On January 2, 1983, the Japanese Diet called upon the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association’s Ethics Committee Chairman for a frank chat about the conspicuous increase of sexual content in young women’s magazines. In particular legislators were concerned about Gal’s Life (Shufu no Tomosha), Kids (Gakushu Kenkyusha), Elle Teen (Kindai Eigasha), Popteen (Asuka Shinsha), Carrot Gals (Heiwa Shuppan), and Maru Maru Gals (Toen Shobo). These were relatively popular titles at the time, with Gal’s Life selling a half-million copies a month and Popteen right behind it at 350K.

The publishing industry did little in response, and so in February 1984, Mitsuzuka Hiroshi, the Deputy Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, spoke out in the middle of the Lower House Budget Committee, complaining about the plague of explicit sexual articles in girls’ magazines, which he called “instructional classes on sex.” Mitsuzuka took the struggle from the Diet floor to the media, appearing on TV shows to further indict the publishers. Prime Minister Nakasone also weighed in: “There’s a worry that the sexual depictions in certain magazines for young women may lead to crime” and then hinted that he would be open to legislative or otherwise administrative action against the publishers.

Results were swift. The day after Mitsuzuka’s Diet speech, publishers Heiwa Shuppan and Gakushu Kenkyusha announced they would discontinue Carrot Gals and Kids, respectively. Gakushu Kenkyusha was in a particular bind as it had a huge business in another highly regulated field: educational text books. Popteen meanwhile pledged a new editorial direction. Gal’s Life changed its name to Gal’s City to escape the increasing social stigma and took out all the dirty articles. This was apparently not what readers wanted, however: Sales dropped so violently that Shufu no Tomosha put the title out to pasture one year later.

What was this sexual content that the Liberal Democratic Party were so concerned about? Essayist Sakai Junko remembers Gal’s Life as chock full of “juicy stories that covered the rawer parts of girls’ lifestyle.” Gal’s Life provided a stark contrast to Magazine House’s olive — a title that imagined all Japanese teenagers wanted to imitate the “good sense and elegance of Parisian lycéenne.” While digging through old issues of Gal’s Life, Sakai discovers these article headlines:

• “Takada Namie’s Girl-Fight Dojo”
• “‘I’m sorry, baby’ — Abortion Experiences”
• “The Exciting Vacation Before We Got Secretly Married”
• “I’m not a prostitute! The Lifestyle and Outlook of Miho, who works at a Shinjuku massage parlor”

There are few images of Gal’s Life available online, and this cover from 1980 has much less controversial headlines (although it does sport the amusing promise “You won’t be an ugly girl (busu) if you read Gal’s Life!”) The general sense, however, is that the magazines had a constant stream of salacious articles for young women on sexual topics, all blanketed in a general atmosphere of “documentary” reporting.

In his book Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues), sociologist Namba Koji mentions a few articles in Gal’s Life such as “Gal Sex Report”, “Document: Love with a Man who Has a Wife and Children”, and “Comparison of Sex from Girls All Across Japan.” He then makes the obvious but crucial point that these are exactly the kind of articles one can expect from men’s magazines.

Framed this way, it is hard to understand the LDP’s crusade against “gal” magazines in the 1980s as anything other than patriarchal sexual hypocrisy. The issue is not “sexual content” itself in the market but who is partaking. As we all know, Japan does not have traditionally puritan attitudes towards sex, and conservatives had traditionally been the staunch advocates of legalized prostitution (against a coalition of women’s groups, socialists, and Christians who worked to outlaw it.) While the 1980s LDP may have been mostly removed from those particular 1950s battles, Mitsuzuka and company did seem bothered with idea that young women — maybe even from good families! — were speaking frankly about sexual experiences and trading tips.

To the LDP’s credit, 1984 was also the year the police started to crack down on an explosion of new sexual services. And perhaps the LDP was most concerned that these magazines explicitly targeted minors and intentionally or unintentionally worked to normalize sexual experiences outside of middle-class social expectations — dating married men, getting eloped, having abortions, working in the sex industry.

Most likely, however, is that the LDP were confused by a different principle all together: the rise of working-class yankii narratives in popular culture. Titles like Popteen and Gal’s Life were not intended for the ojōsama princesses of CanCam or the demure aesthetes of olive. In fact, these magazines built huge audiences by ignoring the slightly imagined, internationalized consumer world of good taste. Instead they spoke to the “real” lives of lower class yankii girls. While the data is not presently on hand, we can assume that working class teens in Japan — who have tended to marry at younger ages, are less busy with schoolwork, cram schools, and extracurriculars, and have less parental supervision — had more sexual experience than their Tokyo upper crust peers. This at least is the message that yankii women have tried to create for themselves in their own media. Starting with these 1980s magazines and carrying all the way to egg and Koakuma Ageha, there have been more explicit sexual articles in yankii/gyaru magazines rather than “good girl” magazines like an•an, non•no, With, or More. And moreover, the most salacious part of the magazine was often the “reader’s column” — where girls told endless and exaggerated sob stories of rapes, bullying, sexual promiscuity, dead boyfriends, and abortions. (I remember reading an issue of egg in 1999, right in the peak of the ganguro movement, that offered a guide to “How to Have Sex in a Car” as well as a particularly graphic reader about group sex in the ocean that involved sea shells.)

