Takehisa Yumeji won wide popularity through magazines, poem-picture books, and sheet-music covers, and his women, unlike earlier ukiyo-e-style illustrations, were taken up by young people as reflecting a modern sense of beauty. Around 1970, Ishihara Gōjin and others filled the large illustrated-explainer pages of boys' magazines with monsters and strange phenomena drawn in minute detail. The word “illustration” took root after the war; in the 1960s it became a genre independent of graphic design, and illustrators became an independent profession from the 1970s on.

On a cover or a page, look at how the picture meets the title and the text: does it leave room for the words, or make the lettering part of the picture?

Beside what words, song, or story did this picture originally sit?

• Bijinga (pictures of beautiful women) 美人画→Yumeji's women spread through magazine and sheet-music covers.