Transwar Design: Kamekura Yūsaku from Nippon Kōbō to the Tokyo Olympics

Nearly seventy years after the end of World War II, there is still a lingering taboo about discussing wartime activities in Japan that has done considerable collateral violence to design history. The standard narrative of postwar Japanese design ascension not only expunges the continuity of individual careers, the honing of professional skills, and the crucial development of networks, but it also ignores the underlying persistence of nationalism in the visual sphere—a nationalism that subtly shifted from wartime mobilization to postwar democratic rebuilding. Therefore, I propose a new model of transwar design that reclaims the important continuities of design practice across the war years. Transwar design is also a framework that has important implications for global design history, as designers across the world served a central civic function, and publicity and propaganda seamlessly traded places.

A pillar of the postwar Japanese design field, Kamekura Yūsaku (1915-1997) was a key designer for both the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka. This paper will explore Kamekura’s work during and after the war as a case study to excavate and interpret the transwar continuities of design in the service of commerce and the nation.