Tokyo 1940 Olympiad

Wada Senzo version of poster in 1940 for Tokyo Olympics.

…the organizing committee for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics decided to take a pass on that according to an article called “Tokyo’s 1964 Olympic Design” by Jilly Traganou. She went on to say that the organizers decided to forgo Kuroda’s work and commission designer, Wada Senzo, “who had studied Western-style painting in Japan and Europe. Wada’s poster superimposed the figure of a heroic, almost militant-looking athlete onto the figure of Nioh, the Benevolent King, familiar to the Japanese as the Buddhist temple gatekeeper, who was known to ward off evil spirits.”