ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an example of graphic design from 1930, pushing back to the year before Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931—the beginning of the era that historians often term the Fifteen-Years’ War. It discusses some of those powerful objects and introduces others, fitting them into a broad trajectory of the Deco style and nationalism. In Deco Japan, the Levenson collection catalog, a section on “Nationalism” features crafts with radiating sun motifs, designs of atavistic flying fish, and figurines of sinuous dragons, proud phoenix, and fierce lions, as well as spectacular objects from the later years of World War II. Dragons were so familiar in East Asian culture that the link to militarism may be easily overlooked. In the 1930s, Japanese artists appropriated fauna with no history in East Asian art but associated with the modern visual culture of Deco.
