Author: Coal mine.
Title: [Tanko].
Description: Tokyo, 1940 (Showa 15) Colour poster 53x77cm. A little dusty and frayed around the edges. ¶ Mines sure came a long way from the hell for the choiceless, the bereft, and the suicidal that Soseki wrote about in 1908. That was a copper mine, I admit, but by 1940 underground workers in coal mines weren't just women and convicts. Unless of course you were forced labour from Manchuria, China, or Korea. Still, all that has nothing to do with the shining, automated, downright pretty, triumph of tidy technology we have here. The artist is K. Homma. This is from a series of educational posters for schools, Wakamoto Kyoiku Kakezono. This changed my preconceptions about life in a coal mine so I wonder what else they published in the series; I might have to change my mind about a lot of things. I've found no mention of any other posters in the series.

Keywords: graphic art education schools technology mining coal c20th Japan modernism children juvenile trades posters