Gennifer Weisenfeld Explores Corporate Advertising in Modern Japan

Gennifer Weisenfeld doesn’t just research — she excavates. 

Her latest book, “The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern  Japan,” is the result of a 20-year odyssey sifting through the glossy, persuasive and often underappreciated world of modern Japanese corporate advertising. From the early 1900s to the dazzling spectacle of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, she traces the evolution of Japan’s commercial marketing to reveal how the rise of modern corporations and consumer capitalism transformed the nation’s visual culture. 

And to think it all started with a bar of soap.

We sat down with the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies to explore the book’s unexpected origins, why Japan’s corporate advertising history has so often gone unrecognized and the pivotal role the 1964 Olympics played in bringing it into focus.


How did a bar of soap inspire you to write the book? 

While researching my first book on the Japanese avant-garde group Mavo, I came across a Kaō soap advertisement that simply captivated me. That single image led me deep into the company’s history, where I discovered that Kaō, along with many other Japanese firms of the early 20th century, regularly hired artists working in avant-garde and experimental circles. These young, often family-run companies, were far more nimble and culturally curious than the large American corporations we typically associate with dominating the early 20th-century advertising landscape. 

Kaō became my case study, and the more I explored, the more I saw how their work revealed a vibrant, innovative advertising culture in Japan that rarely appears in the standard histories. At one point, I wondered if there was simply too much material for one book, because any one of these companies could have been a whole book unto itself — but it was important to give readers a sense of the longer histories of these companies and the markets they operated in. While I’m not an economist, you can’t really talk about commercial products without paying attention to the economic forces shaping them. Bringing those contexts into view helped illuminate why these firms and their creative partnerships mattered so much. 

Why did you decide to culminate your research with the 1964 Olympics?

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics offer a powerful, crystallizing moment in the story of Japanese commercial design. By 1964, the trends traced throughout the book — commercial art’s entanglement with national identity, the growing sophistication of corporate advertising and Japan’s deep participation in global design networks — had reached a point of convergence. 

The Olympics made visible how techniques once used to sell consumer goods or support imperial aims had been retooled to help Japan reintroduce itself on the world stage, while drawing on every facet of visual communication — branding, signage, print, architecture and coordinated graphic systems — to present a modern, technologically advanced Japan. By ending with the ’64 Olympics, the book shows how these long-evolving design practices culminated in a comprehensive, nation-defining project.

The Tokyo Games also reveal the profound continuities that span Japan’s prewar, wartime and postwar design cultures. Many of the professional networks, stylistic strategies and ideological frameworks that shaped Japan’s advertising industry before and during the war persisted into the postwar era. This transwar throughline, which even reaches back to the cancelled Tokyo “Phantom Olympics” of 1940, complicates the idea of a clean historical rupture and instead highlights how Japanese designers brought their expertise into a new geopolitical moment. 

Concluding with the Olympics underscores this continuity while demonstrating how Japan leveraged design not simply as aesthetic expression but as a strategic tool of global rebranding.

“The Fine Art of Persuasion” represents 20 years of research. With a rich and innovative history and such a volume of material to draw from, why hasn’t Japan traditionally been seen as an equal to the U.S. or European corporate advertising agencies that operated during that time? 

Japan isn’t usually placed in the same league because the history of advertising, and design history more broadly, has long been told through a Euro-American lens. Scholars mainly focused on the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, even though Japan was concurrently developing a robust advertising industry. Early Japanese firms were fully engaged in international print culture and produced work that aligned closely with European visual sensibilities, yet this activity didn’t fit the narrative. As a result, Japan’s contributions were overlooked, even though it wasn’t just participating in global advertising networks — I’d argue that it was actively shaping them.

I’d like readers to understand that Japanese designers were deeply engaged with the modern moment. Many Japanese students studied at the Bauhaus, and the Bauhaus had long absorbed Japanese aesthetics. Modernism emerged through an ongoing, reciprocal exchange, where Japan was an active participant rather than a passive recipient on the periphery.