Author(s): Sarah Teasley

Design

From woodblock prints and porcelains to Hello Kitty, Issey Miyake and the Honda Civic, Japanese design has indelibly marked our everyday life for the past 150 years.

This comprehensive history, the first of its kind in English, explains the emergence, development and social, political and economic impact of areas including fashion, graphic, product and automotive design. From Japan's renewed internationalism in the 19th century to the present day, modern Japanese design is at once a local phenomenon, forged from specific historical conditions in Japan and East Asia, and one with international influences and implications. From cars to cameras, design from Japan is ubiquitous. So are perceptions of Japanese design, from calming, carefully crafted minimalism to avant-garde fashion and street subcultures. But these portrayals overlook the creativity, generosity and sheer hard work that have gone into creating and maintaining design industries in Japan.  

In Designing Modern Japan, Sarah Teasley deftly weaves together the personal stories of people who shaped and shape Japan’s design industries with social history, economic conditions and geopolitics. Key to the account is how design has been a strategy to help communities thrive during turbulent times, and to make life better along the way.

Deeply researched and superbly illustrated, Designing Modern Japan will appeal to the wide audience for Japanese design, history and culture.  From coffee sets and clothing to graphic magazines, Sarah Teasley provides a highly analytic account of the history of design in Japan, from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Economic development policies and design education, the emergence of the modern designer and consumer society, colonialism and propaganda, the relationship with the United States in the period after the Second World War, counterculture, feminism and the work of auteur designers today are all examined. Teasley deftly demonstrates how seemingly unrelated conditions and events create and reflect multiple historical moments, just as one star linked to another, then another, creates constellations in the sky. A vibrant and powerful decoding of the modern history of Japan through design. A new and incomparable classic.’ — Kashiwagi Hiroshi, Professor Emeritus, Musashino Art University, Japan, design historian and critic ‘With ease and authority, Teasley cuts through the many layers of economic, political and cultural history of Japan. Her meticulously detailed account of Japanese design history gives a satisfyingly complete picture of design as a practice that people have – and continue – to use for their own end. Teasley’s insistence that design not only intrudes into what historians, politicians and economists have commonly thought of as history but was the result of a continuous interplay between abstract thought and concrete application is brilliant. Ultimately, she has provided a dynamic model for interpreting the underlying questions of modern Japanese history.’ — Elizabeth Guffey, Professor of Art and Design History, Theory, Criticism at SUNY Purchase and founding editor of Design and Culture ‘This shrewd and elegantly illustrated book shows how Japanese designers and manufacturers have used design “to weather change and sometimes as a lever to accelerate change.” Focusing on their institution-building and meaning-making activities, Sarah Teasley traces how a variety of carefully-designed objects and images circulated around Japan, through the empire, and across the globe. The result, like the objects under study, is the narrative they created of Japan itself as transnational, modernist, and enduring.’ — Laura Hein, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War.