This research investigates the color woodcuts of Walter Klemm and Carl Thiemann. They are usually discussed in the Japonisme context and its development in German-speaking countries at the beginning of the 20th century. As they were the following generation of Emil Orlik, who came to Japan and learned the techniques, the achievement of Klemm and Thiemann and their generation had gotten less attention until now. While Orlik’s firsthand information was undoubtedly an important source of influence, he later distanced himself from woodcut printing. On the other hand, the subsequent work of Klemm and Thiemann is distinctly different from the Japanese-style woodblock printing for which Orlik had aimed. As a backdrop, the author considers the growing concept of “original woodblock prints” that prevailed at the time. It had become a keyword marked on the work along with the signature. This fact indicates the changes of intention to produce prints from scratch, not for the reproduction of paintings. One important reason for this shift was the experiment with handprints of water-based colors, and the “unstable” effects unique to handwork encouraged Klemm and Thiemann to experiment freely. Such work cannot be confined to the Japonisme context as diversion examples of Japanese art. Furthermore, we should appreciate the work of the 1900s as a turning point in the modernity of printmaking, i.e., from a reproduction method to a position as an “expression” in fine art.

Photographs have a history of mainly being distributed as printed matter for centered on magazines with the development of printing technology. In Japan, camera magazines thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, and they produced many photographers. Later, when photographs were presented in museums, galleries and other spaces, exhibitions using original prints became common. Today, we can see the transition to displays. On the other hand, much of the history of photography has been drawn with a focus on photographers and work introductions from the perspective of “expression,” but at that time, photography is reduced to images (images taken) only. However, as photography is dependent on its support medium, “expression” must have been accompanied by corresponding changes. Furthermore, the acceptance of photographs itself differs greatly between magazines and museums. These changes in social acceptance must have affected the consciousness of photographers. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the aspect of the “media transition” of photography and to recapture the history of photography in three dimensions. This research focuses on the trends of Etsuro Ishihara (1941–2016), who founded ZEIT-FOTO SALON, the first photographic gallery in Japan, in order to capture the transition from printed matter to original prints. Through the archiving of letters from homes and related parties, we investigated part of how the concept of original print became established.

Is there a need to extend the Design Act to protect image designs in Japan? Although the amendment of the Design Law in 2019 was not expected when we applied for this research project, the relationship between the design and the function of the device is still required for both the operation image and the display image to be protected by Japan’s design right. In Europe and France, the design registration is allowed without a requirement of the relationship with the device, but there are no cases of actual enforcement based on the design right. If this is the case, it is unclear to what extent there is a need for protection of images that have no particular relationship with devices. In fact, if the design right is extended to content images, the right will be widely applied to images of games, which may adversely affect the Japanese game industry. In view of the above, it is not desirable to extend the protection of image designs by the Design Law.

This paper presents part of the results of media-theoretical historical studies on the relationship between Japanese phototypesetting machinery (shashoku) and book design. The discussions center on the development of the phototypesetting industry during the postwar reconstruction period, with a particular focus on the relationship between Sha-Ken Co., Ltd. and Morisawa Inc., two of Japan's leading manufacturers of phototypesetting machinery, and the circumstances in the 1940s and 1950s that led to the eventual breakdown of their close cooperation. Since most of the parties involved are no longer alive and there are many discrepancies in the literal description of events depending on the writer’s perspective, this paper examines multiple sources to the extent possible to derive an objective estimation of the relevant historical events.
What has emerged is a historical context beyond personal conflicts between the two inventive geniuses who co-developed the ground-breaking technology. The course of events was influenced by multiple macro dynamics of intertwining factors, such as the commoditization and collectivization of highly specialized technologies, postwar policies during the occupation period, an increased demand generated by the Korean War, the concentration of publishing businesses in Tokyo, the rapid growth of the economy, the inequality between genders in Japanese society, and the transmission and transformation of principles in family-owned businesses and generational shifts.
By shedding light on the unique development of phototypesetting machines in Japan, which was determined both out of necessity and by chance, this paper attempts to approach the historical progress of the Japanese written language and graphic design from a new angle.

