Osaka 1929
Becoming Modern with Face Powder and Caramels

Osaka women packing cosmetics at Nakayama Taiyodo Club Cosmetics, a pioneer in scientific management, with bold marketing and cutting-edge products. Firms like this drove Japan’s modernization.

In City of Smoke, Japan’s Cotton Revolution, and War, Power and Steel we saw how within just several decades Osaka was transformed into an industrial juggernaut with its cityscape dominated by thousands of smokestacks.

Beyond Osaka’s robust industrial base in textiles and steel, countless other vibrant companies emerged in the city. They produced cosmetics for a new kind of beauty, machine tools for keeping the factories running, sugar for sweetening up life, fertilizer for boosting crops, and anything else that entrepreneurs could think up. Together they helped shape a modern Japan.

The Sapporo National Products Exposition of 1926 (Showa 1) vividly illustrated Osaka’s new role as the modernizer of Japan:³⁹

While the promotional material described Tokyo as “the fashion capital,” Kyoto was characterized as the “city of arts and crafts,” and Osaka as the “city of commerce and industry.” To illustrate its iconic status as the center of fashion, the Tokyo exhibit featured the latest in “western-style umbrellas” (including something called a “radio umbrella”), the “first rank” of fashion in raincoats, bags, brushes, towels, and cosmetics, and even the very latest in building materials.

Nearby, the Osaka display featured an even larger range of consumer, industrial, and construction goods—from soap to sake, fabrics to rubber products, as well as machine tools of great variety. While the Tokyo display signaled Japan’s sophisticated fashion, Osaka spoke to the nation’s status as a fully industrialized and commercialized economy, a country whose range of manufactures satisfied a well-developed consumer market and whose industries had achieved the sophistication to produce precision and quality in machine tools.

In other words, much of Japan’s modernity began its victorious march across the nation from beneath Osaka’s belching smokestacks.

To see how this historic transformation unfolded, we look at three companies that helped shape it. Each company was in its own way caught up in the distinct forces that molded Japan between the 1910s and 1930s, among them consumerism, industrialization, imperial ambition, the embrace of modern life, and scientific innovation. Remarkably, all three companies are still active today.

Empowerment through Consumerism

◆ Nakayama Taiyodo Club Cosmetics

A large number of companies in Osaka targeted consumers. One was Nakayama Taiyodo Club Cosmetics (中山太陽堂クラブ化粧品), shown in the top photo of women packing cosmetics. The company was started as a wholesale cosmetics business in Kobe in 1903 (Meiji 36), but soon started to produce its own products.

In 1918 (Taisho 7) it started production at a factory in Osaka’s Imamiya district, right next to the Luna Park amusement park at Shinsekai. The image of women hand-packing products looks terribly outdated in today’s era of automated, human-free facilities. But it was in fact Japan’s first full-scale modern cosmetics plant, equipped with was then the world’s most advanced production equipment.

The automated production line was created after consulting Yoichi Ueno, Japan’s top expert in industrial engineering, scientific management, and productivity improvement during the interwar period. After the factory’s opening, company founder Taichi Nakayama became a loyal patron of Ueno’s research.⁴⁰

The modern cosmetics industry was still a fairly young business in 1920s Osaka. Although there were some 63 cosmetics manufacturers in the city by 1929, they only employed about 1,170 workers.⁴¹

Nakayama was not only deeply committed to efficiency, he also pioneered innovative marketing campaigns. The company even established its own publishing house, Platonsha (プラトン社), to publish books and trendy women’s magazines such as Josei (女性, Woman) and Kuraku (苦楽, Joys and Sorrows).

Based at the brand-new Dōjima Building, Platonsha became a leader in Hanshinkan Modernism (阪神間モダニズム), the modernist movement in arts, culture, and lifestyle that flourished during the 1920s in the rapidly suburbanizing area between Osaka and Kobe.

Though only active from 1922 (Taisho 11) through 1928 (Showa 3), Platonsha had an outsized impact on the cultural landscape of the era. Partly because Tokyo was busy rebuilding after the catastrophic earthquake of 1923.

Nakayama Taiyodo and Platonsha were at the vanguard of Japan’s emerging consumer culture. To young Japanese women, products like those produced by Nakayama Taiyodo provided both a sense of escapism and a subtle feeling of empowerment.⁴²

Early-twentieth-century consumerism in Japan may be described as a form of visual representation. Although it as yet bore only the merest hint of the complexities that would be wrought by postwar mass culture, the products it made available nevertheless titillated womens imagination.

While the exposure of women to commodities for personal and household use probably incited and played on their anxieties, it also very likely offered simultaneously the hope/opportunity for a satisfactory form of release from the desire for material goods, which had previously been largely repressed. Photographs of women browsing in department stores suggest a form of escapism. No doubt escape was what some women longed for.

Whether or not women had the wherewithal to purchase new products is of secondary importance. More significant was the empowerment that consumerism, as an expression of decision making, offered to them. Women figured as active role players weighing the positive and negative consequences of the commodification of the everyday.

For a brief overview of the innovative graphic design explored by Platonsha and Club Cosmetics during this period, I recommend the book Moga: Designs from Platonsha and Club Cosmetics.

The next detail of the 1924 Osaka Panorama Map shows the location of the Nakayama Taiyodo Club Cosmetics plant. As we saw in The Art of Looking Down, this map is highly detailed and reliable. Yet surprisingly, the illustration of the Nakayama Taiyodo factory does not align at all with what it actually looked like at the time. This begs the question why the map makers were inconsistent.

Running the Machines

◆ Nitta Transmission Belts

As Osaka’s industrialization progressed during the late 1800s, there was an increasing need for companies that could make the machinery used in the factories. Particularly crucial were efficient power transmission systems that brought the power from steam engines, and later electric engines, to the individual machines within a factory.

