Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion, Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that rebranded Japan on the world stage. Through richly illustrated case studies, Weisenfeld tells the story of how modern corporations and consumer capitalism transformed Japan’s visual culture and artistic production across the pre- and postwar periods, revealing how commercial art helped constitute the ideological formations of nation- and empire-building. Weisenfeld also demonstrates, how under the militarist regime of imperial Japan, national politics were effectively commodified and marketed through the same mechanisms of mass culture that were used to promote consumer goods. Using a multilayered analysis of the rhetorical intentions of design projects and the context of their production, implementation, and consumption, Weisenfeld offers an interdisciplinary framework that illuminates the importance of Japanese advertising design within twentieth-century global visual culture.

Gennifer Weisenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. She is the author of Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923, and Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Promoting the Profession  25
2. Visible Language + the Art of Letterforms  77
3. Health + Beauty  117
4. Food + Beverage  181
5. Light, Labor + Leisure  249
6. Nation + Empire  297
7. Transwar Design  353
Notes  407
Sources  449
Index  469