In the early Middle Ages, the legal customs of Germanic tribes were codified, and many manuscripts of the so-called barbarian laws were produced. However, these legal manuscripts have not been ascribed due importance by art historians because of the poor quality of the miniature. In this article, I will examine the role that the images and decoration played in the Frankish legal manuscripts.
Legal manuscripts usually depict legislators and lawmakers and sometimes include decorated initials and framing ornamentation. In a manuscript from the ninth century, Paris BN lat. 4404, the tables of chapters at the beginning of each code are decorated with an ornamental arcade frame. This form of ornamentation has been common since late antiquity on the preface pages of books as well as in the canon tables of the Gospels. An example from tenth-century northern Italy, Modena AC Cod. O.I.2, depicts scribes in profile looking up at legislators. This schema may have been inspired by the depiction of the author’s portrait on the frontispiece of some biblical manuscripts. An example from the end of the ninth century, Paris lat. 4787, illustrates the act of emancipation. The possessions and gesture of this figure suggest that representational images from Christian iconography were converted into the illustration of the legal manuscript.
The codices of the barbarian laws of the early Middle Ages share decoration and iconography in common with Christian manuscripts. By appropriating the religious imagery, they may have wished to signify the authority of legislators and the very laws themselves.

It is incidentally 100 years since Pathé and Eastman Kodak respectively introduced 9.5mm and 16mm film gauges, bringing about a robust non-theatrical film culture that took root in Japanese cities without any time-lag vis-à-vis the West. While existing scholarship has focused on the ways in which small-gauge cameras and projectors were appropriated by cine-amateurs, film education proponents, and proletarian movements in ways that defied the manufacturers’ intended use within bourgeois households, relatively scarce attention has been paid to the reduction-print libraries that were designed to boost sales for portable-projector manufacturers. Drawing on recent studies that position reduction prints as a form of compression formats that embodies the trans-industrial ideology of rationalization by reducing the image fidelity and projection speed close to the threshold beyond which human vision no longer perceives motion, this study examines the politics and poetics of Sakura-graph, Japan’s first domestically produced reduction library. Against the techno-determinist narrative offered by its producers, Yokohama Cinema and Konishiroku (later Konica), I will examine the “technical” dimensions of reduction libraries centering on cataloging, footage reuse, and animation graphics, thus positioning small-gauge film in the interstices of modern graphic media such as photography, typography, and posters.

In the early 2000s, Tompa script was used in the design of everyday items such as posters and ready-made goods in Japan, a phenomenon known as the “Tompa script boom.” This paper is a research report that attempts to trace back the history and development of the Tompa script of the Naxi people in China to Japan from several angles.
In the late 1990s, Lijiang, China became a global tourist attraction, and the Tompa script of the Naxi people of Lijiang was taken up as a regional symbol and cultural icon. Subsequently, the Tompa script was recognized as a Memory of the World Heritage site, which led to its significant transformation as a tourism resource. During the same period, Japanese tourists, researchers, and designers visited Lijiang with their own interests. Japanese media also introduced the Tompa script to the public, and graphic design works in Tompa script appeared in the city. The Japanese crossing of the border of the Tompa script that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s is one example of how hieroglyphs, which are said to be “charming,” were used internationally as a design with the power to move people’s hearts in the context of the era of expanding global tourism. In other words, one could say that the Tompa script played a role in the transmission and generation of international culture through the use of the cultural heritage of an ethnic minority region as a design resource.

The aim of this research is to clarify the design method of The Family of Man’s traveling exhibitions in Japan (1956-57). The study material is mainly a photo album by Takashimaya Archives. In chapter 2, I focused on the Takashimaya Tokyo Dept. Store’s 8th floor, which was the venue of the Tokyo version of the exhibition. The exhibition room had a larger space than other museums in Tokyo at the time. This was one of the reasons why it was chosen as the venue for the exhibition. In chapter 3, I clarified the position of the photographs exhibited in the Tokyo version and compared it with the layout of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s exhibition catalogue. Some of the places where the newly added works for the traveling exhibitions in Japan were identified. In addition, I focused on the display fixtures designed by Kenzo Tange Laboratory, and described the visual effect they had on viewers. In chapter 4, the use of display fixtures in other Japanese traveling exhibitions was grasped. By emphasizing the vista from the entrance, the Osaka version was intended to have a different visual effect from the Tokyo version. In concluding, I said that the same fixtures were probably used in a traveling exhibition in Korea as in the Japanese version.

