Author: Smoca Toothpowder Poster.
Title: [Tabako Nomi no Hamigaki Sumoka].
Description: n.p. [c1930?]. Colour poster 42x31cm. Some browning at the edges, a rather good copy with metal strips at top and bottom and hanging loop at the top. ¶ A more cheerful and straightforward racist poster compared to a couple that are disturbing among the Smoca series of face or head and white teeth posters. Except that it's a woman with a cheroot clenched between smiling white teeth. I know of ten - of varying impact; a couple I've never seen for sale in decent shape and while the rest are easier to find it's not so easy to find them in this sort of conditionSmoca's success - they are still going - was through clever advertising. From the start, in 1925, the company's founder, advertising man Kataoka Toshiro, hired the best artists and cartoonists. Book compilations of Smoca's newspaper advertising made regular appearances from the late twenties on.

Keywords: graphic art advertising posters c20th Japan Asia modernism cosmetics tobacco