青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Here is an engrossing, and at times poignant, compendium of the vestiges of a society’s fantasies—a natural history of visual images encapsulating the memory of a nation.

——Inoue Shoichi (director-general, International Research Center for Japanese Studies)

Kitagawa Kazuo’s fifty years as a toy collector has made him a legend in Japanese antiques circles. His collection numbers in the tens of thousands—articles rich in visual delight chosen from across centuries and genres to satisfy his practiced eye as a professional graphic designer.

In this volume, popular-culture scholar Ishikawa Hajime (Kyoto Japanese Cultural Resources Institute) delves into that treasure trove to illuminate the Japanese passion for visual representation. Some 300 full-color plates introduce a panoply of finds from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including ukiyo-e, posters, tin toys, dolls, curios, and more.

Kitagawa Kazuo is a graphic designer and toy collector born in 1939 in present-day Northeast China. The toy exhibition he organized at the Sakai City Museum in 1983 was the first of its kind at a Japanese public institution. In 1988 he founded the Memory Museum (currently closed) in the Sagano district of Kyoto. He is the president of the Japan Kewpie Club. Past publications include Kewpie-san (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1996) and Kyupi tachi no chiisana ohanashi (Short Stories of Kewpies; Froebel-kan, 1999).