Showa Modern: Ad Designs, 1920's-1930's

During the Taisho and early Showa eras, urban culture flourished, with cafes, bars, fruit parlors, and Western-style shops lining the streets. The streets were filled with advertisements and posters, and the "design" that connected people and things was expressed with a sense of exuberance and freshness. This book introduces more than 200 posters, flyers, and advertisements. [Enjoy the many designs that are still full of fresh surprises and vivid appeal and cannot be called nostalgic.]

During the 1920s and 1930s, a new urban lifestyle blossomed in Japan as cafes, bars, and boutiques selling Western-inspired dishes and fashion filled the city streets, and people embraced diverse lifestyles. Tokyo was being rebuilt after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, while Osaka, further south, was entering a period of unprecedented prosperity. Amidst these turbulent times, advertisers scrambled to find new strategies to attract consumers, inspiring the emergence of commercial art to communicate and evoke new information and imagery. Even today, the advertisements in this book are as vibrant and full of wonder as they were then, a testament to the efforts of their designers.