The
Brady Archive
Sex
and Flat Tires
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
52)
Not long ago I went
to see an exhibition on the history of Japanese advertising from the
Edo era to the 1950s or so, and found out much more than I bargained
for regarding advertising and society in general, and the extent to
which marketing success hinges upon consumer ignorance. The ads in the
exhibition (from woodblock prints and old wooden signs to lithographed
posters and signs of paper and metal), to no one’s surprise, predominantly
pushed drinks both soft and hard (water was still free in those heady
days), as well as pharmaceuticals and better living through chemistry.
One poster showed a sexy young lady fashionably spraying her immediate
1920 environment with deadly chemicals to get rid of nasty bugs that
are still here, though she isn’t; another poster promoted an even
earlier version of the insecticide spray, comprising a bent straw through
which the kids of the household could blow, using their mouths to spray
insecticide on the bugs hovering around their elders, such fun!! At
first I thought, well, back then there were few rules, and people didn’t
know much about these things, but the more I saw, the more I realized
that, spiel for spiel, this was the same ignorance advertisers count
on even now to sell their wares to the uninformed consumer; here, though,
the time gestalt disclosed the reality: one poster featured a dainty
woman in kimono driving a big beer truck in 1911, about as far from
reality as it still is, were anyone to think about it. Sex of course
has always been popular in advertising around the world, as not being
the responsibility of the advertiser to actually provide, more like
an illusionist’s assistant, to take your mind off the actual product.
Another young beauty in kimono touted rubber cement that lusty men could
fix their flat tires with; I couldn’t recall the last time I had
associated sexuality with tire repair. Another featured a naughty flapper
girl with skirt hiked up to here, offering a glass of beer one barely
noticed. It was all quite a heady experience, being assaulted by hundreds
of come-ons at once; if these had been current ads, I might have been
driven to drink, or at least tire repair. But chronic distance can be
a luxury. In perhaps one of Japan’s earliest mysteries-of-the-latest-technology
e-commerce posters, a kimono'd woman speaking into a wooden wall phone
in a lithographed poster for a Tokyo kimono shop says “For the
finest in kimonos, dial 18!!” Totally rad when it was cutting
edge, much like what is totally rad now. Things have changed in some
major regards though, the big over-the-counter illnesses then being
syphilis and worms; also, the image of Bismarck was a big consumer draw,
Godzilla being some years down the road. 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,” now rather comical in
its attempt at being scientifico-inscrutably impressive and unquestionable,
unlike the thoroughly reputable science used in such ads nowadays. Another
pamphlet blithely promoted the World Congress for Leisure Time and Recreation
in Hamburg, July 23-30, 1936, featuring granitically fascist vacationers,
with the very concept of leisure about to get blitzkreiged, as evidenced
in the wartime propaganda posters in another room (which the Japanese
visitors seemed to avoid) with strident fonts shouting didactically
to the peasant hordes about 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 implicitly divine wind; yet other posters 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 demonstrating the early naivete
of what is a now mature and trustworthy medium, but as hard evidence
that advertising is no nearer the truth now than it ever was, or will
be.
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