Toyama Medicine

This origami cube advertises "Toyama's Medicine - 300 Years of History."

I usually don't indulge in travel souvenirs.
I take photos, but don't really need trinkets. And I am bad at finding those for other people. They always strike me as kind of chintzy. But while I was in Japan this year, I stopped at Iwase, a port town in Toyama prefecture, and found a small trinket shop with a medicine counter. As it turns out, Toyama is famous for its medicines, having a long history of powders and treatments being brought to rural customers by itinerant druggists.

A traveling drug salesman from olden times, and one from more recent times.

I fell in love with the package design of these slim envelopes, and Tomoko suggested I buy some - as a souvenir. I couldn't resist, and once committed to the idea, could not limit myself to only a few. So I picked up about $50 worth of medicines that I will never use - headache powders, stomach relief, and what all else I don't even know. But the art on these is so nice I wanted to put them up here for people to see.


They remind me a little bit of Polish movie posters - which I have written about on this blog before. This is product design without the boring constrictions so typical in the US. I know a lot of people don't think much about advertising, but I work in that industry, and trust me, the people who make it often think too much about it. Which is part of the reason why I think it tends to look so uniform and uninteresting. Avoiding photography and choosing instead to go with an entirely hand-painted approach automatically contributes more life to these designs. But I also love their color palettes, text treatments, and the depictions of masks, demons and devils.



After displaying these packets proudly to Tomoko's mother, she told me that the tradition of traveling drug salesmen continues to this day in Toyama. She pulled a plastic pill box down from atop her refrigerator and showed several packages of her own. She explained that the box was left stocked in each home, and when the salesman returned he deducted what was used from the box and presented a bill for it. In some of the rural areas of Gifu, south of her house, I could definitely see this kind of service being useful, but in the suburbs of Toyama it was mostly just an interesting holdover from an earlier time.

I might have looked a little strange in the drug shop, a foreigner with a camera around my neck, ogling the merchandise, but I was probably the biggest customer for headache powders all that week.