From 1900 until 1920 the Japanese postcard industry led the world in design and innovation. The Germans may have perfected lithographic color printing, and the British with Raphael Tuck & Sons created a dominant international art card brand in the English-speaking market. But the Japanese arguably created the most beautiful and unusual cards. Among Europeans, only the French could possibly compete although the inventiveness of the Japanese cards was unsurpassed.

The complex Japanese styles owed their origin in part to the many Japanese painters who spent time in France during the Meiji opening to Europe in the late 19th century. They returned influenced by Toulose-Lautrec and other painters. They infused the Japanese card with a richness of decoration and visual punning unseen elsewhere. It was combined with the rich decorative art traditions across a variety of objects in their homeland. As other sources of patronage for traditional painting dried up during modernization, many renowned painters made a living designing postcards.

The year 1905 marked a huge leap in the consumption of Japanese postcards. The Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905 witnessed nearly a million Japanese soldiers engaged in battle on the Korean penninsula, anxiously in touch with millions more relatives at home. The postcard had already become the most popular means of communication in Japan in the 1870s, earlier than in Europe. The transition to illustrated postcards following postal rule changes in 1900 was swift. Like in Europe, war helped grow the industry. On the left is a patriotic Japanese New Year's card from the 1920s.

Japanese postcards were of course also influenced by the long tradition of woodblock printing that pre-dated the re-opening of connections to the West in the mid-19th century. In fact it was a Japanese collection put together by the US businessman Leonard A. Lauder and gifted in 2004 to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that has helped draw attention to this long under-researched and under-appreciated art form.