“Nagano 1998 – Dreams of Children / Ski Jumping” (子どもの夢), Rare Original Japanese Official Olympic Poster 1995, B1 Size (c. 72.8 × 103 cm) HAK-A

This is an original Japanese B1 official poster produced for the Nagano 1998 Winter Olympic Games, featuring the celebrated minimalist ski jumper in flight composition designed by Katsumi Asaba (浅葉克己) with photography by Kazumi Kurigami (操上和美).

Issued in May 1995, almost three years before the XVIII Olympic Winter Games opened in Nagano, this is one of the principal official posters commissioned by the Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee (NAOC). The design is documented by the Olympic Museum, which preserves an example in its permanent collection under the title “Dreams of Children.”

Japanese sources identify this as the second official Nagano Olympic poster (第2号), printed by offset lithography in the large B1 format. At approximately 72.8 × 103 cm, this example has the monumental scale originally intended for official public and institutional display.

Design

This is one of the most radical exercises in negative space in modern Olympic poster design.

Almost the entire composition consists of an immense, softly textured field of pale grey and white. Within it, positioned high toward the upper-left corner, is a single ski jumper suspended in flight.

The athlete is tiny.

That extraordinary disparity of scale is the entire conceptual force of the poster. Rather than enlarging the athlete into the heroic figure normally expected of sports advertising, Asaba reduces the jumper almost to a mark upon the paper. The surrounding emptiness becomes a representation of sky, snow, altitude and silence.

The Olympic Museum describes the design as showing the small figure of a ski jumper flying amid gently swirling snow, an image intended to symbolise both the grandeur of winter and the aspirations of children toward the world of tomorrow.

Seen closely, the jumper is captured in the aerodynamic V-style, the skis opening away from one another as the athlete leans aggressively forward into the air. Developed into the dominant technique of elite ski jumping around the turn of the 1990s, the V-style was still a relatively new visual symbol of the sport when this poster was created.

The athlete therefore feels simultaneously monumental and extraordinarily vulnerable: a human being reduced to a tiny black form suspended against an apparently limitless winter sky.

Katsumi Asaba & Kazumi Kurigami

The poster brought together two major figures in Japanese visual culture.

Katsumi Asaba (浅葉克己) is one of Japan's most important post-war graphic designers and art directors, known for his sophisticated typography, conceptual advertising and fascination with written language and visual communication.

Rather than approaching the Olympic commission through conventional sporting spectacle, Asaba created a composition based upon proportion, emptiness and visual tension. The viewer's eye must search the enormous field before discovering the athlete—a reversal of almost every conventional rule of sports-poster advertising.

The photograph was created by renowned Japanese photographer Kazumi Kurigami (操上和美). Kurigami's contribution is equally essential: the granular atmospheric field is not simply empty paper but a photographic environment of snow and air, giving the poster a subtle depth that becomes increasingly apparent when viewed at full B1 scale.

The Olympic Museum specifically credits Katsumi Asaba as designer and Kazumi Kurigami as photographer, while Japanese archival sources likewise identify the pair as responsible for this second official Nagano poster.

The Monochrome Concept

The almost total absence of colour was deliberate.

According to the Olympic Museum's documentation, the Nagano Organizing Committee specifically wished to produce a monochrome official poster, giving this design a dramatically different character from the colourful Olympic advertising that preceded it.

The restrained black, grey and white palette evokes the actual visual conditions of a snow-filled winter landscape: horizon, cloud, snow and sky begin to merge until conventional spatial references almost disappear.

Only at the bottom does the composition become graphically anchored.

In enormous black typography appears:

NAGANO 1998
THE XVIII OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES

Beneath sit the five Olympic rings, while the lower-right corner carries the brilliant multicoloured Nagano 1998 Snowflower emblem and a second Olympic identity block.

The sudden appearance of green, yellow, red, orange, blue and purple within the Snowflower provides the only significant burst of colour on the entire sheet, making the emblem unusually vivid against the monochrome field.

The Snowflower Emblem

The Snowflower had been unveiled in January 1993 and was already becoming the central visual identity of Nagano 1998 when this poster appeared in 1995.

