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Matchibako: Japanese Matchbook Art of the 20s and 30s

by Maggie Kinser Hohle
Mark Batty Publisher, West New York, NJ USA, 2004
64 pp., illus. $12.95
ISBN: 0-9725636-5-2.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University


mosher@svsu.edu

Author Maggie Kinsler Hohle notes that "[I[n the mid-1930s there were 20,000 coffee shops and 37,000 cafés and bars in metropolitan Tokyo". Flipping through her attractive little volume, we are immediately struck by a sense of how cosmopolitan the "kissa" (short for kissaten) coffee shops were by the variety of visuals presented on their matchbooks. This reviewer's 2002 visit to Japan confirmed the popularity of coffee shop conversation on politics, literature, and art still to be found there, a refined enjoyment of friendship and conviviality over a hot tasty cup and a sweet treat.

Many matchbooks here advertise products such as Meiji Milk Caramel and Nikke Socks, or depict an elegant lady for Shishedo Cosmetics. Some show cocktails, speeding cars and modern industry. Their Art Deco flappers sip drinks, puff cigarettes from beneath bobbed hair and pert cloche hats, or ponder their next dates. Yet at times they draw on traditional Japanese imagery, as when one from a series from the Kimuraya Bread and Cake Tea Room shows a traditional mud-walled storehouse. Another matchbook features the fox that frequents Shinto shrines. Some advertise entertainments, like a performance of Chekov's "Cherry Orchard" or Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis". The Akasaka "Florida" Ballroom advertises an "Eleven-Member New York Negro Jazz Orchestra" in residence, and exhibits a photographic constellation of the gentlemen's heads as proof. The black mascot of Calpis (Cal as in calcium, pis or salpis, a flavor cited in Buddhist texts) was as rubber-lipped and racist a caricature as any that appeared on Parisian posters during Josephine Baker's heyday.

One might see these matchbook designs as part of a Japanese tradition of miniaturization that runs from carved netsuke to today's electronics industry. They make use of dramatic and colorful typography, clever use of vertical or diagonal text, and usually an attractively limited use of colors. They sometimes evoke the modernist look of Wiener Werkstatte or Bauhaus graphics, cubist paintings or Mogdiliani's nudes, and the book examines the development of one assembly of modernist designers called the Group of Seven. Maggie Kinsler Hohle writes knowledgeably of the matchbooks' era and culture, and of the firms they advertise. This reader's one complaint is that the accordion-fold design of the 4"-square book makes it difficult to read in bed; that's not a good place to reach for a matchbook and smoke, but a good place for small volumes of visual delights. It is suggested that Mark Batty reprint it soon in conventional format.

 

 




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