When Nagase Tomiro opened his Western sundries shop in Tokyo in 1887, cosmetic soap used for the face and body was not commonly seen in the average Japanese household, and in Japan neither hand washing nor hair washing was the general custom that each is today. (1) Now known as Kao Corporation, the company Nagase founded is one of the leaders in the Japanese health and beauty industry, having played a central role in the transformation of the daily hygiene and cosmetic practices of the Japanese nation over the last century. Kao's contribution to modern Japanese culture goes beyond the sphere of daily life, as the company was also a vital sponsor of some of the most pioneering graphic design of the prewar period. Kao is widely recognized by Japanese design historians for its impact on the development of modern Japanese advertising design, and the company's promotional materials are regularly included in historical surveys and museum exhibitions. (2) However, there has been little systematic attempt to analyze this advertising production within a comprehensive context of world design history that takes into account the wide-ranging cultural implications of Japan's consumer capitalism and the ideological formations of Japanese nation- and empire-building.
I propose to integrate the disparate scholarly spheres of art, design, business, social, and political history, reading aesthetics back into the sociology of consumption. I consider Kao as an innovative and adaptive producer in the sphere of Japanese visual culture and explore how the integration of high art, particularly modernist aesthetics, into commercial advertising allowed the company to distinguish its brand-name products. To this end, following a brief history of the company's early development and promotional activity, I concentrate on its operations during the 1930s. This was when Kao launched an important advertising campaign under the banner "New and Improved Kao," deploying a stunning and unprecedented array of modernist pictorial techniques to redefine Kao soap's brand identity from a luxury item to a mass-market consumer good. Applications of modernism in this instance, while keyed to the democratization of soap, enabled Kao to preserve its product's elite cultural cachet and stylishness.
Kao designs show strong parallels with the major artistic movements in the world of fine arts. These include employing abstracted or nonobjective forms, as well as nonmimetic photographic techniques such as photomontage and the photogram, which drew inspiration from cutting-edge work abroad by a long list of artist-designers headed by Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Matter, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Fernand Leger, and Man Ray. It is my contention that Kao designers were able to maximize the marketing effectiveness of their advertising compositions through the skillful application of modernist pictorial techniques, which highlighted product special features and critical elements of brand identity. In the following analysis of Kao's advertising designs, I will tease out the individual applications of these formal strategies. Examining how and why various images were used to further specific promotional goals, I will also interrogate the larger social and political framework in which they were deployed.
A study of Kao's commercial design offers an invaluable opportunity to reexamine the important relationship between high art and mass culture in Japan. In the six decades since critic Clement Greenberg, in his now-notorious 1939 manifesto "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," articulated the profound abhorrence felt by modernists concerning the possible "contamination" of pure form with matters of function and commerce, countless scholars have demonstrated modernism's utter failure at aesthetic autonomy, revealing the deep anxieties embodied in the formalist critiques that anathematized mass culture. In these critiques, mass culture was often gendered female because of the popular association between women and consumption, yielding a means of masculinizing and heroicizing elitist forms of artistic practice. (3) Discrediting mass culture through "sexualized metaphors," which stand for intangible social relations, has also had the effect of obscuring the profound role of aesthetics in constituting the "symbolic and social dimensions of consumption." (4)
Little attention has been paid to issues of gender in relation to Japanese commercial design, but work in related areas proves highly pertinent. The social historian Narita Ryuichi has explored the gendered nature of the emerging modern discourse on hygiene (eisei) in Japan, which I believe provides a crucial analytical framework for understanding how, and to whom, soap manufacturers marketed newly constructed rituals of cleanliness. (5) Narita has shown that from 1900 to 1930, when modern hygiene information was widely disseminated in Japan, the home was the primary locus of daily attention to hygiene, and women were designated by official and nonofficial sources, including neighborhood associations and the mass media, the chief managers of this domestic sphere. Women's active contributions to public forums on matters of hygiene, such as question-and-answer sections in popular journals, indicate their continued concern with these issues and their gradual assimilation of institutionalized notions of a healthy ("normal") body. (6)
Kao targeted several consumer groups, with upper- and middle-class urban women initially constituting the major portion of the company's national consumer base. In the process of democratization, the target clientele was expanded to include blue-collar women and their families. Advertising was integral to the creation of a national society, and advertisers stood among a range of competing interests, both public and private, that were attempting to mold the sphere of women. I will argue that the mobilization of women in the construction of new concepts and practices of modern living in Japan intertwined aesthetics, domestic hygiene, and national identity. I should say outright, however, that my intention here is not to revisit or resolve the scholarly debate about whether mass consumerism was controlling or emancipatory for women, as I believe it was simultaneously both. Rather, I seek to examine the interplay between aesthetics in corporate advertising design and changing social formations as gender roles were constructed and debated in the public sphere.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The Early History of Kao Soap
Nagase Tomiro, the company's founder and first president, began marketing Kao brand soap (kao sekken)--one of the earliest domestically produced brands of cosmetic soap--in 1890, and by 1910 it was a national brand. (7) At the time, relatively few products had brand-name recognition--even fewer had national recognition--and merchant identity was often more a selling point than that of the manufacturer. Commonly called savon in Japan from the mid-sixteenth century, soon after its introduction by European traders, soap was used for mainly medicinal purposes by only a small sector of the Japanese population, with the majority of people using forms of rice bran, pumice, and loofah for washing. With the importation of mass-produced, higher-quality soaps in the late nineteenth century, cosmetic soap for the face and body began to be marketed to a broader array of upper-class consumers for about 5 sen per bar, while no-name domestic soap of lower quality was sold for 10 sen per dozen and a five-kilogram bag of rice sold for 23 sen (there are 100 sen in one yen). Because of its relatively high cost of production, Kao soap was marketed as a luxury and gift item, selling initially for a steep 12 sen per bar, with gift boxes of three priced at 35 sen. (8) Even by 1926, however, the average monthly household income for laborers was still only 102.07 yen, of which nearly a third went for food and another 50 percent went for nonfood expenditures, including housing. A little over 7 percent, or 7.37 yen, was designated for medical and hygiene expenses. (9) At the same time, the average household income for salaried workers, at 137.17 yen, was not much higher, with close to a third spent on food and over 60 percent for nonfood expenditures, with just a slightly higher portion devoted to medical and hygiene expenses. The small margin of disposable income indicates the relative luxury of purchasing name-brand cosmetic soap at the time. (10)
