Celebrating the legacy of Kamekura Yusaku’s iconic Tokyo 1964 Olympics identity

The first of four posters he created, it effortlessly combined Japanese iconography with modernist aesthetics. In graphic design terms, it’s a gold medal – a masterpiece of modernism that remains fresh to this day for clearly communicating Japan and the Olympics. Kamekura was among six graphic designers, including Tanaka Ikko and Nagai Kazumasa, invited to submit proposals for the logo. According to Nagai, Kamekura forgot about the competition deadline and dashed out his design in a couple of hours. It was chosen unanimously, instantly catching the eye of his colleagues and, later, the design world. The red circle’s resemblance to the Hinomaru on the Japanese flag was seen as helping to galvanise a spirit of nationalism in post-war Japan, but for Kamekura the red sun signified the passion and excitement of the Games.

Kamekura’s creative upbringing was influenced by the Bauhaus, reflected in his three subsequent posters, which were the first Olympic posters to use photography. Revered as one of the most seminal achievements in post-war Japanese design, they eschewed traditional illustrations for modernist compositions that combined typography and imagery to compelling effect.

“They were quite cutting-edge and challenged the process of photography in order to create the right look,” says Simon. The second poster, released in May 1962, was a full-bleed photograph depicting a line of athletes shooting off from the starting block against a sharp black background and that striking gold typeface emblazoned below. The photo used American servicemen who were stationed at the Tachikawa airbase as models, alongside amateur Japanese athletes. Its technical mastery is in the painstaking process it took to get the final dynamic image – at the time, blacking out the background digitally wasn’t an option (Photoshop had yet to be born). The shoot took place in the National Stadium on a cold February evening over three hours, with the six runners making around 80 staggered false starts before photographer Hayasaki Osamu captured the perfect shot.

The final two posters, Butterfly Swimmer and Torch Bearer were equally technically complex and celebrated as totems of progressive design. The posters were in multi-colour photogravure, showcasing the technical advancement of Japan’s printing industry, and received numerous awards.

The design principles of the Tokyo Games “spread across the whole palette of the Olympics,” says Simon, and feature in various ways in the exhibition. Take the pioneering architecture of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium by Kenzo Tange, a model of which is on display in Japan House alongside the chic staff uniforms, each one with a block colour and minimalist aesthetic that would fit perfectly in a hipster shop today (“you could easily sell them in Shoreditch,” agrees Simon). Other design highlights, from the commemorative medals to the craftsmanship of the tickets, are also documented.

These pieces of pioneering design coalesced to create a unique visual personality for the Tokyo 1964 Games as the first modernist Olympiad. They demonstrated what design could be, owing much of this to Kamekura’s forward-thinking visual philosophy, in which he set about – as the exhibition name highlights – to design tomorrow. To Simon, the brilliance of Kamekura’s designs paired with the universality of the pictograms have “kept the 1964 Games enduring in the hearts of designers and all of us around the world ever since.”