Silver Match Lighters

Advertising poster for Silver Match lighter company designed by Satomi Munetsugu in 1955. 

Satomi Munetsugu was born in Osaka in 1904, and moved to Paris in 1922, where he studied at Ecole des Beaux Arts and met and married his wife Marioara Rasuceanu. He worked in commercial design after his father passed in 1925, winning several prestigious design contests along the way. The outbreak of war in Europe forced him and his family to return to Japan in 1939. During the war he was sent to Thailand to create propaganda works for the government and ended up in a POW camp in 1945, after which he was released but worked in Thailand until 1952 when he and his family moved back to Paris. In 1974 he received the Order of the Sacred Treasure 瑞宝章, and in the following years had several full-scale retrospectives of his over 20,000 works. He passed away in 1996 and is buried alongside his wife of over 60 years in the Satomi family grave in Kyoto.