While researching the history of Onitsuka Tiger’s branding and graphic design, I came across an odd, yet highly appealing piece of custom lettering on the company’s ONICK ski boots from the 1970s. Reminiscent of aspects of the typeface Black-Out by Eli Carrico (released by my type foundry Wordshape), yet vertically compressed with razor-sliced counters and odd stencil element that makes up one of the legs of the “K,” the ONICK lettering is a potential source for an intriguing modular font.

Original ONICK lettering

I immediately thought of Tsunekawa Ryoichi as a potential collaborator to bring this piece of lettering to full-fledged life in the contemporary context. Based in Nagoya, Tsunekawa runs an independent type foundry called Dharma Type, including three specialized foundry sub-labels: Flat-It, devoted to display lettering; Prop-A-Ganda, a series of fonts inspired by and based on retro propaganda posters, movie posters, retail sign lettering and advertisements in the early 20th century; and Holiday Type, a series of decorative and retro scripts for holiday use.

Tsunekawa’s work has seen a flurry of notice overseas this past year, having been featured in both MyFonts’ “Creative Characters” and YouWorkForThem’s newsletter. As the work of most Japanese type designers is almost wholly unnoticed abroad, the fact that Tsunekawa was interviewed by two of the most popular type distribution companies in the world is something beyond the norm. Perhaps it is because he works independently, or perhaps it is due to the charm and friendliness with which his typefaces are infused. Either way, this attention is both welcome and appreciated.

ONICK ski boot

Beyond mere charm, Tsunekawa’s work is nuanced, detailed, and accessible due to its high level of finish. His fonts stand apart from his contemporaries in Latin typeface design in Japan due to his fascination with pop, vernacular, and historical lettering from “non-pure” sources, whereas type designers like Okano Kunihiko and Kobayashi Akira have spent years analyzing the essence of Western letterform construction and unlocking the essence of Latin forms, Tsunekawa views surface and the awkward nature of his sources as being of value, as well.

His irreverence for the formal doctrines of history imbue his typeface designs with a rugged inventiveness that would be missed by most — glyphs without source designs are guessed at and approximated, often in a manner wildly divergent from what Western eyes would assume. It is in these moments that I find sheer delight in Tsunekawa’s work and that make me most pleased to invite him aboard Néojaponisme and Onitsuka Tiger’s type development project.

Rough sketch for ONICK

His assorted typefaces show an eclecticism in finish and as holistic systems. Tsunekawa’s return email to me about the proposed type project showed a digital sketch of how a completed typeface family from the source lettering might look, rendered with an effortlessness and dedication to detail that belies a skilled craftsperson. Further development showed Tsunekawa’s rigor. The typeface in development rapidly featured glyphs ignored by many: a full set of fractions, Eastern European diacritics and accents, superior and inferior numerals, alternate characters, and custom ligatures — all designed with regulated, detailed spacing.

ONICK type specimen

ONICK is a typeface Tsunekawa should be proud of — an homage to a moment in history rendered in the absolute best fashion. We are proud to present it to the world as a series of type kits including desktop and web fonts bundled with @font-face CSS kits for immediate use.

Download ONICK here.

“Modernism” is such a loaded term when it comes to graphic design. For some, it’s the banal aesthetic that brought about the Helveticization of the corporate world and stripped the personality away from the non-stop barrage of advertising we are subjected to daily. To others, the term refers to something more political and innately humanist — a desire to live in a world where communications are enhanced, with the end goal of life being made more livable. Some view Modernism as a movement that had vaguely defined start- and end-points, while some view the contemporary age as being a mere moment in the continued evolution of a larger, socially focused Modernity.

Here I take a bit of both “Modernisms” and speak of the Modern from a hybrid standpoint — an observation of the moments in time when we as a global society made a conscious effort to veer away from the fussy classicism and pre-industrial struggle of pre-Modernity and set to the task of trying to make graphic design for the people. Not that this was a purely altruistic pursuit: In Japan it tended to be trickle-down, with manufacturers and retail ventures being among the first to shift their visual methodologies¹.

This is complicated by the difficulty in identifying exactly what “Japanese Modern” graphic design looks like. A dizzying number of design idioms came into play both from domestic and international sources from the Meiji Era onward, so there is no overarching visual rubric which can be easily applied to define “Modern” Japanese graphic design. Critics such as James Fraser have argued that an application of visual elements co-opted from progressive aesthetics of foreign cultures, including but not limited to Art Deco and Avant Garde movements, defines Japanese Modern graphic design. While there is no argument that forms of visual expression from abroad were highly influential (It is no coincidence that Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto was translated into Japanese the same year it was published), little allowance is made for the myriad of other influencing factors — particularly the assimilation of vernacular advertising from both the West and the East. It was not just the Avant Garde that influenced Japaneese design.

Moreover, Japanese Modernity was just as much a self-initiated endeavor, not mere contextualization of foreign influence. To charge that the Modern shift was a mere synthesis of foreign visual elements is a simplistic misconception that has dogged the perception of Japan internationally for centuries. To pigeonhole “Japanese Modern” as merely design in Japan that aped the visual styles of avant garde movements abroad is both a disservice and a misstatement². The Modern age in Japan started well before overt Western elements began appearing in posters, matchbox covers, book covers and signage country-wide in the 1920s. During the two decades prior a movement was already well under way towards posters and printed materials featuring reductive compositions with pointed, streamlined deployment of imagery and typography/lettering.

