Gennifer Weisenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, dives into how advertising design has transformed Japan's visual culture. She discusses the evolution of commercial art from the early 1900s to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, highlighting its impact on national identity and imperial narratives. Weisenfeld reveals how corporations commodified state interests and marketing strategies, illustrating the intricate relationship between fine art, branding, and Japan's cultural resilience during war and peace.
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insights INSIGHT
Fine Art Influences on Advertising
Commercial art in Japan evolved from fine art and avant-garde artists working in corporate design from the 1920s onward.
This blending shows how fine art training deeply influenced persuasive advertising design historically in Japan.
insights INSIGHT
Multimodal Advertising in Japan
Japanese advertising design employed diverse media including trademarks, packaging, and electric publicity.
Global technology advances influenced the creative use of light and space in urban advertising.
insights INSIGHT
Japan's Active Role in Global Design
Japanese design history is inseparable from global exchanges, especially through trade journals and visible language.
Japan actively contributed to modern design rather than passively receiving influences.
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Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan
Gennifer Weisenfeld
Gas Mask Nation
Gas Mask Nation
Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan
Gennifer Weisenfeld
Gennifer Weisenfeld's "Gas Mask Nation" offers a nuanced look at Japan's civil air defense during World War II. It challenges conventional narratives by exploring the coexistence of anxiety and pleasure within the visual culture of the time. The book analyzes a wide range of visual materials, revealing how the Japanese population was mobilized through orchestrated drills and propaganda. Weisenfeld's work highlights the multisensory nature of this experience, demonstrating how fear and fascination intertwined. The book ultimately contributes to a broader understanding of wartime experiences beyond simple narratives of privation and suppression.
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: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan(Duke University Press, 2025), 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.
Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.
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