Kazumasa Nagai, Kiyoshi Awazu, Ikko Tanaka, Mitsuo Katsui and Shigeo Fukuda were the idealistic pioneers of Japanese postwar design. Together they created many of the organizations that legitimized and ruled the profession until 1970.
In 1947, millions of Japanese were on the brink of starvation. Every individual was allowed one small sardine every four days and the daily ration of rice per person was 297 grams—barely enough to fill a medium-sized cup. In the United States, the visual symbols of other nations have always been seen as exotic. But in Japan—because of a peculiar attitude formed during the Occupation towards a West it had tried to destroy—symbols of the West doubled as symbols of the future, progress, wealth and prosperity. Defeat was inextricably linked with hope. Nagai remembers, “During the war, Japan was gray. At night, it was pitch black because of the threat of bombing. We lived quietly in that world. Then it became a burnt field and people were running for their lives.” The world they lived in then was not only charred, but dim. Prewar lighting was achieved with 10- or 15-watt bulbs. The postwar landscape was described by many designers as monochromatic. Nagai, who was 16 in 1945, found optimism, even momentary bliss, in the graphics brought by Americans. “After the war, the U.S. occupation army came and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the tiny Lucky Strikes package, and even the tins for the small hard biscuits. I thought, ‘If we’re going to fight a country that is so well off that it can produce such beautiful things, even tiny things, even during a war—defeat is natural.’”
Nagai, Awazu, Tanaka, Katsui and Fukuda were old enough to understand what Westernization offered. They were curious enough to seek color, beauty and prosperity through design—and fearless enough to leave their hometowns—even their country—to find examples. They also had to go out and find work.
In the Japan of the early 1950s, the designer’s job, to paraphrase the cosmetic manufacturer Shiseido’s credo, was “the selling of illusion through the creation of an image,” to create a demand for objects and spike the economy. But in their task the designers had no precedent.
When Kazumasa Nagai took his first job, at Daiwa Boseki, the huge textile manufacturer where his father worked, he was the design department. “Until then,” he explains, “it was an era of naught. If you just sold thread and fabric, that was it, but as the world calmed down, around 1951, if you sold men’s shirts, you’d need packages for them, pamphlets, posters. When I joined, there was no senior designer and no advertising. It was very experimental.”
After graduating from Tokyo University of Education in kosei (composition), Mitsuo Katsui imagined he might design “matchbox labels, or posters now and then.” But he was also aware that “trading companies had advertising departments and a little bit of action.” He ended up at Ajinomoto, the monosodium glutamate and food manufacturer, designing everything from advertising to packaging. His biggest problem was that no one knew what a designer was. “Because fashion design developed first, most people thought you were a fashion designer, so you had to explain it to them.”
However, the entire public was affected by a design event in 1952: the appearance of the Peace cigarette package, designed by the American Raymond Loewy. The design world was stunned to find that he received $4,000 for the work, an unheard-of sum that began to legitimize design as a profession. In 1952, the Tokyo Art Directors Club was founded, but in all but a few cases, art direction was neither understood nor practiced.
Nagai and the others created a coherent design world against great odds. At first theirs was an informal society of designers who gathered together in the enthusiasm of the age, despite such obstacles as less than poor transportation modes and often little or no work, let alone recognition from the business world or society at large. In a matter of years they built professional organizations, conceived of and held grand international exhibitions like Graphic ’55 and created graphic and architectural opportunities in events like the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, art-directed by the design critic Masaru Katsumi, and Expo ’70 in Osaka. When we recall that the designers worked practically for free, it becomes clear that the first Olympics—with a sophisticated, coherent graphic program—was a miracle of design as a public service.
The designers didn’t even attend the Olympics because, frugally, they caught an empty athletes’ plane from Tokyo back to Amsterdam in order to see Europe. The designers found out they’d be offered tickets to a few Olympic events
only after they made these plans.
The European tour, even in a hitched plane, was so extravagant that it practically broke Tadanori Yokoo’s family. As he recalls, “I used all the money we had, all the money left over from selling the house after my father passed away. I’d just gone freelance and my income was about zero. These days, people are afraid to throw themselves to the wind like that.” The era of organized design culminated in the 1965 individual- oriented Persona Exhibition. In interviews conducted in Japanese, I heard personal accounts of the sacrifices, thrills and rewards of helping to create a collection of design that has changed their world, and also ours in the West.
These five men were thoroughly inspired by modernization, and were the first to use design to propagate it. They enthusiastically used and referred to the latest printing technology and science. They promoted contemporary music and theater while also popularizing the traditional Noh theater.
They helped sell the newly developed consumer commodities: electric fans, auto bikes, cameras and electric rice cookers. They presented the outer limits of illusion. They considered and interpreted individualism and Japan and the connection between the two.
* 12 Japanese Master, Graphis Inc, 2002