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On your wall
Travel, Rail, and Liner · Travel, Rail, and Liner
Minami Manshū Tetsudō Kabushiki Kaisha - South Manchuria Railway (Two boys)
South Manchuria Railway Company, 1927
What it is
An offset lithograph travel poster for the South Manchuria Railway Company, dated 1927, showing a Japanese boy and a Manchurian boy striding forward side by side beneath the railway's emblem. The designer is unrecorded; USC's catalogue offers only an uncertain attribution.
Why it matters
The South Manchuria Railway was no ordinary rail line but the commercial spearhead of Japan's presence in Manchuria, and its advertising sold the empire as briskly as it sold tickets. Two boys marching in step under the company's mark is a picture of colonial partnership drawn for a mass audience, which is why the sheet reads today as a document of Japanese expansion as much as a travel come-on. It was pulled by Ichida Offset Printing Co. of Osaka and Tokyo, corporations and empire working the same press.
What to notice
The offset lithography holds flat, poster-bright color evenly across a very large sheet — no brush texture, just clean planes of ink built to carry at a distance.
Two children, one railway, and the whole argument of an empire walked forward on short legs.
Provenance
- School
- Government Railways & Liner Posters (Japan)
- Printer / house
- Ichida Offset Printing Co., Ltd., Osaka and Tokyo
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- South Manchuria Railway Company, 1927
- Source
- USC Libraries, East Asian Library; Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection · rbm-coll3020-02-04
Live trademark
South Manchuria Railway Company logo appears in the image — sold here as history, never adopted into this house’s own branding.
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. 95-year rule (published 1930 or earlier). Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 27x41" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
