The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought by Japan and China between 1937 and 1945, around the same time as (but starting before) World War II. There is a collection of civil defence posters from 1938 on the National Archives of Japan website. They’re available in ultra high resolution but at large sizes you can only view small sections of them at a time. I found this frustrating, because I liked these posters (I like most government/propaganda posters). They’re haunting, unsettlingly elegant and beautiful depictions of the horrors of war in a country which had suddenly come into the modern age.
I liked these posters enough to want high-quality offline versions. So, I made them, by downloading the images piece by piece and then reconstituting them. I figured I’d put this convenient collection back up onto the internet for anyone who’s interested. There are 55 images in total, divided into four categories. Each ZIP file is around 60 MB. Each image is around 2000×3000 pixels—this is only a quarter of the maximum size available on the original website, but it was going to be way too time-consuming to get them at full size. The image filenames include the posters’ titles from the original website, whose English I cannot be held responsible for, but they do provide some clue as to the meaning of the poster.
If you are at least casually interested and have a reasonable internet connection, you might as well download these. If you are casually interested but only have a poor internet connection, I’d recommend at least having a look at the original website.
Examples
That third example is fantastic.
Did you consider using something like DownThemAll to get all the pics, or scripting? Not that they need higher quality then what’s here. Is this public domain stuff?
Yeah, I considered everything, and the manual option was the fastest. They’re stored in a really tricky format.
If Japanese government posters from 70 years ago aren’t public domain, we obviously didn’t bomb them hard enough.