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Harumi Yamaguchi is a female Japanese illustrator.

Yamaguchi is popular for rendering airbrushed representations of caucasian women for posters for the Parco department store chain in Tokyo. Her illustration work in this style is known as "Harumi Gals".

The youngest of six siblings and three older sisters. Her father taught earth science at Shimane University. She was born in Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture. She attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music studying painting. After graduating, Yamaguchi joined the Seibu department stores’ promotion department for three years in their visual communication center where she worked as an illustrator.

Yamaguchi began her career as an independent illustrator participating in the work of the Parco department stores’ advertising and promotions department since its opening in 1969. Yamaguchi began using the airbrush as her main illustration tool in 1972 and quickly became Japan’s preeminent airbrush illustrator throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Her work for Parco was incredibly popular—her illustrations mirrored historic interpretations of department stores as centers for culture as much as retailing.

At Parco, Yamaguchi worked alongside female art director Ishioka Eiko and female copywriter Koike Kazuko for three years to create advertising and design. Parco president Masuda Tsuji 増田通二 patronizingly referred to the trio as his “three daughters” who were able to transfer an aura of ineffable cool unto the department store. Masuda’s 2005 biography The Opening Bell Rings – Welcome to the Theater Masuda 『開幕ベルは鳴った―シアター・マスダへようこそ』contains this anecdote:

The influence of the three daughters, each ‘possessors of strong individualism and cool decisiveness’ were essential to successfully devising the framework for Parco’s image strategy. It was an intentional choice to use women to deliver advertising that would be appealing to women.

According to Yamaguchi’s representative art gallery Nanzuka Underground:

Parco had soon focused on ‘women’ as a major driving source behind Japanese society of the 1970s and onward, further succeeding in diverting this power to the business sector. Yamaguchi’s female figures are far from notions of eroticism as portrayed allegedly through male eyes in the form of pin-ups. On the contrary, the women themselves appear to joyously celebrate their own sexuality and existence. Furthermore, the images of women partaking in boxing, baseball, and skateboarding which Yamaguchi had illustrated in the 70s, could be interpreted as an ironic gesture towards a male-dominant society at a time prior to the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1985; an era when women were unable to equally advance into society.

Parco’s debut ad campaign in 1969 featured Yamaguchi’s illustrations of women performing what had traditionally been male-dominated sports. “I had some friends who began the ūman ribu movement,” she says. “And so, I felt that the Ideal women they strived to be had to correlate with the women I depicted in the advertisements for the shop.”

In 2001, Japanese sociologist and feminist Chizuko Ueno commented on Yamaguchi’s oeuvre in a monograph dedicated to the illustrator’s work, writing that “while appearing to adhere to the scenario of male-tailored eroticism, Yamaguchi deconstructs male desire through her exaggerative depictions. As a consequence, the female body is idealized to a realm unreachable by male hands.”

Yamaguchi’s work is worth consideration for having put forth a feminist perspective in advertising prior to the establishment of Japan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1985, and for the brazen approach to public objectification of the female body that she utilizes in her work.

Yamaguchi’s monograph Harumi Gals was published by Parco in 1978. Yamaguchi is a Tokyo ADC Award winner, was a longtime member of Tokyo Illustrators Society, has exhibited internationally, and her work is in the collection of NYMoMA.

References: Yamaguchi, Harumi. Harumi Gals. Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1978. “Harumi Yamaguchi " HARUMI GALS.’” NANZUKA. Nanzuka, February 2015. https://nug.jp/en/exhibitions/2015harumiYamaguchi/press-release.