Posters circulated in Japan simultaneously with the country’s swift reconstruction and economic revival after the Second World War. If the first generation of poster designers was mostly guided by western modernism, searching for a universal and functional way of communication, the following generations from the 1970s onwards increasingly drew on their own pictorial tradition and maintained marked individual approaches. This was not least a reaction to the west’s fascination with a poster culture with very different parameters and arguments. Until today, the Japanese poster functions most notably as a highly aesthetic image advertisement and indoor medium, presupposing the conception of the designer as an artist.