Pre-War

Japan had a fully-formed culture of printing prior to the 1860 arrival of the first lithographic press from overseas and the founding of Japan’s first lithographic printing company in 1872. “Japan’s Gutenberg” Motoki Shōzō developed Japan’s first sustainable system of moveable type technology for printing (and Japan’s first typography school) in 1869, with the assistance of Irish American missionary William Gamble. Shōzō went on to form the Shinmachi Kappan Seizosho in Nagasaki, and his student Hirano Tomiji the Tsukiji Type Foundry in Tokyo, Japan’s first true type foundries. Both were innovators in creating multiple sets of type and introducing movable Latin types into the Japanese printing industry. The Tsukiji Type Foundry provided lithographic and typographic printing services as well as layout services, printing a number of books in both English and Japanese that looked at Japan as subject³ prior to 1903.

1904 advertisement for the Tsukiji Type Foundry

Integrated printing, design, and typographic services proliferated around the turn of the century, most notably in the formation of Shueisha (later the Dai Nippon Printing Company) in 1876 and the Toppan Printing Company in 1900. Both of these companies still dominate the contemporary printing industry in Japan. These companies’ initial rise, along with the peak of the Tsukiji Type Foundry’s influence in the beginning of the 20th Century, helped create and form public conceptions of graphic design as a pro-social activity that holistically engaged all aspects of commerce. Design departments at the Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya department stores opened in 1909 and 1912, respectively, each providing promotional advertising with streamlined visual messaging that showed an economy of form and directness in consumer appeal that can only be described as “modern” — free from visual frippery, excess ornament of earlier times and direct, to-the-point advertising copy.

Sugiura Hisui, "The Only Subway in the East". Color lithograph, 1927.

Ironically, it was this incorporation of design departments that would lead to the rise of Japan’s first “design stars,” most notably Sugiura Hisui, chief designer for Mitsukoshi and a member of the editorial committee of Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū (The Complete Commercial Artist). This was Japan’s most important graphic design publication at that time, providing commercial art and design in all its forms from both Japan and the world. Individual volumes focused on one or more disciplines, including poster design, advertising, package design, shop signs, billboards, flyers and broadsides, page layout and design, and typography, as well as other related subjects. Each edition was replete with substantial explanatory texts, profusely illustrated, and had many color plates reproduced within. Hisui would later go on to form the Shichinin-sha, an independent design research group that focused on applied typography, the effect of color, and the economy of visual style, as well as producing an annual poster exhibition.

Japan’s second notable graphic designer Yamana Ayao established himself at a young age, designing and illustrating covers for magazines like Josei (Woman) and Kuraku (Joys and Sorrows) for the publisher Platon, as well as earlier designs for his self-initiated journal Chocolate while attending university. Ayao departed Platon to join the cosmetic company Shiseido’s design department at the end of 1928. At Shiseido, Ayao defined the company’s early house style — a tendriled, Aubrey Beardsley-influenced illustration-driven series of advertisements and publications that focused on slightly abstracted female forms, delicate gothic lettering, geometric elements, and arabesque calligraphic flourishes. In two scant years, Ayao became Japan’s first full-fledged graphic superstar, jettisoning his employment at Shiseido (though returning sporadically throughout his career) to take up the gauntlet at assorted design departments throughout Tokyo.

The decade prior to Ayao’s initial time at Shiseido brought an onslaught of assimilation of distinctively foreign elements into Japanese graphic design⁴. Mirroring the European avant garde’s search for a streamlined purity of visual expression, the form of kanji and kana would be subjected to both hyper-decorative and ultra-reductive tendencies at the hands of designers.⁵ Foreign-designed avant garde art and design books were easily available from the early 1920s through 1938, most notably in Tokyo from Kaiser, a German bookstore in Kanda and the nearby book retailer Sanseido. Each stocked the renowned German design periodical Gebrauschgrafik alongside a wide array of exhibition catalogs and photography annuals from around the world. Soviet art and design publications were available from Nauka, a bookshop in Jimbocho that still exists today.

Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū.

Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū.

Foreign and domestic application of design trends and theories were catalogued domestically in periodicals like Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū and the intensely Modern-focused Kōkoku-kai (Publicity World). The latter was a diverse commercial art journal that mixed dynamic multi-color illustrations of lettering, page layouts, signage, and proposed kiosk designs with halftones imagery of graphic design, interior design, and architecture from abroad. A pronounced influence from the Russian and German left is evident in all three of these publications, as well as lesser journals such as Belarto, a short-lived art and design journal whose operations began and ceased within the span of one year — 1933. Just a few years later, these modes of graphic design were actively discouraged, leading to the imprisonment of a handful of leftist graphic designers who refused to convert to the state-approved style — a less architectonic, yet still Avant Garde-influenced amalgam of traditional and progressive design styles.⁶ Photo montage still had its place, but the notions which informed leftist designers and (some of) the style’s early deployment in Japan were displaced with the hardening national ideology of Japanese Imperialism.

Post-War

With the nations’ ideological and political teeth pulled immediately after the war, the citizens of Japan set to rebuilding the nation’s economy. This story includes Kihachiro Onitsuka, the founder of Onitsuka Co., Ltd. and the graphic designers, typographers, and printers who would help shape global perception of his brand.

From its formation in 1949, the story of Onitsuka Tiger is one that is based on innovation in the development of footwear, starting in the years immediately following World War II. The company’s printed promotional materials consistently kept abreast of larger trends in typography, both technologically and aesthetically — the two innately tied together. What drove the look of Onitsuka Tiger up to the 1980s was what was possible with printing technology, alongside then-contemporary typographic development and aesthetic taste.

The 1950s were a time of monumental change in graphic design in Japan. It was the defining decade in elevating both the social and economic status of the designer in Japanese society.

