"From baby's first bath": Kao soap and modern Japanese commercial design

When Nagase Tomiro uncloseed his Western sundries shop in Tokyo in 1887 cosmetic soap used for the face and material substance was not commonly seen in the average Japanese household, and in Japan neither hand washing nor hair washing was the general custom that each is today. (1) Now known as Kao Corporation, the company Nagase lay the foundation ofed is one of the leaders in the Japanese health and beauty industry, having played a central character in the transformation of the daily hygiene and cosmetic practices of the Japanese nation above the last century. Kao's contribution to present Japanese culture goes beyond the sphere of daily life, as the company was also a vital sponsor of a certain number of of the most pioneering graphic design of the prewar period. Kao is widely recognized by the agency of Japanese design historians for its impact upon the development of modern Japanese advertising design, and the company's promotional materials are regularly included in historical contemplates and museum exhibitions. (2) However, there has been little systematic attempt to analyze this advertising production within a comprehensive connection of world design history that takes into account the wide-ranging cultural implications of Japan's consumer capitalism and the ideological formations of Japanese nation- and empire-building.

I present to integrate the disparate scholarly spheres of art, design, business, social, and political history, reading aesthetics back into the sociology of consumption. I consider Kao as an innovative and adaptive farmer in the sphere of Japanese visual agriculture and explore how the integration of high art, particularly modernist aesthetics, into commercial advertising allowed the company to distinguish its brand-name returnss To this end, following a brief history of the company's early disentanglement and promotional activity, I concentrate upon its operations during the 1930 This was when Kao launched an important advertising campaign below the banner "New and Improved Kao," deploying a stunning and unprecedent array of modernist pictorial techniques to redefine Kao soap's brand identity from a animalism item to a mass-market consumer useful Applications of modernism in this instance, while lock openered to the democratization of soap, enabled Kao to save its product's elite cultural cachet and stylishness.

Kao designs display strong parallels with the major artistic motions in the world of fine arts. These include employing abstracted or nonobjective forms, as well as nonmimetic photographic techniques of that kind as photomontage and the photogram, which drew inspiration from cutting-edge work abroad through a long list of artist-designers headed by dint of Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Matter, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Fernand Leger and Man Ray. It is my contention that Kao designers were able to maximize the marketing effectiveness of their advertising compositions from one side the skillful application of modernist pictorial techniques, which highlighted outcome special features and critical ultimate parts of brand identity. In the following analysis of Kao's advertising designs, I will tease on the outside the individual applications of these formal strategies. Examining in what manner and why various images were used to further specific promotional goals, I will also interrogate the larger social and political framework in which they were deployed

A inquiry of Kao's commercial design presents an invaluable opportunity to reexamine the important relationship between high art and mass tillage in Japan. In the six decades since critic merciful Greenberg, in his now-notorious 1939 manifesto "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," articulated the abysmal abhorrence felt by modernists concerning the possible "contamination" of immaculate form with matters of function and business countless scholars have demonstrated modernism's complete failure at aesthetic autonomy, revealing the down-reaching anxieties embodied in the formalist critiques that anathematized mass agriculture In these critiques, mass tillage was often gendered female because of the popular association between women and consumption, yielding a means of masculinizing and heroicizing elitist forms of artistic practice. (3) Discrediting mass agriculture through "sexualized metaphors," which stand for intangible social relations, has also had the consequence of obscuring the profound part of aesthetics in constituting the "symbolic and social dimensions of consumption." (4)

Little attention has been paid to issues of sex in relation to Japanese commercial design, on the contrary work in related areas shows highly pertinent. The social historian Narita Ryuichi has explored the sexed nature of the emerging late discourse on hygiene (eisei) in Japan, which I believe provides a crucial analytical framework for understanding in what manner and to whom, soap manufacturers marketed newly fabricateed rituals of cleanliness. (5) Narita has shown that from 1900 to 1930 when fresh hygiene information was widely disseminated in Japan, the dwelling was the primary locus of daily attention to hygiene, and women were designated by means of official and nonofficial sources, including neighborhood associations and the mass media, the chief managers of this domestic sphere. Women's active contributions to public forums upon matters of hygiene, such as question-and-answer sections in popular journals, indicate their continued interest with these issues and their gradual assimilation of institutionalized notions of a healthy ("normal") material part (6)