TRUTH OF ADVERTISING

Saturday went to the impressively located Otsu City Museum of History to see an exhibition on the history of Japanese advertising from the Edo era to the 1950s or so, the ads (from woodblock prints and old wooden signs to lithographed posters and signs of paper and metal) to no surprise predominantly promoting drinks and pharmaceuticals and insecticides.

One poster showed a sexy young lady ecstatically spraying her immediate 1920 environment with deadly chemicals; another promoted an earlier version comprising a bent straw through which the kids of the household could blow, spraying toxic chemicals on the insects hovering around their elders, such fun!

But back then there were few rules; thus the surreal sight of a poster featuring a dainty woman in kimono driving a big beer truck in 1911, another young beauty in kimono touting rubber cement for men to repair their bike and truck tires with, another featured a naughty flapper girl with skirt hiked up to here holding yet another beer. In perhaps one of Japan's earliest e-commerce posters, a kimono'd woman talking on a wooden wall phone in a lithographed poster for a Tokyo kimono shop says "For the finest in kimonos, dial 18"! It was totally rad when it came out, much like what is totally rad now.

Things have changed in some major regards, though, the big illnesses then being syphilis and worms; also, the image of Bismarck was a big draw, but the general concerns then as now were bad complexion, bad breath, indigestion, headache and dandruff, one brochure touting a "medico-chemical oily tonic for dandruff scales containing cholestero-lecithin"; another blithely promoted the World Congress for Leisure Time and Recreation in Hamburg, July 23-30, 1936, with the very concept of leisure about to undergo blitzkreig, as evidenced in the wartime propaganda posters (which the Japanese visitors seemed to avoid) shouting how America had killed Japan's friends, and picturing art-deco Japanese bombers swarming over art deco American industrial sectors, others idolizing the kamikaze who stood gazing infinitely into the wind; yet others promoted Japanese war bonds, a bad investment, as things turned out.

There in a several room nutshell was the truth of (not in) advertising (and its bedfellow, politics) anywhere in the world, at any time. I left hoping that visitors weren't viewing the exhibition as merely a cute but simplistic version of a now mature and reliable medium, but as evidence that advertising is no nearer the truth now than it was then.