Being “Hip” about So-called Commemorative Military Watch Fobs
Being “Hip” about So-called Commemorative Military Watch Fobs
I could not help notice the discussion on another forum about the practical purpose intended for arrowhead-shaped medals given out by the army and navy to commemorate graduation from flyer’s training, etc. These are commonly called “watch fobs” in collector jargon, but strictly speaking, they were not intended as such.
In Japan, watch fobs and pocket watches came into fashion in the late Meiji era. In the beginning of this trend, fobs were a hinged locket-type design that opened to reveal a built-in compass, but soon they shifted into more conventional medallion designs with a suspension ring on them for attaching to the chain.
However, once entering the Taisho era, as wrist watches started to gain popularity, and freed from their function as watch fobs, medallions tended to become larger and gaudy, creating a new fad of ornaments to dangle from your waist belt or Hakama sash, a post-watch fob fashion that gained momentum among students. These belt ornaments typically were hung on the belt using a leather strap, which is why they had a rectangular suspension instead of a simple ring like the earlier watch fobs.
The heyday of these waist belt ornaments came well after watch fobs went out of fashion, flooding the market from the 1930s onwards. A big tail wind behind this trend was the “medals and orders scandal” erupting over the Showa Enthronement Commemorative Medal, and ending up barring private industry from getting involved in the production of national medals and orders.
Thus a cutthroat "catalog war" erupted in the private sector, in which medals and badges salesmen from various companies blanketed schools near the end of the graduation year to solicit orders for graduation commemorative tokens. The administration office of each school typically had a pile of medal and badge catalogs left by the various reps that also supplied obligatory school cap emblems and uniform buttons.
This practice was simply extended to military schools and those kids proudly dangled their graduation tokens from their belts.
While most medal and badge companies resorted to direct marketing methods employing salesmen, Akiba Medals (still in business today), as a somewhat late comer into the business, caught early on to the benefit of mass media advertising and was unique in that they ran ads in magazines and even in the government gazettes. Thus their magazine ad I show below was in no way typical of how these trinkets were sold in those days.
Such medals were not official military items, but simply commercial souvenirs ordered by schools to give kids a smile, by accompanying the usual graduation group photos and certificates. There are endless variations and topics (sports competitions, calligraphy contests, abacus skill contests, religious meetings, etc). By the way, all kids dreamed of becoming pilots and, by association, thought eagles were cool, so that was a kind of default design for the badge companies. You probably even got an eagle badge on winning a mail pigeon contest.
Nowadays whether you call the arrowhead medals “watch fobs” or “belt ornaments” is a fairly moot point, but to the savvy youths of those days it must have been “unhip and behind the times” as calling MP4 players Walkmans.
.
Bookmarks