In this research project, we investigated various traditional paper-cuts made in Japan and China to celebrate the new year and pray for peace and a bountiful harvest, and conducted a case study on the culture of “form” produced by the technique of cutting images on paper with a knife or scissors.
Following the “Introduction,” in this paper, we present the findings of a survey of traditional paper-cuts and related crafts produced as New Year’s decorations conducted in six regions of Japan (Yonezawa City, Yamagata Prefecture; Nagaoka City and Uonuma City, Niigata Prefecture; Koyasan, Wakayama Prefecture; Sanriku coastal area of Miyagi Prefecture; Tenryu-ku, Hamamatsu City; and Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture) in Chapter 2. Through field surveys, it was found that creators of these paper-cuts have shifted from the clergy of temples and shrines to the private sector and that there has been the mutual appropriation of designs and changes and arrangements in response to the changing needs of the times.
In Chapter 3, based on a field survey in the Shaanbei region of China (northern Shaanxi Province), we discuss the use of paper-cuts called “window flowers,” and how the form is handed down from year to year because they are disposable. Chapter 4 describes the role of “window flowers” as a “language of form,” in other words, how the sounds of the words and the forms of the paper-cuts resonate with each other to convey a multilayered image. The final chapter briefly summarizes the similarities and differences between Japanese and Chinese paper-cuts and proposes research perspectives that can be applied to future studies of paper-cutting traditions around the world.

This research aims to explore the relationship between biology and graphic expression in visual culture through the analysis of graphics generated by microbiomes. Firstly, based on previous studies of modern and contemporary art and design history, this paper shows the evolution of biomedia in visual arts such as plastic arts and design. Secondly, it analyzes specific cases of four
works (series) of graphic expression by microbiomes. I discuss the similarities that can be found them and consider new research areas in visual culture.
Although there are some differences among microbial graphics, such as bacteria, fungi, algae, and so on, they all have similarities in the need for a culture medium and the generating of dynamic biological patterns. In this paper, especially from the point of view of “figure and ground” and “microperformativity,” I consider today’s active elements in graphics and the possibilities of visual expression. It also aims to show the intersection of biology and art through analyzing productions by biomedia (living materials).

This paper focuses on the rendering techniques of three-dimensional objects in Ancient Egyptian graphic art. Ancient Egyptians are known to have developed a canonical system to define the human body as early as 2400 BCE. The system supported the growing demand for paintings and relief works in the royal and private tombs. In the Middle Kingdom, another canonical system, i.e. the first grid system, was invented and remained as a standard method well over 1300 years, excluding the invention of the second grid system in the Amarna Period. In the beginning of the Late Period, however, another grid system was invented to incorporate the anthropometry into the traditional grid system. Concerning the architectural drawings, the plans incorporating the elevation of doorways seem to have sufficed for the construction tasks. Genuine elevation drawings were limited to the designs of details such as decoration programs of temple walls, capitals, wooden shrines and furniture. The famous Ghurob Shrine Papyrus shows a set of elevations drawn on a grid, indicating that the module system, known as symmetria in the Classical Greek Period, already existed in the Late Period and was used to define and refine the appearance of structures. As for the capitals, the sistrum capital was designed by the grid system, however, the floral capitals were designed instead by multi-modular system that allowed the height and the horizontal dimensions to be defined separately. Without doubt, the development of the new canonical system took place in the beginning of the Late Period and holds the traditional canonical system of Egypt and the Greek and Roman symmetria together.