This was due to two primary events:

1. Peace brand cigarettes packaging redesign project

   French American designer Raymond Loewy’s 1952 redesign of the packaging for Peace cigarettes⁷ was a return to graphic form for the Japanese tobacco market after wartime shortages of both cigarettes and associated colorful cigarette packaging. What really caught the public’s attention was Loewy’s design fee for redesigning the ubiquitous brand. Unheralded in any sector of graphic design in Japan, the project fee for Loewy designing the packaging was a crisp ¥1,500,000 — a fortune at that time. The sheer amount had the nation atwitter and instantly skyrocketed public opinion of the work of commercial artists. Graphic designers and illustrators saw an increased perception of value in their work, as well as a noted increase in design fees in the years immediately following the Peace re-branding project.⁸

2. Graphic ’55

   Graphic ‘55 was the first internationally recognized exhibition of Japan’s top designers at the time. The seven Japanese designers who exhibited were Yusaku Kamekura, Yoshio Hayakawa, Hiromu Hara, Kenji Ito, Takashi Kono, Ryuichi Yamashiro and Tadashi Ohashi. American Paul Rand exhibited alongside the Japanese designers, being the preeminent designer for the global business sector at that time. Held at the Takashimaya department store in 1955, this massive exhibition helped introduce graphic design⁹ as a term and a profession worth pursuing to the general Japanese populace. Exhibitor Kamekura had traveled to the United States the previous year and there met Paul Rand, inviting him to participate in the planned exhibition. Rand gracefully accepted, and his loose, soft-focus American take on European Modernism would serve as an inspirational touchstone both for the Japanese public who attended the exhibition (much of whom were unfamiliar with his work and burgeoning profile in the American corporate world) and for his fellow exhibitors, most of whom stuck more-or-less to a visual template engineered by Rand (and his predecessor Loewy) of geometric abstraction and simplification coupled with pop typographic simplicity in their output for the remainder of the decade.¹⁰

The Graphic ’55 exhibition helped the public associate iconic advertising imagery with individuals, enhancing their social recognition and allowing the designers involved to incrementally increase design fees. The exhibition included a range of design project formats, whereas earlier domestic graphic design exhibitions tended to focus on a sole format — the poster — and showed the public the range of works that designers could tackle.

Onitsuka Tiger

232 kilometers south in Kobe that same year, Onitsuka Tiger launched their own piece of highly memorable graphic design — a lavish product catalog that equalled the quality of the designers involved in Graphic ’55. Featuring a four-spot color cover printed by lithograph depicting reliefs of ancient Olympian athletes accompanied by geometric Latin and Japanese hand-lettering, the catalog evinced a sense of athleticism and commitment that resonates five and a half decades later. This catalog sets the tone for Onitsuka Tiger’s early graphic house style — visual interpretations of authenticity and sportsmanship rendered with a high degree of craft and artfulness.

1957 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

The company’s early catalogs were a melange of pre- and post-war influence, featuring a painterly style of illustration for their covers, with text hand-lettered or printed via letterpress. A number of the covers use the hazy gradated style that was popularized prior to the war by Takashi Kono for Nippon Magazine (prior to his conversion to a more simplified means of representation). Thin-line lettering that mirrored Hamana Ayao’s art nouveau and “moderne” takes on lettering adorned many of the covers alongside geometric Latin and Japanese lettering, tasteful mincho hand lettering, and Raymond Loewy-esque “streamlined” lettering which was just coming out of vogue in the United States.

1958 catalog

1959 catalog interior

1959 catalog interior

Onitsuka Tiger’s 1959 Spring Catalog is of note for the juggling of similarly-weighted but ultimately mismatched typefaces that betrays the lack of metal type that their printer/typographer had on hand, printed in black over expressive verdant green crops of halftoned images of sportsmen. The catalog’s interior deploys an odd mix of faces — one spread juxtaposes the combination of Franklin Gothic for the headlines, Bernhard Gothic Medium for the subheads and Century Schoolbook for the text on the left side and Futura Black for the headlines, Cheltenham Bold for the subheads, and Stymie Light for the text with reproductions of a hastily written “Tiger” in the mix sporadically. This array of typefaces is in large part a history of Modern type history in Europe and the Americas, and more surprisingly, the nexus of labor by three men who defined the development of graphic Modernity through their work.

The Rub-Down Era

The 1960s saw a giant shift toward more free-form layouts globally, with dry transfer rubdown lettering freeing designers from having their layouts translated into metal grid layouts by typographers at printing companies, instead opting to paste up layouts and have them reproduced photographically. 1963′s Onitsuka Tiger golf catalog brought a switch to rubdown Letraset lettering for headlines, indicated by wavering baselines and slightly skewed letterforms, set metal type in English and Japanese for body text, and purely photographic reproduction of complete layouts. The subsequent 1963 full product line catalogs also deployed Letraset for headlines with an ATF typewriter-style typeface with halftones images on the interior. The full catalogs’ covers featured awkward hand-lettering that mimicked the forms of Helvetica Medium. Each catalog was reproduced using black and one spot color, offered in a handsome collection of four stylistically unified brochure-style pamphlets of uniform size and layout.

1964 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

1964′s catalogs continued in much the same vein on the interiors, and opted for a calligraphic titling treatment for the Winter Sports Shoes Catalog. One notable shift was a switch to using gothic typefaces for Japanese for almost all catalog interiors, reserving mincho deployment for their golf promotions where the company felt a more traditional look would serve consumers’ opinions about the company.

1967 Winter catalog

1967 brought the first use of the typeface Compacta which would be a continued, though sporadic, visual identifier for the brand’s printed matter through the late 1960s. Compacta was designed by Letraset’s Fred Lambert, adapted from an anonymous German student alphabet made from cut paper that appeared in the 1952 book Hoffmans Schriftatlas by Alfred Finsterer¹¹. With its inherent vertical thrust and machined appearance, Compacta was a logical choice for the company — it looked both serious and fun.

