TANIUCHI Rokuro’s Works; from the covers of the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho
Adults

TANIUCHI Rokuro produced the cover art for the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho from its launch in 1956 until his death in 1981, creating more than 1,300 paintings over a quarter of a century. Every year, we explore the world of Taniuchi’s cover art by selecting four groups of those paintings and changing the works on display four times, examining each group from a different perspective.

Under the title of Adults, the third period of fiscal 2024 focuses on the grown-ups depicted in his cover paintings. Since the overwhelming majority of the people depicted in the cover art of Shukan Shincho are children, we wondered, “Then what about adults? What kind of people appear in what kind of scenes?” So, we chose this theme.
The adults in Taniuchi’s cover art are largely divided into two groups: family members, such as fathers and mothers, and people encountered outside the home. The latter include people whose occupations and other attributes can be recognized at a glance—mail carriers, train drivers, people working on power lines and roads, store clerks, fishermen, rice planters, charcoal burners, picture-card storytellers, fortune tellers, mendicants, street vendors, tofu makers, peddlers, and itinerant actors—and people whose professions are not obvious at first glance—those passing through crowded places such as downtown or department stores, men as seen from behind, and so on. Some of them, such as a stranger sheltering from the rain under the eaves of a house or a dog-snatcher, cause a vague uneasiness in the children’s mind.
We hope that the various adults in Taniuchi’s cover art will provide a glimpse into homes and lifestyles in the Showa period (1926–1989), as well as insight into children’s feelings of longing and fear toward grown-ups.