This article is an evaluation of how common-use color names are recognized, using four indices (the Familiarity of color names, and the Imaginableness of color names, the Distance in color space between a given standard color of JIS Z 8102 in color selection, and the Certainty of color selection as a new index). In term of Certainty, positive correlations were shown significantly between the “Familiarity” and the “Imaginableness” of color names, while moderate negative correlation was shown between the “Distance in color space.” Furthermore, the study attempted to quantitatively evaluate the recognition of color names using principal component analysis based on these four indices, and found that the “Recognition” and “Distance in color space” levels in color names have an explanatory power of 93.0%. This result shows that a color name consisting of one basic color term is more recognizable than any other terms, and that those color terms consisting of two basic color terms are more recognizable than color terms containing no basic color terms. We found that the distance in color space for color names containing a basic color term (or terms) was significantly lower than that of the other color names. This suggests that subjects were able to infer the position of a color in color space using its basic color term (s) even if they didn’t know the common-use color terms. Those results correspond with our past evaluation in 2009.

Russian Constructivism, so-called “left art,” which emerged after the Russian Revolution in 1917, was an artistic and social movement that tried to construct and organize a new society as an art. As a socialist visual style, this study observes the historical and social flow that Russian constructivism was introduced into Korea along with its ideology and examines what kind of landscape its influence created in colonial Korea. For this purpose, the meaning of constructivist image and typography in Russia was first studied. Next, the background and change of direction of the socialist movement in Korea, and the role that printed materials contributed to the spread of socialist ideas were examined. And as the direction of the socialist movement changed, specific cases were reviewed to see how it affected the use of typography and images placed on socialist printed matter such as newspapers and magazines. However, it was found that the changing of the direction of the socialist movement and the social conditions of colonial Korea were combined, it was transformed into a unique shape in which nationalism and internationalism were unevenly mixed.

The 15-piece series, The Hiroshima Panels, co-created by the painters Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, was the artists’ way of conveying what happened in the city’s atomic bombing, a disaster of historical proportions which occurred in the 20th century. The series has made several appearances in the graphic culture of the cultural movements of the 1950s and printed materials (in posters, etc. domestically and abroad) for exhibitions which rotated between galleries throughout Japan. This project will excavate, survey, organize and make high-definition archival copies of relevant original source materials for investigation into the contextual history of the acceptance of The Hiroshima Panels. In other words, it will not study the painting theory or history of The Hiroshima Panels themselves. With the public release and consequent presence of The Hiroshima Panels as one of its central focuses this research will analyze and consider the widespread development of ideas and cultural creation, and the philosophies of the cultural movements seen in Japanese society during the 1950s. In the survey process, this project will also focus on and try to make replicas of the drawings (life drawings and sketches made in Japan and abroad) and preparatory picture book drafts drawn by Toshi Maruki. For the final task, the construction of a digital archive of original materials will aim at wide-ranging information disclosure and access to use via the Internet, as well as the protection of the sources.

The purpose of this study is to classify and explore photographic materials by Inoue Takao (1945–2016) on Buddhist mural paintings in the Ladakh region of India and to examine their expression technique from a graphic viewpoint. Simultaneously, I analyze the way of studying materials through an archive activity. This study applies the collaborative research by each scholar in the fields of archive study, Japanese-style painting, and Buddhist art study. This project investigates the contents of photographic materials (positive film) and classifies them by fifteen temples. Moreover, it builds databases for the images of the Alchi temple and the Saspol stone cave, digitizing positive films with high resolution. We also reproduce the “Prajna-paramita Tārā,” located on the first floor of the three-layer hall of Alchi temple, by a technique called age-utsushi, using the digital data. As a result, we could examine concrete depictions and brush stroke on the image.
I apply the approach of classification by temples and the directions inside them, combining Inoue Takao`s insight with Buddhist art study. Thus, the “creativity” of the person concerned with archives is inevitably required at “present” for updating remaining materials with available ones; the conduct of “archive” is regarded as extremely creative. As for making a “creative archive,” instead of following modern discipline and systems of collection and preservation, we need to update the criterion of value on the preservation of materials to become an organization that can use them from various angles.