EVERYDAY LABELS | Part 2-1: Origins: From Shop Names to Risk Management
---
author: Julian Fenwick
archive_id: SA-Lore01-essay-2-1-en
title: Origins: From Shop Names to Risk Management
series: JF-LORE / Lore01_EVERYDAY LABELS
language: en
status: final
classification: history
clearance_level: public
location: North Wing, 2F
tags: essay, label, history, yago, risk_management
source: StudioAsahi Core Archive
version: 3
---
Part 2-1: Origins: From Shop Names to Risk Management
From "Whose It Is" to "Proof of Safety": 500 Years of the Label’s Burden
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself walking through the streets of Edo. Shop curtains (noren) flutter in the breeze, and simple "Yago" (shop names) are displayed at every storefront. There are characters and marks, certainly, but they do not exist to explain minute functions as they do today. To my eyes—those of a man who once spent his days scrutinising galley proofs—I would call these "signs" rather than "logos." They were concise markers, intended simply to show who was there.
In those days, products were chosen based on a personal trust in "who made it." Reputation was born from the idle chatter of the nagaya (tenement houses), and credit was inextricably linked to the face of the shopkeeper. The Yago or family crest (ie-jirushi) functioned less as information and more as a "hook for memory."
Looking at the equivalent of labels from this era—advertisements known as "Hikifuda"—one notices a decisive difference from the labels of today. While they extol the virtues of the product, they do so not through objective explanation, but by adding "fragments of a story" to bolster a reputation. Early labels were not devices for transmitting information; they were a form of emotional signature, visualising the clues of trust.
However, with the arrival of the Meiji era and the expansion of distribution beyond the reach of a visible face, the label underwent a dramatic transformation of its very essence.
The establishment of the trademark system. This turned the label from a "marker" into a "shield of rights." The shop name was no longer an emotional sign; it became a registered symbol protected by law. The foundation of trust shifted its centre of gravity from the "face of the creator" to the "mark guaranteed by the state." Here, for the first time, the label became a "hardened entity," existing to protect itself from external factors. From sensory reputation to institutional guarantee. The label stood at the very centre of this transition, where the construction of trust shifted from the subjective to the objective.
During the post-war era of rapid economic growth, the tide of mass production pushed labels even further into the realm of "anonymity." Uniform products spat out of factories no longer possessed a personal face. In this era, the burden of trust was taken up by symbols of "standards," such as the JIS or JAS marks. Instead of asking "who made this," they coldly declared that "it meets the criteria." The label began to act as a "receipt," detaching quality judgements from personal intuition and entrusting them to a social system.
And now, the labels before our eyes are stepping into an even deeper abyss. What currently stands at the forefront are the heavy themes of "safety" and "responsibility."
That single sentence on the back of a package, written in microscopic type: "Products containing... are manufactured on the same production line." It is irrelevant to daily convenience, yet it is a breakwater against a "one-in-a-million" system failure. The simple efficacy descriptions found on old medicine packets (yakutai) have now evolved into a legal boundary line, demarcating the exact millimetre of corporate liability.
Viewing history as a whole, it is clear that the label has always been in flux. A mark showing "whose it is" was protected by institutions, replaced by standards, and eventually became an accumulation of words for managing risk.
At every stage, the underlying question remains: "How do we trust an invisible presence?" And each time the answer to that question is updated, the label increases in density, evolving into a harder, more complex form.
Perhaps this small scrap of paper I hold in my hand is a quiet fossil—a remnant of a 500-year struggle between distrust and trust.
— Julian Fenwick
Editorial Note from MONA: Julian’s comparison of the shift from "emotional signatures" to "institutional receipts" is fascinating, suggesting a distinction between a "symbol" and a "signal" in the Japanese context. He views the aesthetic rupture between the playful fonts of Edo-period Hikifuda and the rigid fonts of modern JIS standards as the weight of 500 years of time.
Visual Context (MUNI): "Fossils." A new interpretation. The image of label text piling up like geological strata over time. I want to capture the contrast between the blurred ink of woodblock-printed medicine packets and the cold precision of today’s laser printing within a single frame.