W. David Marx looks at one of Japan’s first modernist magazines, Shinseinen, and the tragic life of Japan’s first fashion columnist, Nakamura Shinjirō.

In 1920, a new publication called Shinseinen『新青年』(“New Youth”) hit Japanese newsstands, filled with short stories and writings on culture for urban, modern men. At first, the editorial focused on the joy of international adventures, encouraging readers to board ships to foreign lands like Brazil and the new Japanese colonies in China, Manchuria, and Karafuto (Sakhalin). The magazine later became a clearinghouse for unauthorized translations of foreign texts sent in from readers.

By the mid-1920s, most readers picked up Shinseinen for its iconic detective stories. But in January 1929, the magazine started Japan’s first-ever column dedicated to men’s fashion. The first one was called “Vanity Fair” 「ばにちい・ふえいあ」written by Kudō Akiko (工藤晃子). In January 1930, this morphed into a new column called “Vogue en Vogue” 「ヴォガンヴォグ」. From the Meiji Restoration onward, Fukuzawa Yukichi and other luminaries had publicly advocated Western dress, but “Vogue en Vogue” was cut from a different cloth: chic illustrations, wry observations on Tokyo fashion trends, educational tutorials for dressing up on the town, and even short skits.

The man behind “Vogue en Vogue” was 24-year-old Nakamura Shinjirō (中村進治郎), a notorious philanderer and the living embodiment of the mobo modern boy. Nakamura knew how to write about Tokyo glamour because he lived it daily. He wrote lyrics for musical reviews at Casino Folies. He hit the town with novelist Kitabayashi Tōma, actor Egawa Ureo, and his roommate, fiction writer Watanabe On. Often described as a “beautiful young man,” he was most well known for his chronic concupiscence. According to later court documents, he dated “four female students and two waitresses” back to back. He moved through women so quickly he once broke things off with a woman simply through a telegram that read, “Sayonara.”

Tokyo’s mobos hung on to Nakamura’s every word in each month’s installment of “Vogue en Vogue.” But between the shallow history of Western fashion in Japan and the author’s own lack of sartorial experience, Nakamura’s fashion advice was often times dubious. VAN Jacket founder Ishizu Kensuke went to Meiji University during the peak years of “Vogue en Vogue” and learned all his style basics from Nakamura. Ishizu’s adherence to the column, however, often got him in trouble. After reading Nakamura’s review of an amazing new cologne, Ishizu bugged every department store in Tokyo until he finally found a bottle. Ishizu proudly wore the fragrance around town, despite the fact that it made him smell like a sweaty animal. Turns out that it was not a cologne at all, but pure musk oil.

This was the least of Nakamura’s problems: at the end of 1932, his transgressions escalated to national infamy. On December 12, newspapers reported that he attempted a double-suicide with the brooding 18 year-old Moulin Rouge Shinjuku-za soprano Takanawa Yoshiko (高輪芳子). Takanawa often talked about dying at a young age, and after meeting Nakamura, she finally decided to take matters into her own hands (source). Despite a platonic relationship, the once-cynical playboy Nakamura fell so hard for the young woman that he decided to join her plunge into death. Nakamura poisoned them both with gas in his apartment.

But the couple failed to enter the afterlife together: Nakamura survived, while Takanawa died. Police prosecuted him for his role in the suicide. In the courtroom, the judge accused Nakamura of ruining the lives of countless young virgins from good families, but Nakamura argued that it was the girls who kept begging him for relationships. Perhaps his explanation resonated with the judge, as he only received a suspended sentence. And as further proof that all publicity is good publicity, the incident put Tokyo’s Moulin Rouge Shinjuku-za theater on the early Shōwa pop culture map.

After the scandal, one of the hit productions at the Moulin Rouge was Nakamura’s own self-written play about his double suicide — “Shinjuku Souvenir.” He played himself. And then on November 15, 1934, Nakamura again attempted suicide with sleeping pills, this time with the actress who played the Takanawa role in the play. But in an ironic reversal, Nakamura died this round, and his female companion survived.

Living only to the age of 29, Nakamura was a great mystery in his day and fell into obscurity in modern times. Magazine Brutus asked older readers to send in personal accounts of Nakamura in a 1980 issue but came up dry.