Information graphics in 1969 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

Onitsuka Tiger’s 1969 catalog saw use of two-color information graphics very much in the style of Austrians Otto & Marie Neurath’s Isotype¹² stylized graphic devices used to help illustrate social statistics and signage in pictorial form. This foray was Onitsuka Tiger’s first investigation into information graphics in a meaningful, thorough way for their printed matter. Olympians who used the company’s shoes, production statistics, market segmentation and market growth were all depicted in bold red and black in a manner that harked back to Isotype, as much as the rounded corners of then-contemporary style in the Onitsuka Tiger family tree of Olympians on the back inside cover of the catalog. It was a bold move, backing up what had previously been the mere atmosphere of the Olympic spirit with numbers interpreted both graphically and with acumen.

1972 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

In this way, the company’s 1972 summer catalog is related — products were photographed in full-color against poster backdrops designed by German Otl Aicher for the Munich Summer Olympics, Aicher being a champion and master of information graphics and of stylized pictographs.¹³ By adopting the 1972 Summer Olympics as the visual language of the company, for the first time a purity of the visual language of Modernism as a unified, totalizing force was applied directly to Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions.

Aicher’s designs for the Olympics were a heady mixture of considered color¹⁴, refined form given shape through Aicher and his team’s solarized spot-color promotional poster imagery; economic creation and use of information graphics (most notably through devising a unified system of pictograms which resonate strongly today); and confident inspirational abstract geometric compositions and nuanced typography (Helvetica seeing one its brightest days in the sun in the Olympic identity program). By merely using Aicher’s posters, using a Helvetica clone and a stylized bifurcate kana headline display typeface to capture the spontaneity of Aicher’s designs, Onitsuka Tiger connected their brand identity to one of the strongest identity design projects in history, positioning the brand as a confident and connected internationally to exuberant, intelligent graphic design. Aicher’s body or work and writing stands as a milestone in graphic design history, emphasizing finished form-making, a dedication to communication, and a commitment to “thinking while making,” formal results being based on synthesis and an iterative process in lieu of easy “visual solutions” planned from start-to-finish with a minimum of “roadside” consideration.

ONICK ski boots brochure

The five years that followed (and preceded Onitsuka Tiger’s dormancy as a standalone brand) would be dominated by technological innovations in their footwear and a slickness in graphic representation applied to both products and promotions alike. The pinnacle of the company’s efforts would occur in 1973 with a brochure for the ONICK ski boots, a revolutionary product that included a lemon-shaped hand pump called “The Air Lemon” that would pump air into a bladder which helped heel and ankle support. Emblazoned on the sides of the boots and on the brochure cover was a piece of swollen extended display lettering with razor-thin counters that mirrors the best original alphabets offered by Photo-Lettering, Inc. — the then-king of custom lettering who dominated the stylistic era of 1970s graphic design alongside the output of Herb Lubalin and his associates at assorted design and lettering ventures. The ONICK mark’s confident originality was accompanied by a host of similarly designed photolettering branding for Onitsuka Tiger projects like AFTER BOOTS, a line of exceptionally furry post-ski session luxury boots with vibrantly-colored stitching and an aerodynamic hand-lettered logo that combined rugged slab serifs with truncated swash elements and a photo-lettering outline treatment graphically.

4-3-2-1 (or How Switzerland Ran Over The World With a Graphic Truck)

The 1974-1975 catalogs of Onitsuka Tiger’s products would be in step with the Heveticization of the rest of the corporate world that had been in progress for nearly two decades prior. This move was emphasized globally by design firms such as Chermayeff & Geismar and Massimo Vignelli’s Unimark and their assorted total branding programs for companies like American Airlines, Knoll, and 3M. Developed in 1957 by Swiss foundrymen Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffma and further developed by a number of type foundries and type designers, Helvetica (née Neue Haas Grotesk) would become the graphic lingua franca of the corporate world. Due to its clean, neutral nature, Helvetica was believed to be both timeless in nature and neutral in tone, offering typographic information in a sober, practical manner¹⁵.

1974 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

These two years of catalogs utilize Helvetica arranged on a thorough, considered typographic grid with considerable white space surrounding the type and typographic pages offset with full-bleed photographs on opposing pages in spreads. They are both the most masterful of the company’s printed matter dating to that time and also the most toned-down — the overtly professional appearance overriding the spontaneity and idiosyncrasy that had been a hallmark of Onitsuka Tiger’s identity since day one.

Of note are two particular Onitsuka Tiger initiatives that dodged the Helvetica bullet: the 1976 EMPEROR golf products catalog and the entire range of catalogs for Onitsuka Tiger in 1977. Both were inspirational in their use of color and bespoke lettering.

1976 EMPEROR golfing products catalog

1977 Onitsuka Tiger Cycling Shoes catalog

The logo for EMPEROR, Onitsuka Tiger’s line of golf footwear and accessories that was issued from the 1960s through the early 1970s (originally with the name of GOOD SHOT) is a unique bit of hand-lettering that fuses the sensibilities of Ed Benguiat’s interpretation of a Caslon for International Typeface Corporation (while simultaneously predating it) with the swashy features of a cancellaresca bastarda, then adding an extreme italic slope and a very ambitious “MP” ligature. Viewed through the contemporary lens, it’s a horsey piece of lettering that lacks finesse, but one cannot deny that it is interesting and adventurous. Within the EMPEROR catalog, products are shot against a backdrop of steel tubing, and this same backdrop is utilized again in all of the company’s 1977 catalogs for the photography, though paired with the typeface Neil Bold, an incised extra black display sans serif and favorite of later Blue Note Records releases and science fiction novels.

Conclusion

Throughout the first era of Onitsuka Tiger, the brand showed a continued commitment to the classical nature of sport, as well as keeping the company aesthetically contemporary. The evolution of the company’s aesthetics mirrored the ambition of the people who were behind the development of the most progressive sports shoes in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed materials are a typographic goldmine and help tell the tale of their time, one of immense change.

