Light, Labor + Leisure
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Published:March 2025
Electricity is a powerful enabling technology. It is also a social and cultural force of unparalleled proportions that has forever altered the landscape of daily life around the world. Certainly, electricity produced bright lights in big cities; it was the visual language of the modern urban metropolis: burlesques, cinema, and illuminated signboards. It also facilitated the production of modern domesticity through the purveying of goods in the burgeoning consumer market. Nevertheless, electricity did not market or sell itself. Two companies at the forefront of creating this market that were actively engaged in innovative advertising design throughout the twentieth century were Toshiba and Matsushita. This chapter explores the industry’s important cultivation of a nascent consumer market for electrical goods in the prewar period, and the role of graphic design and advertising in aestheticizing, visualizing, and commodifying the seemingly transformative social powers of electric energy.
Sources
Too numerous to include here, articles from daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals and newspapers have not been listed in the bibliography but are indicated in the endnotes of each chapter.
Aidea (Idea)
Affiches (Posters)
Art and Industry
Asahi gurafu (Asahi Graph)
Cheinstoa kenkyū (Chainstore Research)
Commerce Japan
Commercial Art
Desegno
Far Eastern Review
Front
Gebrauchsgraphik (Commercial graphics)
Graphis
Gurafikku dezain (Graphic Design)
Hanbai undo (Sales Movement)
Japan Times and Mail
Kaō buretin (Kao Bulletin)
Kenchiku shinchō (New architecture)
Kōga
Kōgei jidai (Industrial Art News)
Kōkoku bijutsu (Japan Advertising Art)
Kōkokukai (Advertising World)
Kōkū asahi (Aviation Asahi)
Kokusai kenchiku (International architecture)
Life
Matsuda shinpō (Mazda News)
Matsushita Denki geppō (Matsushita Electric Monthly)
Mavo
Mitsukoshi (Mitsukoshi taimusu) (Mitsukoshi Times)
Mizue (Watercolor painting)
Modern Publicity
Morinaga berutorain (Morinaga Beltline)
Nagaseman (Nagase man)
New York Times
Nippon
Offset- Buch- und Werbekunst (Offset, book, and advertising)
Ōsaka asahi shinbun
Ōsaka mainichi shinbun
Sandē mainichi (Sunday Mainichi)
Shiseidō cheinstoa (Shiseido Chainstore)
Shiseido cheinstoa alma mater (Shiseido Chainstore Alma Mater)
Shiseido geppō (Shiseido Monthly)
Shiseido gurafu (Shiseido Graph)
Suītorando (Sweetland)
Tōkyō asahi shinbun
Tsūrisuto (Tourist)
Travel in Japan
Umi to sora (Sea and Sky)
Yomiuri shinbun