Fujimori Shigeo — Artist and Advocate
Fujimori Shigeo (1936–1987) was an activist supporting preservation of the Otaru Canal, using art to draw attention to the canal and surrounding warehouses during the city’s economic decline. In his commercial work, Fujimori designed signage and posters, but in the mid-1960s he turned to painting and sketching to support community preservation efforts, creating over 150 landscape paintings of the canal and warehouses in his lifetime.
At the height of Otaru’s economic vigor in the 1920s and 1930s, artists were drawn to Otaru Canal to capture bustling scenes of barges plying the waters and porters unloading cargo. Even in its decline, some artists found a certain bleak beauty in the scenery of decaying barges, disused buildings, and the muddy canal. The Otaru City Museum of Art has numerous canal paintings by local artists in its collection.
Fujimori served as executive director of the Otaru Canal Preservation Movement for several years and was instrumental in planning events to revitalize the city. In the mid-1960s, he helped launch the Otaru Ushio Festival (Otaru Tide Festival). The annual event runs over three days each July and now attracts around a million visitors with fireworks, music, and a parade of almost 10,000 dancers through the city streets.
One of Fujimori’s last works, Red Canal, was painted in 1985 when workers began to reclaim part of the canal for a new road. Fujimori wanted to preserve the entire canal and is said to have expressed his frustration by covering the image in a wash of red ink.
