Mitsu Yashima

was an artist, children's book author, and civic activist.

World War II and later years

Mitsu was the daughter of a shipbuilding company executive. She attended Kobe College, and later enrolled at Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo. In the 1930s, she joined a Marxist study group, where she met her future husband, artist Taro Yashima. She and her husband painted farmers and laborers, and participated in exhibitions of art that critiqued Japan's military expansion and the government's increasingly heavy handed suppression of dissent. She and her husband were later imprisoned and brutalized by the Tokkō (special higher police) in response to their antiwar, anti-Imperialist, and anti-militarist stance in the 1930s. Their lives from this time period are depicted in her husband's graphic novels, published in English, the ''New Sun'' and ''Horizon is Calling''.

Mitsu and Taro's son Makoto Iwamatsu was born in 1933. He would eventually become a renowned actor and voice actor. In 1939 she and Taro went to America so that Taro could avoid conscription into the Japanese Army and to study art. When World War II broke out, Mitsu joined the U.S. war effort, working for the Office of Strategic Services by sending American propaganda to the Japanese. She adopted the pseudonym ''Mitsu Yashima'' during the war.

Following the war in 1948, Mitsu and Taro had a daughter Momo, who also appeared in their children's books. The family moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1954, where she and Taro opened an art institute."Taro Yashima Papers"
de Grummond Children's Literature Collection. University of Southern Mississippi. July 2001. Retrieved 2013-06-27. With biographical sketch. With Taro, she co-wrote the children's books ''Plenty to Watch'' in 1954 and ''Momo's Kitten'' in 1961.

Mitsu left Taro in the 1960s and moved to San Francisco, where she devoted herself to art and community work as well as civic activism. In 1976, she appeared in the television movie adaptation of the book Farewell to Manzanar, acting opposite her son and daughter.

In declining health, she moved back to Los Angeles in 1983 and lived with her daughter until her death on December 7, 1988.

See also

*Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period

References

Further reading

*

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Yashima, Mitsu
1908 births
1988 deaths
Japanese anti-fascists
People from Hiroshima Prefecture
Japanese emigrants to the United States
American artists of Japanese descent
Place of birth missing
Place of death missing
American women civilians in World War II
Japanese-American civil rights activists
People of the Office of Strategic Services
20th-century Japanese women artists
20th-century American women artists
American children's writers