Without much perspective on these class-clustered sexual mores though, one can understand elitist politicians seeing gal magazines lined up equally on a bookstore rack with those proffering middle-class consumerist values, easily falling into the hands of a girl who would otherwise read about Chanel suits and marrying guys from Todai. She would be ruined forever! This is almost the virgin-whore complex grafted onto government policy. Interestingly, however, one of the main readerships for the controversial gal magazines was likely normal middle-class girls who liked to giggle at the sex stories and make fun of the yankii narratives. Nakasone and Mitsuzuka may have not known that these titles also inspired mockery from the very girls they hoped to protect.

In the end, only Popteen survived the 1984 gal magazine massacre. The editors promised to clean up the content but then slowly brought back articles about sex techniques and teenage delinquent life when the Diet had moved on to other problems and scandals. It may have also helped that society went through a “sex boom” right after the Diet hearing. Akimoto Yasushi’s mass idol group Onyanko Club was suddenly on TV every afternoon singing about how “being a virgin is boring” and how high school girls needed to have sex with their math teacher to get good grades.

In the mid-1990s, however, Popteen eventually dropped the delinquent lifestyle stories and became a pure style bible for the kogyaru army. This may have ironically been key to the magazine’s longevity. Whether advertiser pressure or consumer demand, there seems to be less desire these days for Japanese magazines to do anything other than provide excessive product details on the latest clothing. Even when Koakuma Ageha takes up frank talk about domestic violence and hostess lifestyles, the idea is dealing with harsh realities rather than sensationalizing for girls who want to fantasize about adult activities.

Yet there appears to be latent demand in Japan for female-oriented stories of sexual exploits and tragedies, as evidenced by the rise of the keitai novel — which writer Hayamizu Kenro has linked directly to the “confessional” narratives of yankii ladies biker mag Teen’s Road. The Diet may have temporarily killed off the teenage delinquent narrative industry but they could not stifle all the curiosity.

Bonus trivia: When Mitsuzuka held up Popteen in the Diet, the page was open to an illustration by now famed media critic Miura Jun.

Namba, Koji. “Concerning Youth Subcultures in the Postwar Era, Vol. 5: ‘Ko-gal’ and ‘Urahara-kei,’” Kwansei Gakuin University Sociology Department #100, March 2006.

Namba, Koji. Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues) Chikuma Shinsho, 2009.

Sakai, Junko. “Girls’ Yankii Spirit.” An Introduction to Yankee Studies. Ed. Taro Igarashi, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009.

In 1973 famed writer and novelist Paul Theroux made an ambitious jaunt across Europe and Asia almost exclusively by train. His account was published in 1975 as The Great Railway Bazaar — now one of the great classics of the travel writing genre.

With trains as the central theme, Theroux could not resist paying Japan and its shinkansen a visit, so he ends up using the island nation as his furthest point East before heading back to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Express. Coming from a stint in the deep jungles of war-stricken Vietnam, Theroux flies to Japan in late 1973 to ostensibly give a few lectures on English literature. These engagements at universities in Hokkaido and the Kansai region are just excuses, however, for him to take the bullet trains up and down Japan.

While Theroux boasts no expertise on Asia or Japan in particular, what is fascinating about his account is the degree to which he is already able to summon the most classic stereotypes of post-war Japan by the early Seventies.

First and foremost, everything is incredibly expensive — even to this American living in the U.K. Theroux writes, “It is with a kind of perverse pride that the Japanese point out how expensive their country has become.” Clothes “cost the earth,” and he hears rumors of a $40 cup of coffee. Yet he quickly realizes something that is still true today, that Tokyo can be cheap if you stay in inns rather than hotels, eat ramen and other Japanese dishes, and take commuter trains instead of taxis.

(There are some differences from the present, however. Theroux’s account claims that fruit, mostly imported from South Africa, comes cheap and plentiful. Judging by the insane fruit prices of my local supermarket in 2011, this was either an observational mistake or has completely disappeared over the last few decades.)

Further stereotypical scenes: drunk Japanese salarymen passed out on the streets, women greeters at department stores, a “Japanese taste for gadgetry,” the lack of guilt towards consumerism, men and women in surgical masks, and highly ordered behavior that Theroux calls “a people programmed.”

During his short time in Japan, Theroux ends up doing a lot of things and talking to a lot of people, yet he focuses his write up on what he finds to be the culture’s peculiar forms of sexuality.

