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Straight on the road to becoming a professional = smooth progression to success

As he flips through the substantial collection of works, Ricardo talks about the appeal of the works, saying, "I gradually removed the details and began to draw only the framework.What's interesting is that I depict only the essence of things."His words are filled with respect for his mother.

As the years go by, the details of her paintings are peeled away, and in just a few years she has transitioned to abstract painting. At the same time, the dark colors that are common in her early works fade away, replaced by bright colors. For example, the crimson that appears in many of her works. It may be my own impression that she is spitting out the "Japaneseness" that was buried deep in her heart, but I feel that it is certainly an expression of her joy in enjoying freedom from the bottom of her heart.

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Yoshino Mabe

One would think that it must have been extremely difficult to become a successful painter, but when I talked to Tomie, she never mentioned any of those hardships.

When we asked Yoshino (83, Niigata), the wife of the late painter Manabu Mabe, who has known her for a long time, she said, "I've never seen her struggle. Was she suffering from a slump? I've never seen any sign of that."

When the Mabe family moved from Lins to Sao Paulo in 1967, Otake Tomie's name was apparently quite well known. Yoshino says, "Tomie was much older than me, had a good physique, and seemed like someone above the clouds. She wasn't at all afraid of interacting with Brazilians, and she was a very positive person with a strong will to accomplish anything."

Tomie herself says that she "started to sell after she turned 60," but Ricardo and her assistant Futoshi Yoshizawa say that her "success" was "a smooth one." Six or seven years after she started painting, she held a solo exhibition and gradually began to be featured in newspapers.

At first, she lived in the Mocca district, and it seems that Italian Brazilians living there invited her to exhibit. She also frequently exhibited at major exhibitions in big cities such as Brasilia and Rio. However, from her innocent and nonchalant manner of speaking, "Even though no one knew the name Otake Tomie at the time, so many people came. It was all "no say porque," it doesn't seem like she was trying hard to promote herself. It seems that she simply exhibited her work at every exhibition to test her mettle.

Futoshi Yoshizawa

According to her assistant Futoshi Yoshizawa (49, Saitama), "Tomie has always been at the forefront of her work, so she has an incredible strength of will. She's very strict when it comes to her work, and she keeps doing things until she's completely satisfied."

Perhaps it is talent and hard work that produces an artist who is still active at 100 years old.

However, many people believe that it was her sons who made her name even more well known in Brazilian society. Yoshizawa aptly describes the Otakes as the "three arrows."

On the occasion of a joint exhibition with Oscar Niemeyer, he started to create a number of huge objects, even though he specialized in painting. Someone must have been very supportive, but Ricardo jokingly denies it, saying, "It wasn't our efforts that made my mother famous; we used her fame."

"A patron? He never wanted one. It all came down to the fact that he steadily submitted paintings to every salon and biennale, and above all else, that he was a good artist and a hard worker. The fact that he did not remain within the Japanese community was also an essential factor," he added.

Is he an outsider in the Japanese community? Shinta sticks to "Otake Time"

Tomie Otake is an outcast in the Japanese community. She stands in stark contrast to many prewar immigrants who lived in close groups. People who knew her consistently say that she was "a person who lived in Brazilian society."

He was also a member of the Japanese-American art group "Seibikai" (founded in 1935), but was not said to have had a deep connection with the group. Ricardo highly praises the group, saying, "No other immigrant community has formed a group like this. It's a reflection of the Japanese consciousness towards art."

Kazuo Wakabayashi

Kazuo Wakabayashi (82, Kobe), a painter who was a member of the society, said, "I think that even though the members were professionals, many of them thought, 'Let's make a splash in the colony.'" While the Seibikai warmly welcomed newcomers, it also had a closed-off colonial temperament and was reluctant to enter the Brazilian community, which seemed to conflict with the ideas of postwar immigrants.

"I think Otake's thoughts were similar to those of the Japanese artists who emigrated to Brazil after the war. The postwar people who thought, 'I didn't come to Brazil because of the colonies,' had the Brazilian art world as their goal," says Wakabayashi. Tomie was probably one of the pioneers.

In the 1950s, he obtained letters of introduction to Tomie and Mabe Manabu from Tsutaka Kazukazu, who had exhibited twice at the São Paulo Biennial, and moved to Brazil with his wife in 1961. Tomie, who plunged into Brazilian society at the same time as he began his career as an artist, introduced Tsutaka, who had come from Japan, to Brazilian artists such as Mario Pedrosa, a critic who was a member of the international jury for the same Biennial, and Willis de Castro.

"They created a window for me to enter the Brazilian art world. I was truly grateful in my artistic life to have known them." He was on friendly terms with the Otake family, who frequently visited his home.

"Mr. Otake has such strong nerves that I envy him. It's not because he's become famous like now, but he's always been like that."

He has a reputation for being so careless about time that people even refer to him as "Otake time" after "Brazilian time."

For example, she had no qualms about arriving late to a ceremony where she was receiving an award. "When I exhibited my work with Mabe and others, even after we had finished loading the paintings onto the truck, Otake's painting hadn't arrived yet. I called him and he told me to wait. He was finishing it now." The more stories like this one, the more likely they are to appear.

Tomie, who has also attended exhibitions of young Brazilian artists, both famous and unknown, said that on her birthday, so many Brazilians gathered that it was impossible to walk. For the 100th anniversary of Japanese immigration, she created commemorative monuments at Guarulhos Airport and in Santos City, and for the 80th anniversary, she created commemorative monuments at 23 de Maio Street, celebrating both anniversaries of Japanese immigration. However, she rarely showed up to events in Colonia.

Wakabayashi felt that in the 1950s, when she began her career as an artist, "about one-third of the Brazilian art world was made up of women." At Seibikai, a "microcosm of the Japanese art world," women artists made up at most one-fifth, and at most one-tenth. She herself said, "It's far from Liberdade, so I didn't go there very often." However, in reality, she had come to Brazil in search of freedom, and she probably didn't want to get close to the colonia, which was a microcosm of Japanese society.

Commemorative monument in Santos City by Mr. Otake (Wikipedia.com)

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*This article is reprinted from the Nikkei Shimbun (November 26th and 27th, 2013).

© 2013 Nikkey Shimbun