Essays 

“Et tu, Brute?”: Designing Masculinity in Brutus Magazine

Zachary Sauer

Acknowledging Judith Butler’s assertion that gender is something we do, sociologist Bethan Benwell characterizes the production of gender in popular culture by its “dependency upon various cultural ‘scripts’ or discourses, and the frequent ambiguity, contradiction, negotiation, and fissure that accompanies such a process.”¹ In other words, Butler’s discursive articulation of gender is constructed through the intertextuality of cultural texts that reveal the mediated nature of the categories they produce. Brutus magazine, the “first lifestyle magazine for men” in Japan,₂ constructs masculinity through the combination of text and image to communicate a particular aesthetic ideology. The following paper will examine some of the design strategies of Brutus art director Horiuchi Seiichi (1937-1987) and cover artist Ashibe Kazuhisa (Unknown), among others, that leverage visuality in the construction of Brutus as a cultural text. 

The May 1, 1984, issue of Brutus features a cover story entitled “What’s What? Brutus’ Information Vitamins: Contemporary Trends from A to Z” . The sixty-three “information vitamins” are the consumer trends most relevant to the Brutus reader, a design-conscious, professional Tokyo man between the ages of 25 to 30. Launched in 1980 by Heibon Publishing, which was reorganized as Magazine House in 1983, Brutus was marketed to urban middle-class, early-career professionals. Following the didactic approach of Japanese lifestyle magazines, Brutus was a means to educate its reader on a socially-acceptable, quintessentially masculine style of consumption.³ At the time of its launch, Brutus was the newest in a portfolio of publications that appealed to particular demographic segments, such as Brutus’ sister magazine Popeye, the young, cheerful “magazine for city boys.” Launched in 1976, Popeye was designed to appeal to a new generation of apolitical urban youth isolated from the radical student movements of the 1960s.⁴ It encouraged a light, boyish consumer lifestyle and came to be widely read by both men and women. Soliciting a predominantly male audience, Brutus represented the city boy’s next stage of development as a consumer graduating into wage-earning adulthood.⁵

The magazines were published on alternating weeks, and an examination of the previous week’s Popeye reveals that Popeye and Brutus have noticeably different dimensions: they are the same width, but the 2.5-centimeter difference in length is quite noticeable. When placed side-by-side, Brutus appears, both literally and figuratively, more elevated. Although Popeye is thicker in content, there is a higher proportion of black and white to color printing. Brutus has fewer pages, more color, and is printed on higher-quality paper. Considering this distinction, it is also 70 yen more expensive. As such, through a close physical analysis of the object, Brutus emerges as the “grown-up” version of Popeye both discursively and materially.

The Brutus logo, inscribed prominently at the top of the illustration in bright red, was designed by Seiichi Horiuchi, who also supervised the publication’s editorial design. The magazine’s namesake is Popeye’s nemesis Brutus, alternately known as Bluto, from E.C. Segar’s King Features comic, which was licensed to Magazine House in Japan. Horiuchi’s title design directly references Brutus, with the letterforms terminating in broken lines that resemble the spiked edge of the character’s beard. 

The logo contrasts sharply with the rounded text of Popeye’s title design, which crowds the top portion of the magazine and contributes to Popeye’s diminutive appearance. Through their reference to Segar’s work, Brutus, and Popeye, along with women’s magazine Olive,⁶  incorporate signifiers of American visual culture in their title design. The acculturation of American ideas, the notion of internationalism, and a critical engagement with mass culture were highly visible in the popular culture of 1980s Tokyo, and these notions are expressed not only in the editorial content of Brutus but in the editorial design itself.⁷ 

  Ashibe Kazuhisa’s cover montage depicts an inground pool with a television placed on a diving board, perhaps as a postmodern gesture acknowledging the pervasiveness of mass media. With the wide proliferation of television, magazines, and eye-catching posters plastered across the urban environment, the exchange of images and meanings became a central part of everyday life.⁸ Cultural critics like Asada Akira encouraged the youth to “play” with this knowledge to escape the repressive “managed society” of Japan,⁹ and a market emerged for the consumption of culture and experiences. Ashibe’s work also engages with the idea of West Coast Americana with its expansive pool and bright green lawn, imitating the work of artist David Hockney and Japanese illustrator Nagai Hiroshi. This engagement with West Coast culture carries through many of the magazine’s features, including the issue’s “Summer Comfort” fashion spread, with white models shot on the beaches of California, and “West Coast Culture Exploration,” an article translated from English on the satirical Church of the SubGenius. 

