Shiseido’s Marketing History to Be Used for MIT Educational Materials
Distributed Worldwide Through MIT’s Free Online OpenCourseWare
Shiseido has announced the inclusion of the company’s cosmetics marketing materials as educational
material for modern Japanese history and culture courses offered at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) in the United States. Relevant materials including advertising, sales counter tools
and in-house magazines developed during the Taisho Era through to the prewar period are offered to
the public free of charge together with a research paper from the end of May 2009 via
OpenCourseWare (OCW)*1, which is an open site containing lecture information operated by MIT.
This is the first time MIT will launch a website to introduce the in-depth marketing history of a
Japanese company as educational material for the study of Japanese history and culture.
*1 OCW offers free course materials that are officially used in MIT courses on the Internet.
Overview of Educational Materials
This educational material, entitled “Selling Shiseido：Cosmetics Advertising & Design in Early 20th
Century Japan,” will be used in lectures including “Introduction to Japanese Culture,” which will be
presented by Professor Shigeru Miyagawa (Foreign Languages and Literatures, MIT) commencing
in spring 2010.
Materials are comprised of items such as a general statement advised by Professor John W.
Dower (Japanese history, MIT); an essay by Associate Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld (Art, Art
History & Visual Studies, Duke University Graduate School) and an image gallery for reference, in
which approximately 300 images provided by Shiseido are posted.
The 20th century history of Shiseido provides a vivid image of the efflorescence of modernity in
Japan—reflecting the changing ideals of feminine beauty, the emergence of a vibrant consumer
culture, cutting-edge trends in advertising and packaging, and the persistence of cosmopolitan
ideals even in the midst of the rise of militarism in the 1930s. This unit draws on Shiseido’s vast
archives, focusing on the marketing of concepts of modern beauty from the 1920s through 1943.
In OCW, Shiseido’s materials will be posted as the 7th theme in the educational materials along
with “Black Ships & Samurai” and “Ground Zero 1945 (Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors)” in
web-based Visualizing Cultures, which conveys the modern history and culture of Japan.
http://ocw.mit.edu/shiseido
Background of Developing Educational Materials
Subsequent to receiving a request from MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who has been focusing on
Shiseido’s history for some time and visited the Shiseido Corporate Museum (Kakegawa, Shizuoka)
in August 2006, Shiseido has provided over 3,000 items selected from among 20,000 reference
images stored at the corporate museum to MIT, including product advertising images produced from
during the Taisho Era up until the prewar period, as well as photo images used for in-house
magazines such as HANATSUBAKI and Chainstore. Based on these source materials and as a result
of conducting surveys and educational material development over an approximately 2-year period,
MIT has produced educational materials at this time using roughly 300 images together with a
research paper.
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(Reference)
OpenCourseWare (OCW)
OCW is a system developed by MIT in 2001, incorporating the dissemination of free educational
materials that are officially used in MIT courses on the Internet. The launch of OCW under the
principle of “offering the intellectual property of MIT to all people, rather than a few students”
received front-page coverage in the New York Times, capturing the public’s interest. Among the
2,000 courses available at MIT, the educational material of 1,800 courses is currently released into
the public domain via web-based OCW. Such materials include lecture overviews, study plans,
lecture notes to tasks, regular examinations and lecture videos. This website attracted attention
around the world and is currently viewed by 2 million people on a monthly basis. In April 2006, the
International OCW Consortium was organized under the initiative of MIT and participating
members, which currently includes 190 universities in 32 countries. In Japan, six universities (Osaka
University, Kyoto University, Keio University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo University and
Waseda University) established Japan OCW Consortium programs in 2005, in which 20 universities
and 17 organizations currently participate.
MIT OCW website: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
Visualizing Cultures
Visualizing Cultures is a website within MIT’s OCW that introduces research into modern Japanese
history. The website posts many historically valuable images, thereby enabling viewers to learn
about modern Japanese history and culture. Initially developed by Professor John W. Dower and
Professor Shigeru Miyagawa of MIT in 2001, this website currently introduces relevant contents
under seven themes including Shiseido and the Black Ships & Samurai.
Visualizing Cultures website: http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html
MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa
Professor Shigeru Miyagawa has been a project member since the establishment of OCW. In
addition to his specialized research in linguistics, Professor Miyagawa has also taken a leading role
in conducting research on the application of the latest IT advancements to education. He made
significant contributions to the establishment of OCW and a project developed in his laboratory won
a Distinguished Award at the Multimedia Grandprix and also at the Mac World Exposition. In 1995,
Professor won an Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. He is
scheduled to be promoted to Chairman of Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at MIT in
July 2009.
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MIT Professor John W. Dower
Wrote numerous books related to modern Japanese history. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his book
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II published in 1995. Translated Japanese
version and expanded edition of this book were published by Iwanami Shoten in 2001 and 2004,
respectively.
Associate Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld
Associate Professor of Japanese Art History at Duke University Graduate School specialized in 19th
and 20th century Japanese visual culture. Currently working on publications related to art history
and the study of Japanese commercial design, and various aspects related to designing, including
Japanese art after the great Kanto earthquake.
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(Reference) Partially extracted from material images and comments
The cosmetics industry was without question a critical part of Japan’s burgeoning consumer market.
It provides an unparalleled window into the changing contemporary ideals of beauty and taste, not to
mention being a valuable indicator of cultural trends in health and hygiene. Shiseido’s innovative
product and promotional production tells a distinctive story about Japan’s experience of modernity,
including the impact on national culture of mass market consumerism, urbanization and changing
gender roles.
● Image 1: In the early phase of advertising (1907), there is an image of jogakusei (female
student) with a fashionable coiffure dressed in the standard school uniform wielding an
oversized bottle of Eudermine cosmetic toner that is nearly as large as she is. The image denotes
that a new female type of the Meiji period, the jogakusei was recently empowered with
state-mandated compulsory access to basic education, and her emerging public position and
modern femininity clearly demanded a powerful new cosmetic arsenal.
● Image 2: An elegantly dressed European woman delicately holding a single camellia blossom
lies luxuriously on a chaise longue. This could describe a French image of a stylish Parisienne
in her boudoir, but it is, in fact, a late 1920s Japanese advertisement. Advertising design
represents the aesthetic of cosmopolitan chic seen throughout the visual sphere in early 20th
century Japan.
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● Image 3: Shiseido’s promotional aesthetics were part of an emerging, worldwide culture of
beauty that was elegant, freshly contemporary, cosmopolitan and transnational. Selected covers
from Shiseido Graph magazine—published from 1933 to 1937—feature a vivid array of
independent women in chic, contemporary scenes.
● Image 4: The reactionary and restrictive ideological context of this recycling effort did not
entirely restrict its creative mode of expression, as evidenced in the playful editorial layouts
using cut photographs of piles of recycled containers for the contours or actual shapes of bottles
(advertising in recycling campaign of empty containers during wartime).
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● Image 5: Another strategy the company used to negotiate the anti-luxury ordinances was to tie
its products to the morality messages of the wartime spiritual mobilization movement. A
newspaper advertisement from 1941 for Shiseido shampoo told women that “dirty hair makes a
dirty spirit/mind!” (kami no yogore wa kokoro no yogore!).
● Image 6: Style, sophistication and a certain cosmopolitan elegance would not be entirely
abandoned by manufacturers or the consumer public even during the dire circumstances of the
final years of the war, as women clung to their Shiseido lipstick, even when it had to be sold in
chunky wooden containers.
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