Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923, and Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931.
Weisenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan. and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Fine Art of Persuasion at the Duke University Press website.…Moreover, typographers traditionally considered lowercase types (minuscule) with their pronounced ascenders and descenders to be most legible, enabling easier differentiation between discrete words. Although Asian characters do not have the equivalent of upper-or lowercase, Japanese linguistic expression in printed text is polyglot, employing extensive use of romanized scripts, particularly for cosmopolitan cachet and visual emphasis in advertising. Hara responded to this proposition with deep misgivings about the purported benefits of using all lowercase for greater legibility, ultimately dismissing it as a passing fad. Instead, for visual emphasis he would later increasingly employ all-capital roman letters in his title and header designs, both with and without serifs.When one opens to page 99 of my book, the text and illustration immediately focus the reader on the topic of visible language and the pioneering work of designer Hara Hiromu, a major figure in the history of modern Japanese design, who wrote extensively on modern letterforms and modernist typography. Visible language is a key concept that I develop in the book to explain how designed and aestheticized letterforms, particularly in advertising, communicate through form as well as semantic content. The visible language of letterforms, distinct from text and content but intrinsically allied with them, can also mark different subjectivities and ideological beliefs. Building on expressive native calligraphic traditions and a rich commercial print culture, modern Japanese advertising designers rapidly expanded their lettering lexicon from the late nineteenth century as they encountered Western typefaces and international professional editorial design techniques. This chapter explores the emergence of modern Japanese lettering and typographic design as they were developed in tandem with the professional sphere of advertising. Through close analysis of selected examples of Japanese scripts and types in specific promotional contexts, I illuminate the multilayered and effective mode of visual communication constructed through printed text. The examples range from logotype designs to mass media print publicity. Some are attributed, and others are anonymous. They are sober and whimsical. Employing the distinctive historical, grammatical, morphological, and aesthetic aspects of the Japanese language, designers have been able to create a powerful visible language that has been instrumental in defining product and corporate, as well as cultural and national, identities in modern Japanese visual culture. While this section does not represent the entirety of the book’s content, which spans across twentieth-century Japanese advertising design and its multimodal production for the construction of national brands, it is an excellent example of a key concept and underscores my argument about the importance of language and designed letterforms in advertising.
Elemental typography was not simply concerned with letterforms but also encompassed the critical relationship between text and image in editorial layout. Hara’s montage poster design for the Hōchi Shinbunsha–sponsored Third Snap Photography Competition of 1935 exemplifies his stark geometric simplification…
--Marshal Zeringue
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