Looking for something to do at night, Theroux ends up at a performance called “Red Flowers Fall on Fair Skin” playing at the Nishigeki Music Hall. The newspaper ad — “commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon” — tricks him into believing it is a culturally important show. Hence he acts disappointed to ultimately discover it is, as he puts it, a “tit show.” Resignation turns to abject horror as the stage performance slowly transforms into first, a minstrel show, and then bouts of incredibly violent and sadistic sex. In a segment called “Ten no Amishima,” a man kills a woman right as he orgasms, and in the final piece “Onna Harakiri,” a naked woman slowly commits suicide with a blade, splattering blood everywhere. Theroux is even more weirded out by this “savage eroticism” when the male audience shuffles out in orderly fashion and then they all bow goodnight to colleagues with utmost protocol.

While Theroux’s account reads like a satirical fictionalization of Japanese entertainment, this particular show did actually exist. “Red Flowers Fall on Fair Skin” 『白い肌に赤い花が散った』played at the Nishigeki from November to December 1973, written by playwright and failed LDP candidate Takechi Tetsuji. Theroux does not catch, however, that this kind of performance was far from “mainstream”: Takechi was a highly controversial figure who had been prosecuted routinely for obscenity.

Yet after that show Theroux seems to find sex and violent art everywhere he looks. He tries reading Edogawa Rampo and finds it implausibly perverted. He flips through a young woman’s manga as she’s in the train bathroom and discovers “bloody stories.” He hears an anecdote about a teacher and her students’ mothers all getting together to giggle over a pornographic Buddhist scroll. Even when he meets a Kyoto professor obsessed with Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, the discussion quickly descends into the Japanese scholar’s specific proclivities for sex shows. (We alsp learn in this discussion that Saul Bellow had a boring time in Japan until they figured out to take him to a strip club.)

Theroux is no prude, but he is never quite able to laugh off the encounters with sex throughout his time in Japan. He had even seen the darker sides of the Asian sex trade throughout his travels in places like India and Bangkok, but he seems traumatized by the sheer banality of “blood-thirsty” sexual voyeurism in Japan.

The Great Railway Bazaar’s brief Japan episodes put forward familiar views of Japanese sexuality that would later become stereotypical. That being said, was the author’s special attention to Japanese sex culture a fair topic for exploration? Or was it intentionally exploitative, meant to shock his English-language readers and draw moral lines of which Theroux was clearly on the right side?

While in Japan, Theroux does not once comment upon Japanese sexual services intended for the individual, nor does he seek them out. No one stops him on the street to offer him girls. Yet his social experiences keep bringing him back to the subject of sexual voyeurism, and you can feel his frustration and slight digust. Compare that to his experiences in the rest of Asia, where he treats prostitution with little shock, and his reportage just ends up layering a creepy veneer on something he finds to be generally inevitable.

Theroux likely had little background to understand the degree of institutionalization of sexual commerce within Japan, especially for a nation that has moved far beyond its pre-war poverty-driven prostitution industry. There is no single “red light district” but a widely distributed network of establishments across the country, employing hundreds of thousands of workers. As scholar Anne Allison and others have shown, Japan’s gigantic “mizu-shobai” industry of sexual services — ranging from paying to drink with women to strip clubs and full-out prostitution — relies quite heavily upon on its integration with the corporate world. Sexual voyeurism and gender hierarchy have not been regrettable acts of desperate men: Top male bosses fraternize and companies “build bonds” through the help of these services. In the 1970s, Thereoux was likely to run into the activity as soon as he entered a male-exclusive world, such as university faculties of Western literature.

And it is this very framework of male fraternization that pushes sex towards being a voyeuristic activity. Heterosexual sex for male bonding must be rebuilt and reconfigured — from its original conception as a private act between individuals — for the purposes of group male entertainment. Hence violence and sadism are likely to become core thematic principles, as alternatives like romance, love, and tenderness directly project man’s private bonds to women — thus creating a conflict with its new context. In other words, “savage eroticism” is likely a functional product of sex’s role in male fraternization rather than merely a cultural quirk.

Interestingly the socialized voyeurism of Japanese sex culture that Theroux encountered has faded in recent years, and his travels mark the final days of an era when the “sex show” had a special place in society. These days sex services are split between the faux relationships of hostess clubs and kyabakura, meant to provide psychological support for men, and the full-out physical gratification of pink salons, delivery health, soaplands, and other fuzoku parlors. While corporate money still keeps the hostess club world afloat, younger men — who are now less likely to be full-time company employees with access to entertainment accounts — have moved away from sex services as social bonding. When they rent naughty DVDs at Tsutaya, they’d rather not run into anyone they know.

Today legal and gray market sexual services still make up a significant portion of the Japanese economy and employ a large number of women. In this sense the book’s observations — while now certainly clichéd — came plausibly from a place without malicious intent. Theroux may have been one of the first Western writers to call disproportionate attention to the socialized aspect of sex in Japan, but he certainly was not exaggerating for effect.

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.