¹ The focus is even more myopic — I am looking at typography, a subset of graphic design, filtered through the lens of application by a sole company, Onitsuka Tiger, a Japanese company with an at times firm, at times tentative, foot in the North American and European markets, as well.

² Something that has been actively taken up both abroad and domestically.

³ This self-awareness and self-analysis of nation is a key ingredient in what can be defined as Modernism: the recognition of nation precedes socially progressive trends of thought that affirm the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge or technology.

⁴ The Japanese graphic design work informed by foreign elements of the two decades prior to World War II is continually collected today, reprinted in cheap volumes by publishers like David and Seigensha.

⁵ The orthography of the Japanese visual language would be called into question time and time again, as well. 1919′s New Japanese Script, designed by Shokichi Toru, reduced the thousands of kanji and hundred-plus kana required to read Japanese down to a mere 125 syllabic glyphs, their form influenced by a mix of Latin, Cyrillic and Kana letterforms. A more adventurous attempt was made by Itto Kojima in 1886, reducing the Japanese syllabary down to a scant base of 24 characters, 4 horizontal snap-on bars that denoted inflection, and an encapsulating box to create variants of each syllable. In total, the result was a compendium of 204 characters that represented 609 different sounds.

Kojima Itto’s 1886 Revisionist Script

Shokichi Toru’s 1919 Revisionist Script

Kojima and Toru’s revisionist syllabaries are discussed in brief in Zerro, a compendium of dead visual languages that was self-pubished by Yukimasa Matsuda and his excellent and adventurous Ushiwaka-maru publishing imprint.

⁶ Of note, conversion-wise, was Yamana Ayao’s shift from increasingly Western-looking illustrations of women to more traditional Japanese-looking subjects as depicted on the covers of the first two issues of the state-approved Nippon Magazine published in 1935 and Takashi Kono’s move from a Tschicholdian use of “typo-photo” to a more subdued style of photomontage that had distinctly Japanese elements at its core for Nippon Magazine.

⁷ See more here.

⁸ Loewy’s additional projects for Asahi Beer, Mitsuwa Sekken Soft Soap and Fujiya and their associated massive fees entrenched Loewy as the most popular American designer in Japan during that decade.

⁹ The industry was imbued with the moniker “graphic design” and acknowledged as a term and specialized practice by American William Addison Dwiggins in 1922.

¹⁰ This was fine for a while, but had all of the life wrung out of it by 1959 internationally.

¹¹ In 2007, I revisited the original student alphabet and released it as Vorganger Grotesk — an authentic representation of the originator’s graphic intention, as represented in the aforementioned. It is the headline typeface of Néojaponisme.

¹² More here on the Neurath’s Isotype project.

¹³ As well as being someone run down by a car outside of his home in 1991 while crossing the street on his riding lawnmower.

¹⁴ This color palette has been referenced a number of times post-1972, perhaps most notably in Los Angeles motion graphics production company Brand New School’s redesign for the television network, The International Music Feed. A critique of that here.

¹⁵ There is little need to expound further on Helvetica here — the amount of research regarding this single typeface family is staggering. For an entertaining introduction that helps impart a sense of the development of graphic design as a visual and social culture from pre-Modern to PostModern times, I highly recommend viewing Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary film Helvetica.

Between infamously long work hours and personal identities grounded in corporate affiliation, Japan has usually been known for its labor rather than its leisure. This may be, however, exactly why the nation’s enduring obsession with golf is so conspicuous. Sure, golf is the most obvious athletic extension of Japan’s social priorities, but in recent days, the sport has an enormous legion of fans that expands far beyond the rigidities of workplace hierarchies. The game has grown and shifted together with society — providing a useful metaphor for understanding both the country’s emergence as an economic power in the 20th century and the downfall of the salaryman-dominated social system in the 21st.

Although now something approaching a cliché, the first images to emerge globally of Japanese golf culture told a slightly depressing story. Back in 1964, an infamous photograph appeared in Life of atomized salarymen at a three-story driving range hitting balls into the void. This etched a nearly permanent narrative for the rest of the world: The busy people of a very crowded Japan were trying to live out the fantasy Western lifestyle at any extreme. Scholar Marilyn Ivy wrote in the essay “Critical Text, Mass Artifacts” that the U.S. media portrayed Japan as “impossible, dehumanized productivity.” And in that framing, those now-iconic industrialized golf ranges surely looked like the key leisure activity of a “dystopic capitalistic” system (Ibid.).

Twenty-five years after that photograph, however, the idyllic towns of Hawaii and California greeted planeload after planeload of “Japan Inc.” businessmen as they headed out to play the areas’ most prestigious greens. The dream had been fulfilled — those practicing in that dystopic driving range were now enjoying the Great Outdoors shoulder to shoulder with the American elite. And when a Japanese businessman purchased the ultra-luxury Pebble Beach Golf Links on the California Coast for $700 million over the market price in 1990, Japanese golf suddenly became another facet of U.S. paranoia towards Eastern economic dominance.

But we all know what happened later: The Japanese economy collapsed in the mid-1990s, and the salaryman class lost its monopoly on social prestige. Golf was a core tradition of corporate warriors, and it therefore also suffered a reputation loss from its over-association with the dominant old-man contingent. The decline of golf, however, is itself history, and in recent years, the sport has been rehabilitated as a sport rather than a day of work outside of the office. And it is now open to almost all — not just old men with expense accounts but also young women on group dates.

Even with these changes to the player base, one thing remains constant: Golf has become as deeply-embedded in Japanese culture as green tea and baseball. There have been thousands of fads and trends involving foreign culture, but golf has weathered a full century of tremendous social change to still reign as a dominant sport. How did this one particular game of hitting a little white ball into a distant hole become so entrenched in the Japanese psyche?

