p4
Nakamura Kisen, Inoue Seiji & Yokoyama Kei. 漫画旅行 - 日本全国 [Manga Ryoko - Nihonzenzu ... ]. [Tokyo c1930?]. Ten colour printed broadside maps, each 55x77cm, bound together with a hand lettered front wrapper. Stitching broken, last map loose; there are tears and old, neat enough, repairs. Not bad. sold
Nakamura, Inoue and Yokoyama collaborated on a series of these manga maps of Japan, likely thirteen altogether. I have had a couple of these separately and wondered whether they fit together to make a giant romp round Japan. I still don't know but now I know why I have seen many single maps with the right edge oddly trimmed: it was obviously a thing to bind them like this.
I've been too lazy to work out which areas are here but I did recognise the Fukushima map, something none of us will see repeated: a fun tourist map of the Fukushima and Miyagi areas.
Textiles. A gathering of 15 original designs for textile designs. n.p. [1930s]. 15 sheets in gouche and inks; all about 40cm in one direction and ranging from 20 to 32cm in the other. One with a short clean tear. Short notes on the back of three, numbers on two. Au$650
Pretty lurid, huh? As the thirties pressed on and the avant garde was in disgrace - communist and anarchist scum that they were - textile design became less adventurous in form but brighter, so much brighter, and woodcut pattern books from Kyoto with designs like this proliferated. Something of a Kano school revival.
These flower designs are so highly finished I'm convinced they were made for a pattern book - probably spring or summer; autumn and winter were more restrained. Working drawing are usually much more ... well, working.
Poster. 理研チャック [Riken Chakku]. n.p. [c1930?]. Colour lithograph poster 93x59cm. Small chomps from the top right edge and the very bottom; with metal hanging strips and loop at the top. Au$450
Have you seen any movie as dynamic and thrilling as a Riken chuck at work? Me neither.
Smoca Toothpowder Poster. タバコのみの歯磨スモカ [Tabako Nomi no Hamigaki Sumoka]. n.p. [c1930?]. Colour poster 42x31cm. A hint of browning, a nice copy with metal strips at top and bottom and hanging loop at the top. Au$600
One of the more sinister of Smoca's transfixing and sometimes disturbing series of face or head and white teeth posters. I know of ten - of varying impact; a couple I've never seen for sale in decent shape and while the rest are easier to find it's not so easy to find them in this sort of condition.
Smoca's success - they are still going - was through clever advertising. From the start, in 1925, the company's founder, advertising man Kataoka Toshiro, hired the best artists and cartoonists. Book compilations of Smoca's newspaper advertising made regular appearances from the late twenties on.
Smoca Toothpowder Poster. タバコのみの歯磨スモカ [Tabako Nomi no Hamigaki Sumoka]. n.p. [c1930?]. Colour poster 42x31cm. Some browning at the edges, a rather good copy with metal strips at top and bottom and hanging loop at the top. Au$450
A more cheerful and straightforward racist poster compared to a couple that are disturbing among the Smoca series of face or head and white teeth posters. Except that it's a woman with a cheroot clenched between smiling white teeth. I know of ten - of varying impact; a couple I've never seen for sale in decent shape and while the rest are easier to find it's not so easy to find them in this sort of condition
Catalogue - Lighting. アートキューブ : 東京電気株式会社 [Atokyubu : Tokyo Denki Kabushikigaisha]. Tokyo Electric Co. [193-?]. 23x15cm publisher's colour illustrated wrapper; [2],8p, eight full page illustrations. Staples detached, small nibble at the top of the spine and some ink notes on the back cover; still pretty good. Au$225
Atokyubu are what they sound like if you say it right: art cubes. Cubes of light and here are some ways they can be used: as signs, display, and chic lighting. I'm not sure they took off, I can't find anything else about them.
The sign on the front cover is for Mazda, the light department of Tokyo Electric. In 1939 a merger created Tokyo Shibaura - better known now as Toshiba. But it's not that simple, you need a genealogist to properly unravel the company history.
