Becoming Imperial Brands: Japanese Advertising in Colonial Korea, 1920–1932

Abstract This article explores the expansion of advertisements by Japanese consumer goods brands in Korea during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), focusing on the 1920s and early 1930s. It adopts the “colonial modernity” approach to examine Japanese advertising in Korea as an interface between Japanese and Korean non-state actors. It also uses transnational design history to investigate, more empirically, how these actors, such as manufacturers, consumers, advertising agencies, retailers, newspaper companies, practitioners, and the colonial government, contributed to the expansion and change of Japanese advertisements. It studies the cases of three Japanese brands, Morinaga (confectionery), Lion (toothpaste), and Ajinomoto (artificial seasoning), analyzing their advertisements and examining written records from the companies’ archives, their histories, and contemporary publications. By doing so it uncovers the negotiations, challenges, and tensions among the various actors involved in the Japanese brands’ advertising in Korea. The article argues that colonial modernity around Japanese advertising design was formed between or across Korea and Japan, by both Koreans and Japanese, and that through this gradual process of interaction and adaptation Japanese “national brands” transformed themselves into “imperial brands.”