Aimitsu (靉光), born Nichiro Ishimura in 1907 in Hiroshima and died in 1946 on the outskirts of Shanghai, was a Japanese painter usually identified as a Surrealist, although he also worked in other styles and genres. His importance lies in how he combined European experimentation with a personal, enigmatic painting language in interwar Japan.
He came from a small landowning family in Hiroshima. When he moved to Tokyo to pursue art, he took the name Aimitsu, also written Ai-Mitsu or Akemitsu. In 1934 he married Kie, a teacher of the deaf, who helped support him through the hardships of his early career.
His most famous work is Landscape with an Eye (1938), held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. It shows shapeless forms and a large eye within a landscape. In 1944 he was conscripted and sent to China; he died of a fever, possibly malaria and dysentery, near Shanghai. In 2007 the same Tokyo museum staged a retrospective marking the centenary of his birth.