Japanese handmade postcards. An album of 84 handmade postcards from the 1930s. n.p. Concertina card album 18x23cm with pattern paper covers and card slipcase with handwritten label. 84 cards mounted in corner slots on double card leaves - ie it can be opened both ways. Some browning. A couple of other things are also in there but aren't counted. Au$600
I usually avoid postcards: that way lies madness and, if you aren't careful, cigarette cards and stamps. But these, using block prints, brush work and lots of collage, are something else. There's a sense of immediate history that doesn't come with manufactured cards; and a clever eye.
These were made by someone and sent to somebody but apart from recognising that the maker had an enviable fine hand I can't tell you who and whom. There's a story here that someone literate might unravel. The dates and postmarks range from about 1931 to 1938.
Catalogue - bicycles. Nishiura Shoten. 西浦商報 [Nishiura Shoho]. Tokyo, Nishiura 1930 (Showa 5). 23x15cm publisher's printed wrapper; 48pp, illustrated throughout. Some signs of use, pretty good. Au$150
From a carrier motor tricycle to a kid's tricycle with everything in between.
Tsutsumi Kanzo. 漫画双六 世界早のぞき [Manga sugoroku sekai haya nozoki]. Nagoya(?), Shin Aichi 1931. Colour lithograph broadside, 55x70cm. With the playing pieces intact in the right margin, some stains along the top edge. Au$275
Sugoroku, these paper racing games, like most genres of Japanese graphics range from the fabulous, through insipid to kitsch to awful to downright disturbing. This one is up the fabulous end of the scale.
Tsutsumi - one of the great pioneers of modern manga - takes two young aviators on quick world tour and shows them all the most important things. Curious, for me, is that each stop is not headed with the country name but some quality, some spectacle, some activity. Thus meeting Mussolini in Italy is titled 'hero'; for baseball we see see Babe Ruth knocking over a New York skyscraper; tennis is Henri Cochet in France; film is of course Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood; science is a zeppelin in Germany; war is Chiang Kai-shek in China; manners are learnt in England from Ramsay MacDonald; I'm not sure what the gymnastic penguins in the Antarctic represent. And so on round the globe with celebrity and national stereotypes galore.
Wada Sanzo. 色名総鑑 [Shikimei Sokan]. Tokyo, Shunjusha 1931 (Showa 6). 20x12cm publisher's cloth case with title label with 160 mounted colour samples on 56 accordian folding card leaves; and wrappered book; 178pp and some tables (two folding). A bit of browning and usual offsetting of the card; quite good.
Colour samples named in Japanese, English and occasionally French or German; two of the tables are multi language lists of colour names. The top edge of the colour cards are gilded and the apparently plain paper lining of the case has a pattern of transparent glazed shapes printed on it. sold
First edition of Wada's first serious attempt at colour nomenclature. Wada, though at the top of the art ladder in Japan, insisted on pursuing new directions and founded the Japan Standard Color Association, now the Japan Color Research Institute, in 1927. In these early years science, art and aesthetics went hand in hand.
Another copy. The usual offsetting of the card; a nice copy in the original printed card outer folding case. Au$750
Kon Wajiro, Yoshida Kenkichi & Modernology. 柳屋 - 第42 [Yanagiya - dai 42]. Osaka, Yanagiya March 1931. 23x15cm publisher's illustrated wrapper; 60pp, a few small illustrations. Signs of use but decent. sold
This is an issue of the obscure and clearly serious Osaka magazine Yanagiya devoted to some extent to the first volume of Modernology, published in 1930.
Kon's thesis - born out of watching the people of Tokyo begin to rebuild after the 1923 earthquake and fire - is that those who do the planning, designing and official building know nothing of what people actually do, what they own and how they use those things - how they live and who they are.
