Matsuzakaya Nagoya turns its renovation hoarding into a 1930s manga exhibit
Matsuzakaya Nagoya has turned the hoarding around its South Building renovation into a gallery for comic strips the store drew up as advertising around 1933, pairing a construction wall with nearly a century of its own retail history.
Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Stores said its Matsuzakaya Nagoya store has turned the construction hoarding around its South Building renovation into an exhibition of "Matsuzakaya Manga," comic strips the department store produced as advertising around 1933, according to a release dated October 17. The display, on the ground floor of the South Building, runs through the end of November.
The comics -- including series titled "Matsubo to Sakae-san," "Pinkochan Monogatari" and "Ton-chan to Chiko" -- ran on the back of flyers Matsuzakaya distributed, likely at its Ueno store, the company said. Surviving manuscripts held by the J. Front Retailing History Archive cover work by 11 artists; the release names three of them: Tagawa Suiho, Shimada Keizo and Kato Takeko. Tagawa went on to create Norakuro, one of prewar Japan's best-known manga series.
A South Building renovation is, for most shoppers, a wall of hoarding to walk past. Matsuzakaya is using its own 1930s advertising archive to make that wall worth stopping for instead -- a low-cost way to put nearly a century of in-house department-store history in front of Nagoya shoppers at exactly the moment the store itself looks like a construction site.