How Japan Turned Department Stores Into Dreamworlds
Nozomi Naoi | The Reader | 20th September 2026
Tokyo’s department stores are grand institutions, monuments to “beauty and abundance”. It turns out that they have also been agents for cultural change. Part of this was through their early adoption of 20th century technologies like lifts and lighting. More important was their use of posters for advertising. Lithography facilitated inventive poster designs and made posters hugely popular, an “art world sensation”. Essentially, they were addressing “a difficult question: what did modern life look like?”