As seen in most importation of Western culture in Japan, golf first entered the country directly through acts of foreign intervention. When Japan re-opened its borders in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the port cities flooded with Western businessmen looking to cash in on a new trade route. Since these men and their families mostly lived in sequestered communities with Western housing, they were also quick to install other institutions, such as churches and cricket clubs, that would replicate their lifestyles from back home. So it was quite inevitable that a foreigner would look out one day on a lush green Japanese valley and claim the land for golf.

In 1901 destiny called for Arthur Hesketh Groom, a Brit in the tea trade who was sick and tired of not having a good golf game in the 33 years he had been in Japan. He took it upon himself to construct a private four-hole course on Mt. Rokko, which two years later, he expanded into nine holes. Thus was born the Kobe Golf Club. In the May 19, 1903 issue of English newspaper Kobe Chronicle, Groom announced a golf tournament on his new course. Unsurprisingly, no Japanese players showed up, and in this nascent year, golf was exclusively a pastime of the expat scene. But by the following year, the now 18-hole Kobe Golf Club had 171 members, seven of whom were Japanese.

Once Groom proved that the sport could work on Japanese soil, golf spread throughout the country — but always at the hands of foreigners. A more winter-friendly course opened in nearby Yokoya in 1904, and two years later, Brits near Yokohama founded a course in Negishi. Native players slowly trickled in to the sport, sometimes as caddies of the Western players, but they were generally slow to become competitive members of this elite world. Japan’s first national golf tournament, which started in 1907, did not even have a Japanese contestant until 1916.

1918, however, was a big shift as Inoue Makoto became the first Japanese player to win his country’s makeshift national tournament. With this victory, golf started to show movements towards greater domestication. Of course the first Japanese involved in the golf scene were the sons of high-society families who had studied or worked in the West. Inoue had been posted at the New York office of his company and spent enough days and nights at New Jersey’s White Beeches Country Club to be crowned club champion for two years straight. Another famed early golfer Akaboshi Rokuro had picked up the sport during his time at Princeton.

These foreign-trained individuals acted as early golfing ambassadors, but soon they were joined by the nation’s less-globetrotting upper class. In 1914, 30 top Japanese businessmen — one of whom later became a cabinet secretary — came together to start their own golf course in Tokyo’s Komazawa area. In just two decades, golf had shifted quite nicely from the foreign elite to the Japanese elite. And this set a pattern common to most trend adoption around the world: The next-highest status group often attempts to imitate the highest-status group’s culture as a way to claim membership to the group above them. This “trickle down” of a burgeoning modern Japanese elite imitating the West was directly responsible for golf’s national expansion.

Right up until the end of World War II, golf increasingly became a well-integrated part of the privileged classes’ lifestyle. By 1940, there were 71 courses across the nation and around 110,000 total players. This was impressive growth from the days of Groom and his private course, but golf had hardly become a mass sport. Compared to other successful foreign imports such as business suiting and baseball, golf had not become anywhere near as common. The limiting factor was mostly financial: Buying golf balls and clubs would have taken up most of an average worker’s yearly salary. We can assume, however, that golf’s small, exclusive player base gave it universally understood associations with wealth and prestige. Golf was clearly the pinnacle leisure activity of Japan’s ruling class. This was true, however, of most modern consumer culture in the pre-war years: Only the urban elite could really participate.

World War II completely disrupted Japan’s old class system, however, and as a new, more egalitarian Japan emerged from the rubble of the Empire, golf had a new chance to penetrate more deeply into Japanese society. For the first few years of the post-war, U.S. soldiers reclaimed most of Japan’s golf courses for military usage, but in doing so, likely gave the sport further legitimacy as the sport of society’s top tier. Things got rolling again for Japanese golfers in the 1950s, as the U.S. returned the courses to private ownership, and the Japanese Golf Association re-opened its doors. In 1957 — the year after the government officially declared the “post-war” to be over — there had been an increase up to 116 courses with 18 million course visits. That same year a Japanese player Nakamura Torakichi won the international tournament Canada Cup (now World Cup) hosted in Japan and sparked what author Tanaka Yoshihisa calls the “First Post-War Golf Boom.” From 1957 to 1961, golf was red hot, as the top executives and managers of Japan’s burgeoning New Middle Class — arguably the new elite in a post-aristocratic Japan — flocked to the greens. With this huge demand to hit the links, an unprecedented number of new courses were constructed. It also helped that companies could claim golf — like boozing with hostesses and lavish dinners — as an entertainment expense. The more golf played, the less tax paid.

Throughout the 1960s, the number of courses continued to grow steadily. But this growth curve got a major kick during the “Second Post-War Golf Boom” of 1971 to 1974. Golf tournaments had begun to appear on TV in the late 1960s, and as a result, a much larger group of middle class workers began to take interest in the sport. This was also a time period when the Dankai Generation — Japan’s Baby Boomers — had entered the work force and began to settle into their careers. Golf’s association with the business elite in the late 1950s had sent the implicit message to younger workers that knowing how to play golf would become a critical requirement for future promotion. This was also the era when Japan’s pop culture really exploded: when consumers could afford to buy LPs, off-the-rack clothes, stereo equipment, and magazines. Japan had emerged from being the world’s manufacturing factory and started to actually spend some of its hard-earned wages on leisure and goods.

Although growth of the golf industry petered off in the early 1980s, the Bubble Economy of 1986 to 1989 spurred the Third Post-War Golf Boom. This era had all the ingredients required to make an elite leisure activity more widespread: speculation-fueled wealth-generation, a currency doubling in value, and a broad culture of conspicuous consumption. The Bubble was the age of excess — the salaryman class living out all the fantasies of the post-war in glorious and excess detail. This meant drinking watered down Johnny Walker Blue Label every night in Ginza hostess clubs in black Armani suits. When it came to golf, companies suddenly had the cash to invest in prestigious country club memberships, corporate trips abroad to Hawaii, and other extravagant ways to tee off. With salarymen being the kings of society and golf being their leisure activity of choice it only made sense that the sport would loom large in the wider culture. Just as the brigades of corporate soldiers hit their paradise years of fancy golfing, this era also saw an influx of female golfers, who made up 20% of all Japanese players by the early 1990s.

