Social History Through T-shirts

Make that: teii shatsu. To be exact, Japanese shirts from the mid-1980s: the era of puffy youth fashion.

While my French is pretty basic, and word division aside, this seems perfectly fine. For that matter, when I've seen French used on Japanese objects, it has read like it was lifted from printed matter.

Then, as now, the usual practice for product decoration was to go with some version of English. If the French came from printed sources, the English equivalent was not exactly Shakespeare.

Meaningless scrawl, or "Repo"? As in, "Repo Man"? The movie is from 1984, so the timing works for me to have bought this 1985 or so.

At some point in those years I was told there had been a notorious drug bust of stationery designers. Tripping would go a long way toward explaining how they came up with wacky English for embellishing kids' pencil cases. Whether the story was truth or joke, it's brought to mind by this T-shirt verse. Which, for once, is admirably grammatical.

A puffy girl...

While Econo Size is impressive, it's hard to accept that she could heft it with only one tiny hand. Tiny because it's so out of scale, or to accentuate the chic puffiness of her outfit?

Some of the most unavoidable pop music of the mid-'80s was by a boy band whose members wore oversized, wiiiiide jackets. If I ever knew the band's name, it's long forgotten. As huge as Japanese pop culture is now, most stuff from my time in the country can't be found, at least not in English. Unfortunately, it was just a few years too pre-Internet.

My surviving mid-'80s T-shirts at least document the puffy fashion of the era.

Like so many other shirts, the collar of this one offers a bonus.

While it's doubtful that Japanese youth ever actually read the messages, this shirt did have good intentions. Too bad the execution didn't live up to them.

Midsummer Greetings

Handmade post cards: wood veneer, ink painting, calligraphy, and paper [moon].

These were found in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, in a Little Tokyo gift shop run by two elderly women. There was a good bit of stock that appeared to be from the late '50s and early '60s, and I suspect these cards are about that old.

The cards mark ochūgen (お中元), which is secondary to New Year as a time of gift-giving and sending post cards with best wishes.

In Japan in the mid-80s, I bought quite a few ochūgen cards of summer flowers, dragonflies, and other seasonal themes, which were mass-produced and available at any stationery shop. At a folk art shop I also found a number of designs stenciled on handmade card, with the maker's name and a "post card" ID stamped on the reverse.

The cards above are unusual in being blank on the reverse, without even the craft person's name. They don't seem likely to have come from Japan; perhaps they were hobby work by a local person.

Superior Life

This sewing packet is probably from the late 1940s or the 1950s—

City postal zones, as listed on the inside cover, were used from 1943 until the early 1960s—

Those dates are from this USPS history [pdf, page 34]:

During World War II, thousands of experienced postal employees left to serve with the military. To offset the loss, in May 1943 the Post Office Department began a zoning address system in 124 of the largest cities. Under this system, delivery units or zones were identified by one or two numbers between the city and state — for example, Birmingham 7, Alabama — so that mail could be separated by employees who did not have detailed scheme knowledge.

Twenty years later, the Department implemented an even farther reaching plan, the Zoning Improvement Plan (ZIP) Code.

Also inside the packet, a post-war import—

Printed on left of red vertical border: "Made in Germany."

So, sometime in the years between the end of the war and the introduction of ZIP codes, Superior Life was advertising its solvency, as reflected by plentiful offices and assets.

If the company (and its assets) lasted to the 1980s, I assume it was swallowed up at some point after that—probably by some outfit that was in turn swallowed by successive other outfits. Any surviving entity may have been re-branded during all the mergers, acquisitions, and ponzi schemes since then... Perhaps a business history researcher (not me), could learn when and why the Superior name disappeared.

But there you have it, in our superior system.

Tiger of the Month Club: July

No farm should be without one!

Once again, a closer look reveals an interesting sense of scale:

Frate Indovino: Summer Seer

"All for one, and...?!"

The theme of "strength in unity" leads to the subject of a previous gag. We are reminded that

Our constitution begins by declaring in a solemn and peremptory manner, "The Italian Republic is founded on work.'"

And yet,

A gentleman, invited to visit a factory, had a question: "How many people work in your company?"
- "Well, about one in ten."

In the stars:

on July 11 a total solar eclipse will be visible in the South Pacific, Chile and Argentina, for five minutes and 20 seconds ...
Magnetic storms: low activity
Favorable days: continues to be a critical period for the hypersensitive, with days of great instability in the last ten days of the month.