Itagaki Takao. 藝術界の基調と時潮 [Geijutsukai no Kicho to Jicho]. Tokyo, Rokubunkan 1932 (Showa 7). 22x16cm, publisher's cloth with onlaid colour illustration, mildly used printed card slipcase; 428pp including 36 pages of photo illustrations. Rather good. Au$650
First edition. Itagaki was seemingly indefatigable as a champion of modernity and modernism in the late twenties and early thirties. Between 1929 and 1933 he worried at the relationship of the machine to art, design, architecture, photography and film, propounding his concept of "machine realism" in a small bundle of books like this. Come the deadly government crackdown on Itagaki's natural disputants - the "proletarian realists" - he apparently retreated into conservative didactic writing on western art and film.
Yamashita Kishi(?) 世界未来戦双六 [Sekai Mirai-Sen Sugoroku]. Tokyo, Shogaku Gonensei 1937 (Showa 12). Colour broadside 54x789cm. Minor signs of use, quite good. Au$400
Despite the grim colour scheme - a feature of the late thirties - this is a heart-racing view of future war. It was the new year gift from the elementary school magazine for 5th graders, Shogaku Gonensei.
Shop signs. 新看板図案工作集 [Shin Kanban Zuan Kosakushu]. Tokyo, Seibundo Shinkosha 1938 (Showa 13). 26x19cm publisher's cloth (small chip from the spine) and printed card slipcase; 194pp, numerous b/w line drawings and photo illustrations, 17 colour and another eight plates printed in green. Au$400
Second printing or issue? This appeared the year before as a special number of the journal Kokoku Kai - advertising world. A collection of new advertising and shop signs which is both a treasury of existing signs - most Japanese with a selection from Europe - and offers design suggestions and practical tips. There's a few I want, the giant ear with a phonograph implant high on the list.
Worldcat finds no copies.
Takeo Takei. 原子爆彈 [Genshi Bakudan (ie: Atomic Bomb)]. Tokyo, Domei Tsushinsha September 1945. Octavo printed wrapper; 32pp including wrapper, untrimmed and loose (apparently as issued). Rather browned and a bit frayed round the edges. Au$
Published as Domei Sosho No.1 by Domei - the national news agency - on 20th September 1945, apparently the day before the US occupation censorship had time to be fully implemented.* Domei Sosho no.2 was on the Potsdam declaration and there, I think, the series ended. I have read that 200,000 copies of this were printed. Worldcat locates one copy outside Japan - in Australia - and it doesn't appear in the catalogue of the Prange collection - the world's largest collection of occupation era documents, collected by the official historian to the occupation.
There is still nothing much to be found in English on Takeo or his pamphlet. As I can best figure, the story is that Takeo was a scientific and/or political correspondent for Domei and spoke English. He and a colleague listened in to allied broadcasts, translated Truman's statement on the bombing of Hiroshima and were the first to tell the Japanese government that the "new bomb" was an atomic bomb. Takeo's widow and son published a memorial book in 1995 with background and contemporary papers which doesn't seem to have worked its way to writers in English. From my stumbling through a review of that book I get the impression that Takeo was seen as an apologist for the US and their use of the bomb which was unfair. He was attempting to give as objectively as possible as much information as he could and what information he had came only from what could he could scrape together from radio broadcasts. How much of this view of him was long after the fact I don't know. He had been or became - I'm not clear on this - a communist journalist which can't have endeared him to any authorities.
There is a modern facsimile of this which may or may not be related to the book published by Mrs Takeo - it seems likely. That should not be mistaken for this. Neither should Takeo Takei the journalist be confused with Takeo Takei the illustrator.
*Nuclear physicist Sagane Ryokichi's 'Genshi Bakudan' published in October had two sections removed by the censor from every copy.
Pesticide posters. Nihon Nohyaku. Set of five posters advertising pesticides from the company, Nihon Nohyaku. Nihon Nohyaku [1952?]. Five colour posters 52x37cm. All in excellent shape. Au$500
Vivid, charming and, in a couple of cases, dramatic representations of the evil threatening your crops. These herald the introduction of new chemicals developed in the forties and introduced into Japan before the moribund chemical industry - like the rest of Japanese industry - revived after the occupation years in the late fifities and early sixties. And long before human safety and the environment appeared in legislation.