Golf’s takeover of Japanese society continued to fit the trickle-down model quite nicely. In all of these golf booms, a roaring economy and greater spread of media brought a huge number of new players into the game. Golf has always been expensive in Japan; this is the country that introduced the idea of “green fees” on top of already-exorbitant sunk costs in country club memberships. And golf always had a strong association with the top echelon of society. So as incomes increased, more people had the disposable income to play golf, and they naturally wanted to play golf as a way to identify as a member of the society’s upper crust. At first this meant internationalized Japanese showing their worldliness by joining up foreign country clubs in their own country. Later this meant the top executives in the New Middle Class imitating the pre-war elite.

By the 1970s and 1980s, golf still had its prestige but lost its exclusivity. Ultra-bright driving ranges across Tokyo would be filled to the brim with white collar workers hitting balls into a net, as practice for the next time their company would pay for them to play 18 holes. And in the Bubble, Japanese became the most famous consumers of golf around the world, snapping up famed courses for unbelievable prices. In Singapore, for example, the Japanese expats joined country clubs at such a rate that the government had to pass a law preventing foreign players from being more than 30% of the total membership (Ben-Ari).

Golf’s growth trajectory in Japan’s miracle post-war should be no surprise, but there is something interesting in how golf managed to stay in the national imagination for so long. There was a time in the 1950s when everyone was obsessed with owning a rice cooker and refrigerator, but of course, these became commonplace in the 1960s and these humble dreams disappeared in their widespread attainment. Tennis boomed around the same time but petered out with the over-proliferation of college tennis clubs in the mid-1980s. Golf had the dual advantage of always being expensive and inaccessible even as incomes rose, as well as being a sport that did not necessitate youthful prowess. The richer and older you were, the more golf you could play. But the increase in players always outpaced the construction of giant courses, and this lack of supply always kept fees at a slightly painful level for the wider population, hence giving corporate entertainment budgets a critical role. Despite Japan’s great wealth, it was nearly impossible to actually play golf in this Bubble era peak. Players would have to reserve golf courses several months in advance as well as pay exorbitant green fees (Ben-Ari). Due to Japan’s tight geographical constrictions, golf became more exclusive the more it became popular. Compare this to the Louis Vuitton handbag, which started in a similar position of being only for the upper classes, and by 2005, was on the arm of every other girl in the subway. Golf’s natural barriers towards mass adoption strengthened its prestige.

With the Bubble’s collapse in the early 1990s, however, the holistic and dominant taste culture of the post-war male elite — whiskey, golf, dark serge wool suits with white shirts and dark ties — became an easy target for ridicule. Tastes had greatly diversified in the 1980s, and a new culture of aesthetic refinement (spurred in great part by the Saison retail empire) rejected the mainstream business-driven cultural world. Japan was no longer monolithic, and as the economy started to teeter and the salaryman became a sad sack in sack suit, golf was suddenly a punchline, more associated with men stained by stale cigarette smoke and coffee-stained teeth than regal men in natty dress breathing in the Great Outdoors. Golf went through some rough years in the national imagination, especially with the collapse of exclusive country clubs and exposure in many cases of funding from organized crime. By the 2000s, however, enough time had passed to give golf a second shot. Thanks to athletes like Tiger Woods, the sport would shed some of its older associations and be reborn as a class-neutral athletic endeavor.

Golf has always had a unique sense of style. With a lack of sustained physical movement inherent in the activity, dress could be relatively fancy compared to other sports. Okay, knee breeches and argyle may have been the height of “sporty” in the past, much like the white flannels of tennis players. Before the modern era, however, there was generally high propriety of dress for all occasions, and this extended to the golf course. Dressing up as “gentlemen” on the green was a natural part of the pastime for early players, and this past has been sewn into the sport’s reputation. Modern players may not take up the exact dress of their ancestors but they surely bask in the sense of decorum established centuries prior.

At the same time, this sense of gentlemanly propriety has made golf a difficult fit within the wider pantheon of sports. Take the case of Japanese Ur shoe-brand Onitsuka Tiger, which framed itself constantly in its early years as the ideal material companion to the Olympic tradition. In the spirit of athletic diversity, Onitsuka Tiger manufactured distinct shoes for every obscure sporting event and physical activity in the modern world from track to boxing to “baton twirling” to rugby to handball. Yet the company’s golf shoes were produced under a separate brand name — GOOD SHOT Golf Shoes. In the 1950s, these had a look that has been mostly forgotten today: clunky black nylon lace-up cleats with patches of white on the toe, something like a boat shoe’s angry uncle. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Onitsuka Tiger went back to the classic saddle shoe design that had become a key look for professional golfers in the 1920s. These stayed in basic whites, browns, and blacks, but later on in the 1970s, expanded into electric reds and yellows.

This kind of business-shoe adapted for the green is a vestigial remnant of golf’s ancestry. These days, global athletic brands have invaded and enforced a strict space-aged techno-savvy — a strong counterbalance to the old aristocratic fun of dressing up. No natural fibers are harmed in the production of modern golf clothes. Sunglasses must look like props from 1980s science fiction films. Even Brooks Brothers — the arbiter of traditional style in the U.S. — likes to encourage younger men to wear anachronistic pieces like rounded club collars to the office while suggesting a relaxed, “less formal” ensemble as the perfect golf wear.

