Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public's everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion, Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that rebranded Japan on the world stage. Through richly illustrated case studies, Weisenfeld tells the story of how modern corporations and consumer capitalism transformed Japan's visual culture and artistic production across the pre- and postwar periods, revealing how commercial art helped constitute the ideological formations of nation- and empire-building. Weisenfeld also demonstrates, how under the militarist regime of imperial Japan, national politics were effectively commodified and marketed through the same mechanisms of mass culture that were used to promote consumer goods. Using a multilayered analysis of the rhetorical intentions of design projects and the context of their production, implementation, and consumption, Weisenfeld offers an interdisciplinary framework that illuminates the importance of Japanese advertising design within twentieth-century global visual culture.
Gennifer Weisenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. She is the author of Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923, and Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Promoting the Profession 25 2. Visible Language + the Art of Letterforms 77 3. Health + Beauty 117 4. Food + Beverage 181 5. Light, Labor + Leisure 249 6. Nation + Empire 297 7. Transwar Design 353 Notes 407 Sources 449 Index 469
"The Fine Art of Persuasion is a landmark study. The wide-ranging evidence Gennifer Weisenfeld presents leaves no doubt about the impact of commercial design in the development of Japan's consumer capitalism. Generously illustrated and crisply written, this book will be a go-to reference for anyone interested in the convergence of advertising and mass media within Japan's rapidly evolving and often fraught social, political, and economic history." - Christine M. E. Guth, author of (Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery) "Advertising is so ubiquitous today, yet its history is poorly recorded and understood. Gennifer Weisenfeld has produced a pioneering study that does much to improve our understanding of its forms and organization in one of the most dynamic centers of modernity: Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. Deeply researched and persuasively written, her book draws out the particular character of Japanese branding and advertising and the role they have played in the construction of national identity." - David Crowley, National College of Art and Design, Dublin
