The 19th Annual Nelson Wu Lecture: Electric Design: Light, Labor, and Leisure in Prewar Japanese Advertising

Like the last glimpse of a departing train shown thundering out of the station in a cloud of smoke, “The age of simple wound filament light bulbs is disappearing!” exclaims a 1939 advertisement for New Mazda brand light bulbs with new dual filament technology marketed by the Tokyo Shibaura Electric Company, commonly known by the acronym Tōshiba. A montage of images, photographic and painterly, a blur of speed and smoke, the advertisement not only champions the efficiency and economy of Mazda incandescent light bulbs, but also visually expresses the profound compression of time and space enabled by new technologies built on the foundation of electricity. Electricity was a fundamental element in national infrastructure—used in everything from national defense to heavy industry. It also transformed domestic labor and facilitated the production of modern domesticity in early 20th-century Japan through the purveying of goods in the burgeoning consumer market. Two companies at the forefront of creating this market that were actively engaged in innovative advertising design throughout the century were Tōshiba and Matsushita. This paper explores the important and innovative role these Japanese manufacturers played in cultivating a nascent consumer market for electrical goods in the prewar period, particularly how graphic design and advertising produced by these companies visualized and commodified the seemingly transformative social powers of electric energy.

 

The Nelson Wu lecture is co-sponsored by East Asian Studies program and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

 

GENNIFER WEISENFELD, Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies and Dean of the Humanities at Duke University, received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. And her most recent book Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. In addition to co-editing the volume Crossing the Sea: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu, with Gregory Levine and Andrew Watsky (Princeton University Press, 2012), she has written numerous journal articles, including several on the history of Japanese design, such as, “‘From Baby’s First Bath’: Kaō Soap and Modern Japanese Commercial Design” (The Art Bulletin, September 2004) and the core essay on MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido company’s advertising design. She is currently working on two new book projects, one titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan, and the other, Protect the Skies! Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan.