Showa Modern: Ad Designs, 1920s–30s

A new urban lifestyle blossomed in Japan in the 1920s and ’30s as cafés, bars, and boutiques selling Western-inspired fare and fashions crowded city streets and people embraced different modes of living. Tokyo was being rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1923, while further south Osaka entered a period of unprecedented prosperity. Amid these turbulent times, advertisers scrambled to find new promotional strategies to attract consumers, inspiring the rise of commercial art to communicate and evoke new information and images. Even today, the ads in this book are as vibrant and filled with wonder as they were in those years, a testament to the efforts of their designers.