Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets!

This film poster was designed by Masamichi Oikawa for Shūji Terayama’s production “Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets!”. It represents a rejection of International Style principles that were being pushed at the time through the handcrafted and hallucinatory aesthetic. The poster was made for Terayama’s radical theater collective Tenjō Sajiki and the design goes against the typical grid-based modernism and photographic realism of the time that took over mainstream visual communication. Oikawa took Japan’s countercultural theatrical expression and put it into a visual form. The combination of psychedelia with traditional Japanese visual elements results in an alternative design language that challenges both Western modernist conventions and commercial Japanese graphic design.