Initially, leather belts were used. Later, rubber belts and fabric-reinforced rubber belts emerged. In 1888 (Meiji 21), Osaka-based Nitta was the first company in Japan to succeed in the manufacture of leather belts for power transmission. By 1918 (Taisho 7), the company started sales of rubber belts as well.⁴³

The above photo shows the interior of the Nitta Leather Belt Factory (新田帶革製造所) in Kuboyoshi in 1913 (Taisho 2). Today, Nitta is a large global concern producing power transmission belts, conveyor systems, filters, tubings, fittings, and other items for industries ranging from transportation to healthcare.

Nitta was just one of countless machinery makers in Osaka. Thanks to such companies, Japan produced most of its machinery domestically by the 1930s.

Imperialism and Modernity

◆ Dai-Nippon Sugar Refining Company

At first glance, this photo appears unremarkable. Factory buildings, a smokestack, a loading crane, several boats, and a few workers carrying baskets suspended from poles. But hidden in this image are the powerful forces of imperialist colonialism and a newly emerging vision of Japanese modernity.

This factory of the Dai-Nippon Sugar Refining Company (大日本製糖株式会社, Dai-Nippon Seitō K.K.), one of Japan’s five largest sugar producers at the time, stood along the Yodogawa River in the northeastern outskirts of Osaka. When this photo was taken in 1913 (Taisho 2), the company imported raw sugar from Taiwan and the South Seas, and refined it for both domestic consumption and export.

Taiwan had become Japan’s first colony in 1895 (Meiji 28), after Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). As part of its Southern Expansion Doctrine, Tokyo invested heavily in the island’s infrastructure, industrialization, and economic development. It aimed to transform Taiwan into a model colony.

A central focus of Japan’s efforts was the development of Taiwan’s sugar industry. Success in this area was seen as a critical step toward validating and advancing the broader goals of Japanese imperialism. From the outset, Japanese colonialism and sugar production were intricately linked.⁴⁴

Although sugar had been used in Japan since the Nara Period (710–794), it was still a rare and costly luxury during the Edo Period (1603–1868). This started to slowly change from the late Meiji Period (1868–1912), when sugar came to be seen both as a source of nutrition and an influential marker of civilization.

The confectionery company Meiji, founded in Tokyo in 1916 (Taisho 5) and famous for its chocolate bars, declared in its charter “that the essential level of civilization or barbarity of a nation could be measured by the amount of sugar or sweets consumed.”⁴⁵

Sugar steadily crept into daily life, and even literature. Sprinkling sugar onto bread for a quick and easy breakfast was mentioned in the novel I am a Cat, written in 1905–1906 by Japanese novelist Sōseki Natsume (夏目漱石, 1867–1916).

As consumers increasingly embraced sugar consumption as a sophisticated symbol of modernity, numerous iconic sweet products were born. They included Morinaga Caramels (1913), the fermented drink Calpis (1919), and Meiji Chocolate (1926), all still immensely popular today.

Women’s magazines introduced Western-style desserts “as a way to keep the family healthy, expand the daily repertoire of food, and increase appetites at home.”⁴⁶ Kamishibai storytellers, who employed illustrated boards in a miniature stage to entertain children on the street, earned their way by selling candies to their young audience. Coffee houses, a popular symbol of 1920s Japan, placed sugar on the table, for customers to add to their drinks. Suddenly, sugar was everywhere.

Sugar consumption surged from 2.27 kg per capita in 1888 (Meiji 21) to 15 kg in the 1930s.⁴⁷ Sugar was big business, a crucial enabler of colonialism, and a potent symbol of a modern society in which consumption defined personal identity.

The Dai-Nippon Sugar Refining Company lives on as the Mitsui DM Sugar Co.

Born in Osaka

A remarkable number of Japan’s leading corporations were established in Osaka during the city’s rapid industrialization in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The following table lists some of Osaka’s key organizations, arranged by their foundation year. Most names are still familiar today. If an organization’s original name was notably different, it appears in parentheses.

Some companies, such as Sharp, relocated from Tokyo to Osaka after the 1923 (Taisho 12) Great Kanto Earthquake. They are not listed here.

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Notes

³⁹ Young, Louise (2013). Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 211, 212.

⁴⁰ 『東洋の化粧品王と言われた男・中山太一』Club Cosmetics. Retrieved on 2025-07-08.

Tsutsui, William M. (1998). Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan. Princeton: University Press Princeton, 80.

⁴¹ 『大阪市産業大觀』Osaka City (1929), 30.

「化粧品・大阪市に於ける化粧品の製造工業は近時著しく發達し、内地の需要を充たすのみならす海外に輸出せらる、もの亦甚多し。製造工場數六十三、職工一千一百七十人、其年製產價額一千八百五十四萬圓に達す。
寫眞は中山太陽堂クラブ化粧品製造工場の一部を示す。」

⁴² Sato, Barbara (2003). The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 16.

⁴³ Company History. NITTA Corporation. Retrieved on 2025-07-08.

⁴⁴ Kushner, Barak (2012). Sweetness and Empire: Sugar Consumption in Imperial Japan in The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan, 1850-2000. Palgrave Macmillan, 133–134.

⁴⁵ ibid, 135.

⁴⁶ ibid, 140.

⁴⁷ Sugar consumption per capita in Japan reached an all time high of 27.8 kg in 1972 (Showa 47). In 2021 (Reiwa 3) it was 17.7 kg. Sugar Consumption Per Capita in Japan. Helgi Library. Retrieved on 2025-08-07.

Published August 19, 2025
Updated August 23, 2025 12:52 PM

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