Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize. She also co-curated the exhibition “Made in Japan: Twentieth-Century Poster Art” at the Poster House Museum in New York in 2023.
Naoi applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life, and shared the following:
Page 99 of The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life is actually the first page of Chapter 2 (Envisioning the Modern Family: Fashioning the Image of the Child). This chapter reveals how modern Japanese department stores became a kind of spectacle and dreamworld experience that brought in the whole family, including children. This impacted the way the Japanese public envisioned the role and value that children played in a nuclear family as a new kind of modern family structure. The department store provided aspirations for how parents could educate and culture their children through consumption and the experience of the department store space. Department stores’ efforts to create a family-oriented space as well as its mission to provide education and culture to the public aligned with the proliferation of children’s magazines and print media for children during the early 20thcentury. This reveals the importance of visual materials in the social construction of the modern Japanese child and a new family identity. For example, by March 1908, Mitsukoshi (one of the pioneering modern department stores) established the Children’s section, and opened its first Children’s Exhibition the following year. While much of their facilities and business models followed Western examples, this concept of the family-oriented leisure space is a distinguishing characteristic unique to Japanese department stores. These efforts by Mitsukoshi and other stores that followed were in line with the interest in re-examining the role of children within a modern family structure for developing and modernizing Japan. On page 99, I write:Learn more about The Land of Happiness at The MIT Press website.In their visualization and advertisement, early twentieth-century department stores helped fashion the picture of modern life to include children. They became the “dreamworlds” that promoted this figure of the imagined modern Japanese child and, by extension, the modern Japanese family.To further the ‘dreamworld’ experience, department stores went above and beyond, especially on their rooftops—they had zoos, botanical gardens, water fountains, telescopes, roller-skating, sportsland, and even a cable car ride for sightseeing! Furthermore, many Japanese experienced riding the elevator and escalator for the first time in these department store spaces. Department stores also provided cafeterias and dining spaces that offered affordable Western-style food and in 1925 introduced the ‘Children’s Western meal’ (okosama yōshoku), a sampling of the latest Western foods for children. All of this kept the whole family in the department store space to spend the entire day.
Page 99 and the inclusion of the modern Japanese child into the space of the department store is a good point in the book to think about the kind of space that these new institutions created: a social space that shaped the experiences and identity of the modern Japanese audience. However, what it does not demonstrate well is the importance of design and advertising, which went hand-in-hand with creating an outlook for Japan’s new department store. What a major part of the book discusses is how department stores created alternate spaces for artmaking and exhibition to the newly established art institutions in modern Japan. Through its display spaces within the store, cultivating public advertising spaces, establishing its design department, and introducing innovative ways to solicit design ideas, department stores brought into the mainstream imported artistic styles, advanced reprographic technologies, and even avant-garde visual language. The numerous images of department store posters and advertisement, especially by Sugiura Hisui (1876-1965), Mitsukoshi’s first in-house designer of twenty-seven years and founding director of its Design department, illuminates how Hisui created a unified brand image, one of ‘total design,’ that revealed the role and mission of the Mitsukoshi department store as cultural center and beacon of modern advancement.
In addition, the final chapter (Chapter 3—Expansion and Extension: Japanese Department Stores at Home and in the Empire) reveals how in the years preceding the world wars and the Pacific conflict, the mission and role of the department store went beyond commercial purposes and functioned as national and colonial entities that reenforced such Japanese identities domestically and abroad.
This book reveals how modern design functioned as the very language in which the department store became a social space, art institution, and national structure where consumers could acquire a new social identity. Through the visual language of the modern lifestyle that department stores strove to design, at times this new ‘identity’ was modern, Western, and yet Japanese: one that the upper class could afford, the new middle class could aspire to, and even creating national or colonial identities in the years preceding the Pacific conflict.
--Marshal Zeringue
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