Like most liberal modernist culture in Japan, Shinseinen faced tough times in the fascist 1930s. The magazine expanded its readership to women during that decade, and “Vogue en Vogue” came to cover fashion trends for both sexes. Translator Hasegawa Shūji took over under the column, writing under the female pen name Hara Narako. But “Vogue en Vogue” ended in December 1938 just as the Pacific War took on a new intensity in China. Shinseinen dropped its stylish modernism for jingoistic war reports.

In the peace of the postwar, the magazine returned to its roots with detective fiction. But unable to keep up with increased marketplace competition, Shinseinen folded in 1950. With 30 years on newsstands, the magazine lived just one year longer than NNakamura Shinjirō.

Sources and Further Reading
Yasuko Claremont: Shinseinen in the Interwar Period (1920-30)
湯浅篤志・大山敏編『叢書新青年　聞書抄』
中野正昭: 新興芸術派とレヴュー劇場

The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on “Modern” Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

In the 1920s, Soviet Constructivism worked to apply “intellectual production” in multiple spheres of graphic creation for utilitarian purposes, including buildings, theater sets, posters, fabrics, clothing, furniture, logos, and menus. Constructivists like El Lissitzky promoted spatial typographic assemblages, as well as the use of stripped-down sans serif typography in conjunction with geometric shapes in space.

In 1928, German typographer Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his book The New Typography. The popularization of abstract geometric illustration and pattern design went hand-in-hand with this codification.

These graphic trends increased in popularity across Europe through the late 1920s and 1930s. Artists adopted rule-based graphic design yearning toward increased efficacy of communication. Stripped-down, utopian-oriented form-making promulgated the avant-garde’s desire to build the world anew in the one way they could: graphically.

World War II brought about huge changes in the population of avant-garde designers — hundreds of progenitors of the geometric style died as a result of the war and hundreds more were forced to shift national allegiances and move to other locales. The most famous example is the emigration of the German Bauhaus school of design from Germany to the U.S.A. in 1937. This mass exodus brought the mass-produced minimalist aesthetic to America in force, sparking the greatest explosion of Modern graphic design design in the New World.

The booming post-World War II American economy established a greater need for graphic design, mainly advertising and packaging. While the remaining Moderns in Europe helped stay the course of this graphic language on the Continent, the Americans took up the gauntlet with commercial fervor as well.

The post-war boom of the 1950s caused a wildfire interest in the avant-garde graphic design and typography of the previous decades in Japan, as well. While the aim of European avant-garde movements tended toward the utopian, Japanese designers’ interests were more stylistically inclined (as were American designers working in said style in the postwar era, often understudies of the radical Modernist progenitors of the prewar era).

This fascination with Modern design as style reverberates in Japan today. While Modernism as style is a recent trend in the rest of the world, Japan has clung fast to the aesthetics of the Moderns through the ’50s through the present. Much of contemporary graphic design in Japan is little more than early Modernism mimicked — linoleum blocks cut by hand in Adobe Illustrator, a strict adherence to monotone/duotone palettes, and old advertising cuts (clip art) re-purposed for the nth time, though in digital form.

The Pattern Pattern series is a reflection of Japan’s waning interest in the Modern that is rendered wobbly by stat cameras and multiple generations of manual analog reproduction. While this country belatedly (and with increasing rapidity) turns its eyes toward kiss-spaced Helvetica and the global trends of the International Style of the ’70s in retro fascination, the beauty that is Japanese Modern design (if in name only) of the ’50s through the ’80s is quickly dying.

The Pattern Pattern series of pattern designs are an homage to these simpler, yet still complex times when Japanese graphic designers charted an indigenous graphic course in the name of the International whilst unwittingly sustaining what was a graphic dead end to the rest of the first world.

While graphic design critics have decried the reemergence of Modernism as style in the West over the past decade, Japanese graphic design has long been in the curious yet utterly unacknowledged position as leader in Modernist mimicry. And just as the world is catching up, this country is letting go of early forward-thinking graphic design as applied aesthetic (sans utopian vision).

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.