1930s Japanese Air Raid and Civil Defence Posters

January 26, 2008 12:16 PM

The Japanese National Archives have a nice set of late 1930s, pre-World War 2, civil defence posters, created in response to their hostilities with China: General Air Raid Defence; Blackout Control; Fire Protection; and Gas Attack. via Airminded, an excellent blog on "Airpower and British Society 1908-1941, mostly."

Each poster has explanation if you click the "comments" button. I found the "jpeg" link, not the "jpeg2000" link worked better, unless you want to load a browser tool. I loved was terrified by Action Radius of Heavy Bombers; Blackout of Automobile; Disposal for dropped incendiaries (interesting they were so sensitive to the danger of fire bombing, in 1937); and the Effectiveness of Gas Masks. High resolution is available for all posters. The rest of the archives gallery is great as well, especially these pedagogical wall posters from elementary schools.

posted by Rumple (13 comments total)

The specific Airminded post about this archive, with interesting comments as well.
posted by Rumple at 12:22 PM on January 26, 2008

Favorited. Great stuff. Can't wait to show Mom these, see if she remembers some of them.
posted by vito90 at 12:28 PM on January 26, 2008

Oh snap, just found the maps. Awesome.
posted by vito90 at 12:30 PM on January 26, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The colors are really distinctive. I can't think of anything else that looks quite like these.

The idea that you have to have Windows and their preferred plugin to see JP2s is just silly. QuickTime shouldn't have a problem.
posted by vruba at 12:44 PM on January 26, 2008

Really cool stuff.

And, yeah, the requirement of an ActiveX viewer to look at the jpeg2000 versions is dumb. Hell, my ancient version of Safari displays jp2's just fine.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:57 PM on January 26, 2008

Nice find! Thanks.
posted by vronsky at 1:55 PM on January 26, 2008

Very nice.

Their bomber-range explains the IGHQ's approval of taking the Aleutian islands, and Operation Ichi-go (which in a curious coincidence is either 'Operation #1' or 'Operation Strawberry').

It also illustrates (cough) a (/cough) mefi comment from last year, how B-29s carrying significant payloads, let alone A-bombs, from Tinian wasn't foreseeable prior to the war.

I've found (elsewhere) this image that encapsulates the zeitgeist of the "Victory Disease" happy times of early-mid 1942, and how Japanese imperial attention was focused southwards during WW2 proper and (understandably) not able to fully comprehend the impact of the rebuilt force of the US coming out the East in 1943-1944.
posted by panamax at 2:16 PM on January 26, 2008

Airminded really is a wonderful blog - very glad to see it mentioned here.
posted by greycap at 4:19 PM on January 26, 2008

Oh snap, just found the maps. Awesome.

The maps are groovy. Great link, thanks!
posted by KokuRyu at 4:47 PM on January 26, 2008

except for it being slightly broken, you can tell it to make you big ol' 2560x1600 wallpapers out of details of these scans.
posted by damehex at 5:34 PM on January 26, 2008

Nice find, thanks Rumple!
posted by carter at 8:15 PM on January 26, 2008

Wow, this stuff is great. Many of the pedagogical charts, in particular, are beautiful. Thanks for the post!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:34 PM on January 26, 2008

These are really cool. They're just aching to have posters made out of them.
posted by !Jim at 11:12 PM on January 26, 2008