Collection: 1930s Posters

The 1930s decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War. It saw the international financial system collapse, beginning with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and an economic downfall called the Great Depression that had a traumatic effect worldwide, leading to widespread unemployment and poverty, especially in the United States, an economic superpower, and Germany, who had to deal with the reparations regarding World War I. The Dust Bowl (which gives the nickname the Dirty Thirties) in the United States further emphasised the scarcity of wealth. 

A majority of our 1930s Posters are reproductions from the Japanese Beer Culture that exploded during that time.

Pre-war Japanese Beer Posters: the Most Beautiful Ads ever made?

Before 1994, a Japanese brewery legally had to produce 528,000 gallons of the stuff every year to qualify for a license, a regulation nakedly meant to hand the advantage to long-established corporations. This situation still exists, to an extent, in Korea; hence the dominance there of the near-flavorless Hite, Cass, and OB.

But if we've entered the golden age of Japanese beer, we've missed the golden age of Japanese beer advertising. That came before the Second World War, a time when, if the advertising industry needed drawing, painting, or lettering, it was done by hand.

Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo were not known for their richly flavorful product, but could command richly evocative imagery for the posters and postcards that promoted it.

A robust market now exists for these antique pieces of advertising and their suitable-for-framing reproductions. Spend enough time hunting for them, and you'll start to notice that different brands often used the same pictures: what you'd thought of as "the Asahi girl" might well turn up on a Sapporo poster, and so on.