Submission 3,584

About

Harumichi Shibasaki (Japanese: 柴崎春通) is a Japanese painter who runs a YouTube channel "Watercolor by Shibasaki"^[1]. In early 2022, the elderly YouTuber, dubbed "Japanese Bob Ross" by the media, came to amass over 1 million subscribers in his 70s.

Online History

Shibasaki, at 69, started the YouTube Channel on March 13th, 2017, on his son's advice. He originally uploaded tutorial videos of watercolor paintings but later expanded his subjects to other drawing materials and started a series in which he corrected the artworks submitted by viewers. One of his earliest videos of painting a simple tree had earned over 5 million views by the summer of 2020 (shown below, left). At the beginning of 2022, his video of a drawing with a 16-colored crayon set (shown below, right) went viral on Twitter, and it helped to push the number of subscribers up to 1 million in February.

Personal Life

According to his official site^[2] and Japanese Wikipedia^[3], Shibasaki was born in 1947 and started his carrier as a watercolor painter and a teacher after graduating from an art college in 1970. He had worked for a Japanese correspondence school of art for over decades. In 2001, he went to the US in his 50s and studied at The Art Student League of New York through a Japanese government-sponsored program. He also became a friend of Charles Reid^[4] during his days in the US.

He has held his solo exhibitions at venues near Tokyo once or twice a year since before he becomes a YouTuber. In 2019, he contracted with a management company, Anymind Group, as a dedicated creator.^[5]

According to a 2022 interview^[6], he has heart disease that has made him have a pacemaker and take surgery six times and also believes that he can keep himself in good condition for painting for no longer than 5 years.

Reputation

Media outlets have pointed out that Shibasaki's intelligent instruction and his gentle voice have been received favorably among the viewers, and helped him grow popular outside of Japan. In August 2018, when he got awarded YouTube's Silver Play Button, he said on a radio program that half of his viewers were from overseas, so he came to ask translators to add English subtitles to his videos.^[7] The number of his subscribers had already reached over 800k before his crayon video went viral in 2022.

Japanese news media introduced him as a senior successful YouTuber around late 2020, when people gave more attention to online media as they had to spend time at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[8]^[9] In Particular, an English news article by Mainichi in September^[10] led to further English news reports by CNN^[11], New York Post^[12], and Artnet News^[13], which introduced him as "Japanese Bob Ross". TV media began featuring the painter when his channel came to have over 1 million subscribers in the spring of 2022. A Japanese gossip magazine in that year described him as "The Grandpa we've seen the most in YouTube thumbnail".^[6]

As of June 2022, he has 1.41M subscribers on YouTube, 63.4k followers on TikTok^[14], 110k on Instagram^[15], and 56k on Twitter.