Pop art without Andy Warhol? Iconic cartoon mice repping the underground comic scene? These are the possibilities in a world where Japan defeated the United States in 1945.
Here’s an alternate look at art history, reimagining movements, tropes and trends that could have evolved much differently had the Allies lost the second world war.
J-pop … art?
One of the most influential postwar creative movements, pop art elevated advertising and mechanical reproduction to the level of fine art. Combining splashy, intense colors with recognizable, everyday subjects, the style forced viewers to reconsider the sophisticated techniques underlying seemingly mundane comic books, magazine advertisements and other objects.
Given Japan’s rich ad and comic culture, it’s not surprising the country developed a pop art style of its own. Before 1945, the popularity of propaganda kimonos hinted at the movement. Since the end of the war, the style has flourished as artists like Yayoi Kusama, who inspired Andy Warhol, used advertising’s bright colors, while others like Lady Aiko and Mr have adopted comic imagery. It’s not hard to see how, in a Japanese-dominated society, pop art might have extended its global popularity with no Campbell’s Soup cans in sight.
Manga: underground no more
Contemporary manga is a hybrid of Japanese and American comic art, says Stephen Salel, the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Robert F Lange Foundation curator of Japanese art. Many manga elements, like characters’ large eyes and exaggerated expressions, owe their origin to US cartoon pioneers like Walt Disney.
In a Japan-dominated postwar world, American cartoonists probably would have been repressed, particularly those who contributed to wartime propaganda. Manga reaching US shores likely would have looked more realistically Japanese. And, Salel points out, as the preferred style of the victors, manga probably wouldn’t have conveyed the underground chic that’s made it so popular among US comic aficionados today. Imagine outlaw teens and proud geeks in a different world: would they have clustered around smuggled copies of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse?
Rōnin characters roam the big screen
The rōnin, or “wave man”, the masterless samurai forever cut off from mainstream society, is a powerful Japanese icon. Freed of traditional hierarchies, he wanders from place to place, using his skills to survive – and, in some tales, to protect the innocent and punish the wicked. Sound familiar? Rōnin did find fertile ground in postwar American culture, particularly in westerns, with characters ranging from the squeaky-clean Lone Ranger to Clint Eastwood’s grim “man with no name”.
Sometimes the rōnin-gunslinger relationship is explicit: The Magnificent Seven was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, and the 1971 movie Red Sun united veterans of both movies in a unique “samurai western”. If Japanese aesthetics had dominated postwar Hollywood, we might have seen an Old West rōnin carrying a sword alongside his six-shooter, fighting a cattle-rustling gang headed by the yakuza.
East meets East Coast: the new preppy
In the late 1800s, Japan began adopting Western clothing; by the 1940s, it was the standard wardrobe for daily life. But if Japan had won the war, it seems likely that many of its traditional textiles and designs would have filtered into Americans’ style. Can you see a postwar Ivy League alum cooling down after a tennis match wearing a Japanese robe called a yukata? Or a CEO’s suit lined with flashy, kimono-inspired fabric?
It’s not that hard to imagine, since similar looks have made it into American stores in the real world. Japanese retailer Uniqlo, renowned for its preppy clothes, also carries yukatas and Japanese-patterned shorts in its lineup. And Harajuku style, which merges American design and theatrical Japanese aesthetic, shows how the east Asian nation’s culture has impacted western clothing today.
Typography takes a turn
In the 1900s, increased industrialization and the rising cult of efficiency in the west signaled the end of flowery, Spencer-style penmanship. The efficient Palmer method streamlined handwriting, while the widespread adoption of the typewriter in the late 1800s and early 1900s accelerating the process. In Japan, on the other hand, pictographic kanji and the syllabic writing systems of hiragana and katakana had thousands of characters, which slowed the progress of one writing machine: the first Japanese typewriter had 2,400 keys.
While it’s hard to picture a postwar Japanese occupation forcing Americans to adopt Japanese “alphabets”, it’s probable that signs and other public messages would have been printed in Japanese in certain regions, especially California. And this would likely have bled out into mainstream American writing, with Asian-inspired fonts and advertisements gaining popularity. “Brush-written calligraphy on elongated formats such as poetry cards [tanzaku] and hanging scrolls might have regained far more popularity than it currently enjoys,” Salel says.
As for pictographic writing, it’s not hard to see how it could have slowly worked its way into common usage – not unlike the emoji, which originated on Japanese cellphones in the 1990s and has since traversed the world.
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