Visions of Japan 1992

This boxed collection of Japanese graphic ephemera served as a visual accompaniment to the V&A exhibition of the same name as part of a Festival of Japan in 1992. It was encased in a card sleeve along with a hard-backed volume of observations on life in Japan and a series of extended photo essays on aspects of modern and traditional Japan, bound and stitched in a traditional Japanese style. The ephemera box was presented as a scrapbook and contained 28 A4 printed sheets featuring a wide range of visual culture from consumer products to transport, cultural events to etiquette, packaging to logistics, medicines to comic books, selected to illustrate the Japanese twin poles of contemplative elegance and impulsive exuberance. A special touch is the inclusion of tipped-in items of genuine ephemera, some wrapped in plastic envelopes, others pasted in. It’s a lavish treatment with no expense spared.  The last image reproduces the list of captions that explains the content of each of the 28 loose leaf pages. One detail not on the list is that  Raymond Loewy designed the peace symbol featured on the Peace cigarette pack (item 21).