Its six coloured forms represent stylised winter athletes arranged like the petals of a flower, while the overall geometry also evokes a six-sided snow crystal and an alpine plant.

This union of sport and nature closely complements Asaba's ski-jumping image. The tiny athlete exists almost completely within the natural environment, while the emblem below formally combines athletic movement with snow and flora.

Immediately beneath the emblem appears the original:

© 1993 NAOC TM NAOC 5-001

while the right-hand margin carries the crucial production inscription:

“Printed in Japan 1995”

Together these markings establish the poster's original NAOC provenance and its 1995 Japanese printing.

Historical Significance

The subject would ultimately prove extraordinarily appropriate for Nagano.

When the Games finally opened in February 1998, ski jumping became one of the defining sporting stories of the entire Japanese Olympics.

Competition took place at the Hakuba Ski Jumping Stadium, and Japan's ski jumpers produced some of the host nation's most memorable performances. Kazuyoshi Funaki won individual large-hill gold and normal-hill silver, while the Japanese team of Takanobu Okabe, Hiroya Saito, Masahiko Harada and Funaki captured the large-hill team gold medal.

Those triumphs occurred nearly three years after this poster was issued. The anonymous airborne figure therefore belongs to a very different moment: the anticipation of Nagano rather than the celebration of its eventual champions.

That makes the title Dreams of Children particularly resonant. The athlete is not presented as a recognisable celebrity. He represents aspiration itself—the dream of flight, competition and participation.

Rarity

This is not merely Nagano 1998 memorabilia but one of the Games' documented official art posters.

The Olympic Museum preserves this design in its collection and identifies it as an official Nagano 1998 poster, while Japanese archival sources catalogue the B1 edition specifically as:

長野オリンピック公式ポスター 第2号 スキージャンプ〈子どもの夢〉

—Nagano Olympic Official Poster No. 2, Ski Jumping (“Dreams of Children”).

Japanese sources record the B1 edition at approximately 103 × 72.8 cm and identify the printing technique as offset.

Its preservation presents an unusual challenge. Whereas a busy photographic or illustrated poster can visually disguise minor marks, this design consists almost entirely of exposed pale-grey space. Foxing, staining, fingerprints, creases, moisture damage and surface abrasions have virtually nowhere to hide.

The combination of official NAOC provenance, documented Olympic Museum status, Katsumi Asaba design, Kazumi Kurigami photography, 1995 printing and monumental B1 format makes this an important piece of Japanese Olympic and graphic-design history.

It is also one of those rare Olympic posters that functions entirely independently as a work of graphic art. Its radical use of scale and negative space remains remarkably contemporary more than thirty years after it was created.

Condition

Excellent+ condition overall, particularly impressive for a poster whose enormous pale field makes even minor imperfections immediately apparent.

The delicate grey photographic texture remains remarkably clean and consistent, while the tiny ski jumper retains excellent definition. The black NAGANO 1998 typography and Olympic rings remain deep and sharply printed, and the multicoloured Snowflower emblem retains superb saturation.

The poster remains unbacked and without prominent structural fold lines. There are only light handling impressions, shallow surface creases and gentle natural paper undulation visible under close inspection, principally around the margins and lower portion of the sheet. Minor edge and corner wear is present, including a few small edge impressions consistent with the substantial B1 format.

Importantly, there is no significant foxing, widespread staining or major discolouration —a particularly important consideration for this exceptionally restrained monochrome design.

The reverse is remarkably clean and bright, displaying only minor handling impressions and natural age-related paper movement.

Once professionally mounted and framed, this poster will display superbly. The extraordinary relationship between the tiny airborne athlete and immense surrounding field becomes particularly powerful at full B1 scale.

Please review all photographs carefully; they show the exact poster for sale, front and back, including detailed imagery of the original ©1993 NAOC TM NAOC 5-001 and “Printed in Japan 1995” markings.

This is an original Japanese B1 Nagano 1998 official Olympic poster, designed by Katsumi Asaba with photography by Kazumi Kurigami and printed in Japan in 1995.
It is not a reproduction or a later reprint.

It is over 30 years old.

Certificate of Authenticity included.