This seems a direct sartorial consequence of golf’s re-imagination as an activity open to all. Democraticization is great for people but terrible for clothing. Formality of dress has always been a quiet tool of class society to clarify status, and it makes sense that dismantling the aristocratic conventions cooked into institutions means doing away with much of the costume. The new American work uniform — an over-sized dress shirt (with undershirt showing through the open collar) and a pair of giant Dockers — could easily be traced directly to belief in meritocratic egalitarianism. Theoretically-speaking, there could be creative fashion in a utopian democratic society, but fashion throughout history — at least what we consider “dressing well” — has almost always been correlated with imitation of the upper classes’ style rules.

Throughout the 20th century, playing golf was a badge of upward mobility — a chance to buy into an exclusive “Gentlemen’s game.” And certainly, dressing up was part of the appeal. The concept of dressing for “time, place, occassion” (TPO) has become a quaint anachronism — except, arguably, in Japan where it still guides most public dress. It makes sense therefore that while golf lost most of its aristocratic or upper class associations in Japan after becoming over-exposed within the salaryman class, the sport was able to make an impressive comeback with Japanese women around 2007 by adding back to the game a sense of TPO-driven dress.

Women’s sudden interest in golf was an unabashed trend conspiracy, mind you, with the golf industry paying out large sums to apparel companies and fashion magazines to directly target young women who had never once considered the idea of putting. They re-framed the game as part of the courtship process with (upwardly mobile) men, and hence, a new opportunity for women to dress up in a completely different set of (adorable) clothing, which they would need to go out and buy. An entire magazine Regina popped up to be the fashion guide for the female golf set.

Yet everyone won. While this has echoes of the industrial complex bending the behavior of citizens, the plot also says a lot about the nature of golf. This would not have been possible with ice hockey nor even basketball — sports that require putting a lot of incredibly specialized people in the same room. And ironically the democratic nature of golf in the 21st century also opened the door. Ladies circuit stars like Miyazato Ai have been an inspiration to Japanese women to get out there and show their athleticism. The dainty clothes were an appeal to some, but the entire female golf movement did encourage many women to take the sport seriously beyond the social dimensions.

Like so many traditions in the 21st century, golf has found a new strength and stability in its ability to signify many things to many audiences. The sport has been freed from its previous monolithic understanding as an exclusive leisure activity for elite men. Golf may no longer work in Japan as a universally understood symbol of economic progress, but the elements of prestige, leisure, and fine dress still resonate with larger audiences than before. Golf can be all things to all people. Businessmen still banter over distribution strategies while rescuing balls from the bunker, and two holes down, a young couple learns to play golf together as an unspoken sign of eventual matrimony. Golf has mutated over the years but these evolutions occur so that it can remain core to the Japanese DNA.

References:

All facts about Japanese golf history, unless otherwise noted, came from:

Tanaka Yoshihisa. Gorufu to Nihonjin. 『ゴルフと日本人』 Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1992.

Other sources:

Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson. Japanese Sports: A History. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.

Eyal Ben-Ari “Golf, Organization, and ‘Body Projects’: Japanese Business Executives in Singapore.” The Culture of Japan Seen Through Its Leisure. Ed. by Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Marilyn Ivy “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan.” Postmodernism and Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.

Back in 2009, I spent a few very busy weeks conducting, editing, and translating fifteen interviews with leading Japanese musicians, fashion designers, and photographers for the Onitsuka Tiger book Made of Japan. While the project was a great chance to get into the minds of individuals who shape contemporary Japanese culture, I also wished at the time that I could turn my attention at some point to the rich history of Onitsuka Tiger itself.

So earlier this year, in warm welcome from the company, Ian and I raided the archives of old catalogs and industry circulars in Onitsuka Tiger’s Tokyo office dating from the early post-war onwards. The photos, graphic design, and copy of these catalogs alone perfectly chart out the development of consumer culture in Japan. The two-color printing of 1960s’ materials, for example, looks identical to 45 rpm singles of that era. And by 1976, the catalogs were filled with foreign athletes with impressive moustaches — very much in the same mold as the first issues of era-defining men’s magazine Popeye.

Our humble web journal has always been dedicated to the intersection between Japan and global culture, and in these catalogs, Ian and I were excited to find the story of a local company working tirelessly to position its Japanese technical know-how as the material means to international athleticism. Beyond today’s kneejerk embrace of the Olympics games as a glorious sponsorship moment, founder Kihachiro Onitsuka seemed obsessed with the wider conceptualization of the Olympic tradition — the celebration of global diversity in the opening ceremony, the huge variety of competitive games, the jet-setting descent of VIPs upon world capitals, the modernist virtues. As part of that Olympic framing, the company overtly and tirelessly referenced the games in catalogs and shoe names, and more broadly, built an Olympian-scale product strategy that offered specific shoes for every possible athletic activity — from marathon, track, volleyball, yachting, and baton twirling. (They also made a “referee shoe” at some point.)

Onitsuka Tiger asked Ian and I to work on essays related to these catalogs, and Ian has also produced two new fonts Kirimomi Swash and Kirimomi Geometric Sans (download here) based on the catalogs’ old lettering work. We will also be publishing two essays. I wrote a piece on the history of golf in Japan, based on glancing through materials on Onitsuka Tiger’s golf shoe brand GOOD SHOT and some solid library time. Until now, I had never looked much at the history of Japanese sports but I was intrigued to find that the pattern of importation and adoption echoes the model seen with other kinds of Western culture coming to Japan. (Hint: It’s “trickle down.”)

Ian meanwhile looked at the development of Onitsuka Tiger’s visual identity in the context of Modernism, both the chronologically-defined art movement and the broader idea of 20th century social development. The visual tone of Onitsuka Tiger’s early ads and catalogs encapsulate and document the recent history of typography in modern times.

So stay tuned as we roll out these essays over the next month.