In the cover feature, the Brutus editors present just what the reader needs to navigate the “flood of information and things”¹⁰ endemic to Japan’s “ultra-consumer society.”¹¹ The first page of the “Contemporary Trends” section refers back to the colors of the cover and features overlapping text set on vertical, horizontal, and diagonal axes, subverting the modernist grid and blending international and local typographies. Each section is organized following the Roman alphabet, with the list of trends including everything from consumer goods, authors of note, art and design movements, and popular phrases. The English name or Romanized transliteration of the first “vitamin” in each section is set vertically under a bold drop cap accompanied by a subtitle in Japanese, inserting the taste for internationalism into the design itself. Titles are often written in English, sometimes in French and German, or rarely in Latin. Brutus’ regular “Et tu, Brute?” column references the infamous betrayer of Julius Caesar but also the moral ambiguity of its namesake comic book character, whose likeness appears as a coda at the end of the column. These references depart from the cheerful innocence of Popeye, acknowledging the corruption of adulthood as the Brutus reader becomes increasingly burdened by responsibility.¹² 

Ashibe’s montage also features an orange remote control that faces the reader; its numbers are replaced by Roman letters. The “P” button on the device is highlighted, corresponding to the image displayed on the television screen: the first “information vitamin” under the letter “P” is Phoenix Follies, a hyper-sexualized line of female model figurines. Befitting its appeal to a specifically male audience, Brutus utilizes sexuality to construct a masculine subjectivity through features such as “New Beauties,” a round-up of beautiful women in the media, and its regular “Brutus Counselor” sex advice column.

  According to cultural critic Karatani Kōjin, the deconstructive tendencies of postmodernism were isometric with Japanese thought, and therefore Japan could not be the subject of Derridean deconstruction.¹³ The acculturation of the “discursive turn” in philosophy and postmodernism in the Japanese design reveals a similar tension, as it becomes difficult to establish where postmodernism ends and where Japan’s characteristic assimilation of international styles begins. Although he contested Karatani’s assertion,¹⁴ Asada also notes that the “pathological play with language” of the 1980s was characteristic of the arts and literature of the Edo period (1603-1867).¹⁵ Brutus’ editorial design engages in similar discursive games, both visually, textually, and through a combination of the two, especially when reporting on upscale cultural experiences. 

The magazine’s regular “Brutusism” section is dedicated to the “study of pleasurable life” and explores highbrow subjects in contemporary culture. This issue’s feature discusses the urban practice of “building watching,” described by notable contemporary writers Seiki Takashi, Nakahara Hiroshi, and Hino Keizo as an aesthetic experience akin to flâneurie or bird watching. The title design incorporates the “Brutusism” text into a solid black bar that rounds the corner of the page to frame the feature’s main title, and a row of vertical black bars suit the verticality of Tange Kenzō’s Grand Prince Hotel, which appears in a photograph by Ishiuchi Miyako.

The “Bldg. Watching” text is composed of isometric letterforms that also convey an architectonic quality. In Japan, isometric typography is closely associated with the work of graphic designer Igarashi Takenobu, who had recently designed the graphic identity for the newly-opened Parco Part Three in Shibuya with three-dimensional letterforms.¹⁶ The title of the article, dropped vertically from underneath the isometric heading, engages with the visual wordplay that features prominently throughout the magazine’s editorial design. Placing the characters for me and ai next to each other, separated by a dotted line, the text can be read as “Walking, watching architecture,” or “Walking, loving architecture,” a technique that implies the readings are simultaneous and mutually informed. 

Another page of the building watching feature includes a sprawling photomontage, also by Ishuichi, of Tange’s Sogetsu Kaikan in Asakasa. Beyond yet another intimation of Hockney’s work,¹⁷ the fragmented scene depicts the urban panorama reflected through the “mirror” of Sogetsu Kaikan’s windows rather than the building. Sometimes elitist, the “Brutusism” section routinely features evocative visual and literary works, and this montage beautifully conveys the notion of Tokyo’s “urban collage” of vernacular accidents.¹⁸ Through the experience of building watching, new perspectives, and spatial relationships are discovered through the comparison of architectural forms and their surfaces. Crucially, there are “no rules” for building watching yet. This intense focus on an understanding and appreciation of design, especially the internationally recognized architecture of Tange, the photography of Ishiuchi, and the graphic design of Igarashi, conveys the aesthetic sensibilities of an emergent creative class who followed Asada’s call to “run-away” by producing cultural experiences that could not be commodified by “managed society.”¹⁹

The West Coast was not the only source of exotic Americana: the magazine’s sixteenth “Neo Y Chromosome” serial was an antenna for the “mysterious radio waves coming New York”. Dropped vertically under the main title heading, the character for “mystery” is turned on an angle and highlighted yellow, offset by the diagonal motion of the red bolt behind it. The title “Neo Y Chromosome” refers plainly to the biological construction of masculinity but also functions as an acronym for New York City. The first letters of each word are highlighted the same yellow as “mystery,” imbuing the acronym “NYC” with a murmur of exoticism. The “pathological play with language” continues in the title heading, which is written entirely in English or Romanized Japanese, all choices meant to signify the transmission of Americana and further reflect the hybridity of contemporary culture. Additionally, Fukaya Testu’s text explores the “private” subculture of Alphabet City, describing a community-driven infrastructure anchored by shops, galleries, and music venues that ostensibly resisted instrumentalization by the “managed society” in a country where capitalist ideals were even more entrenched.

