and shops, and designers who worked for them, found theoretical guidance
and practical models. In addition to examples of orthodox modernism,The
Complete Commercial Artistreproduced many pieces by the exemplars of
European art deco or “commercial modernism,” including Lucian Bernhard,
A. M. Cassandre, Jean Carlu, and others. Their respective works were icons.
In fact, overt copying of their most well known designs was encouraged.
The most visible manifestation of Western influence was in
advertising posters for the major Japanese retailers. The Mitsukoshi
Department Store established a design department in 1909 , and almost
immediately adopted cubism as a house style. It continued to foster a
modernistic sensibility for decades following. Shiseido Company Ltd.,
known for its cosmetics, was a major proponent of the new style in posters
and packages that employed stylized illustrations of the sleek (and void of
ethnicity) deco women. Advertisements for the Tokyo Subway Company,
South Manchurian Railway, Japan Tourist Bureau, and Minori Cigarette
Company, among other major businesses, also employed artists who
understood the Western idioms.
It took more ingenuity to adapt, or modernize, Japanese type
characters to the model of Europe’s New Typography, but designers and
typographers invented ways to streamline traditional forms. They even
developed Futura-like equivalents. The airbrush was a prime method of
giving characters the illusion of motionso common in contemporary Western
letterforms. And Japanese type specimen books included many pages of
Western “novelty” alphabets alongside Japanese characters that were similarly
composed. In fact, many of these hybrid decorative character sets look as
though they could have been designed today by digital fontographers.
During the 1920 s and 1930 s, as it was preparing for war, Japan was
a thriving commercial nation with Western trading partners. So, aside from
the indigenous designers’ formalist fascination with modern design
methods, commercial imperatives demanded that popular graphics be more
cosmopolitan, if not universal. The decorative European style ultimately
won over stoic modernism, and was used for every kind of visual
communication, large and small. Movie tickets are perhaps the most
surprising of all the ephemeral media to be seriously (and ambitiously)
designed. Yet they provided the perfect venue.
The advertising industry was booming in pre-war Japan, and
business leaders understood that every empty structure, object, and material
was a potential conveyer of an advertising message. Movies were so popular
in Japan that there was no more efficient way to reach a filmgoer than the
imprinting of messages on tickets. It is unclear who started this practice,
but printing companies acted as advertising agents, so probably the leading
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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