Although Karatani and Asada problematize the notion of postmodernism in Japan, it is impossible to essentialize the editorial design of Brutus as a vehicle for the translocation of American culture or as a uniquely ‘Japanese’ cultural text. Writing in 1993, graphic designer Koizumi Hitoshi reflects on contemporary graphic design, which had become “like a broth, containing all sorts of creative juices and ingredients.” He concludes, “In the end, it doesn’t matter where a particular ingredient comes from because it gets subsumed into the broth.”²⁰ This “broth” is visualized through the heterogeneity of Brutus’ editorial design, which provided an appropriate conduit for the “flood of information” experienced by its reader. As a cultural text, the magazine allowed the urban man to construct a masculine subjectivity even within an increasingly fragmented media environment. The Brutus man accomplished this not only through purchasing goods and services but also by accumulating cultural capital. At worst, this male subjectivity was constructed through commodified representations of women made small and collectible by way of Phoenix Follies and “New Beauties.” In the intervening years between childhood and marriage, the Brutus man was expected to establish a masculine style of consumption and cultivate an awareness of an increasingly globalized world in which Japan had recently reemerged as a major economic power. 

NOTES

1. Bethan Benwell, Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2003), 8.
2. Hui-Ying Kerr, “Envisioning the Bubble: Creating and Consuming Lifestyles Through Magazines in the Culture of the Japanese Bubble Economy (1986-1991),” (Ph.D. diss., Royal College of Art, 2017), 164.
3. Kerr, 164-6.
4. Mariusz Kostrzewski and Wojciech Nowak, “Evolution of male self-expression. The socio-economic phenomenon as seen in Japanese men’s fashion magazines,” Economic and Environmental Studies 18, no. 1 (March 2018): 234-5n20.
5. Kerr, 165-6.
6. Launched in 1983, Olive was designed to capture the high-school female demographic that comprised as much as 40% of Popeye’s readership. See Kostrzewski and Nowak, 234n19.
7. For more on Brutus and Popeye as a vehicle for the consumption of American culture, see Komori Masaki, “Wakamono zasshi to 1970-nendai nihon ni okeru ‘amerikanaizēshon’ no henyō: ‘takarajima,’ ‘Made in U.S.A. catalog,’ ‘popai’, and ‘burūtasu’ o jirei ni [Japanese Youth Magazines and the Transformation of Americanization in the 1970s: Takarajima, Made in U.S.A. catalog, Popeye, and Brutus],” Shuppan kenkyū [Journal of the Japan Society of Publishing Studies] 42 (March 2012): 47-68.
8. Ueno Chizuko, “Seibu Department Store and Image Marketing: Japanese Consumerism in the Post-War Period,” in Asian Department Stores, ed. Kerrie L. MacPherson (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 192.
9. Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. H.D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 29-31. See Jordan Sand, “The Ambivalence of the New Breed: Nostalgic Consumerism in 1980s and 1990s Japan,” in The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West, ed. Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 85-108.
10. Ishikawa Jirō, ed., table of contents, Brutus, May 1, 1984, p. 3.
11. Ivy, 40-2. The so-called “ultra-consumerist society” was especially visible in 1984, the same year Jacques Derrida joined Karatani Kōjin and Asada to discuss the commodification of Asada’s Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics, a dense treatment of “certain strains of poststructuralist thought” beginning with an analysis of Deleuze and Guattari. Asada and the “New Academicism” movement of young scholars working at the intersection of critical theory and popular culture is discussed in Brutus, p. 79.
12. For more on the tensions between career obligations and leisure for the Japanese man, see Kerr, 168-172.
13. Karatani Kōjin, “One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. H.D. Harootunian and M. Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 259-72. See Steve Odin, “Derrida and the Decentered Universe of Chan/Zen Buddhism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 17 (1990), 61-86. Although the assertion that Japan is impervious to postmodernism reveals a nationalist bias, the proto-deconstructivist tendencies of Chan/Zen Buddhism and its pervasiveness in post-Muromachi culture cannot be ignored. The notion of “Japan being reborn through Zen” has been discussed by contemporary graphic designer and art director Hara Kenya, the successor to Tanaka Ikkō at Mujirushi Ryōhin. See Hara Kenya, Designing Design (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2007).
14. Ivy, 40-42.
15. Asada Akira, “A Left Within the Place of Nothingness,” New Left Review, no. 5 (September-October 2000), 24-25. 
16. Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 419-20. See Sakura Nomiyama and Haruki Mori, Takenobu Igarashi A-Z (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 280-5.
17. Ellen Lupton, in conversation with author, February 27, 2022.
18. Takeo Muraji, “Tokyo: An Urban Collage of Chaos Amidst Order,” in Asian Alterity: With Special Reference to Architecture and Urbanism Through the Lens of Cultural Studies, ed. William Siew Wai Lim and Shujuan Lin (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007), 88-97.
19. Ivy, 44n7; Sand, 96.
20. Koizumi Hitoshi, introduction to New Typo graphics: the new faces of contemporary typography (Tokyo: Pie Books, 1993), 6-7. See Richard S. Thornton, The Graphic Spirit of Japan (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991).