One of the most striking aspects of city life in Japan is the bold use of graphics: Posters and magazines continually shout for our attention on busy trains and streets. Artistically, we see the good, the bad and the ugly, but the work of Japan's first great graphic designer was consistently impressive.

Hisui Sugiura worked from the 1900s to the late 1930s, reflecting the desires and dreams of the rising urban middle class. Although most of his printed work was ephemeral, his daughter preserved many items, and donated a large collection to the National Museum of Modern Art. Over 300 posters, magazine covers, postcards and so on are now being displayed at the exhibition gallery in the National Film Center in Tokyo. This is a refreshing dip into a colorful, optimistic era of urban history, balanced with an Art Deco celebration of the natural world.

Sugiura was born in Matsuyama in 1876 and studied nihonga (Japanese painting) at the new national academy, the Tokyo Art School. However, a chance meeting with a charismatic artist changed his life. Seiki Kuroda was passionately interested in the new wave of Western art then hitting Japan, and encouraged many young men to become the country's first yoga oil painters.

Although Sugiura was fascinated with the pictures Kuroda brought back from Europe, he continued to study nihonga. After graduating in 1901, he did not know which path to follow, and for a while he moved into his friend's house and spent all day copying exciting new designs from Western magazines.

At that time, there were artists who painted pictures and printers who produced books, but no such thing as a graphic designer. Sugiura said he felt "like a sandwich man between the two parallel trends of nihonga and yoga . . . dreaming of a grassy plain that nobody had yet explored." It was brave of him to leave behind the certainties of his fine-arts training and enter the tough world of commerce.

After a spell in printing he joined Mitsukoshi in 1908 and soon became head of their new design department. At that time, Mitsukoshi was transforming itself from a traditional kimono merchant into the promoter of a modern lifestyle, and here we can see the process at work.

A 1914 poster features a large angel rising above a miniature skyline of Tokyo, but in the 1920s his gentle Art Nouveau style changes to strong colors and dramatic angles, emphasizing the buildings themselves. For the opening of the Ginza branch in 1930, Sugiura shows happy families shopping in a lively street at dusk. This not only emphasizes the bright lights but also reveals the changing life of women.

His early images often show young women sitting quietly at home, or stylized beauties echoing the style of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha. But in the Taisho Era, women longed for a more active life, and from the 1920s his female images bounce into movement. Here we see women striding about in Western fashions, skiing, sightseeing, dancing and even bathing in the sea. Instead of disguising his nudes as mermaids, Sugi- ura was able to publish daring images, such as his jazzy poster for a 1928 exhibition.

Sugiura was one of the leading lights of the "Group of Seven" graphic designers. In 1927 he founded a magazine for the study of poster art, Affiches, and the first cover is a vibrant design in red and black with a dancing nude.

This was also the exciting age of travel by trains, boats and planes, but while many European designers stressed the speed and power of the machines, Sugiura explored the human dimension. Yoko Imai, curator of the exhibition, pointed out his famous poster of 1927 for the first subway in Asia, the link between Ueno and Asakusa.

"The train is a small part of the design," she said, "and Sugiura creates a sense of happy anticipation as it approaches the platform. The crowds in the distance are in traditional Japanese clothes but from the little girl pointing to the train onward the styles are increasingly modern. It is a symbol of the great changes in Japanese society at that time."

Other subway posters from the late 1920s show his talent for silhouette. Here, he abandons the decorative details of buttons and furs to show crowds snapped against the brilliant electric light of the train. A walking stick here, a gesture there: These silhouettes are full of life. Also, he vividly captures the drama of being underground. Some posters show crowds descending deep staircases, others show the city above, with bold text slicing through the sky on a beam of light.

In contrast to the urban scenes, there are also many graphics of the natural world. Monkeys, peacocks, lilies, insects, all are captured with a vivid sense of movement and are well composed, even in the small scale of a postcard or ticket.

The vitality and variety of his work is most impressive, and brought him fame and respect. In 1934 he left Mitsukoshi to teach at Tama Art School, but unfortunately for him, the functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus movement was coming to the fore. The new generation turned away from his decorative ideals, and rejected his view that the study of nature was an essential foundation for good design. In 1929 he criticized the way that "Unfounded, feeble fellows, who have never dirtied a single sketchbook, stain the fine view of the city with signboards and . . . create a pile of rubbish on the street."

Despite this disappointment, he ended his days happily. In the cabinet at the end of the gallery one can pull open the drawers to find illustrations for his wife's poetry books, and in the lowest drawers are some delightful flower studies of red clover and Japanese ivy. Throughout his life he kept sketching from nature, sharing the humility of the best artists.

Finally there is a photograph of Sugiura as a well-dressed dandy, living the modern lifestyle that he did so much to promote. If you look in the catalog there is a revealing contrast: a photograph of the young art student, in 1887, painting in Chinese robes. What a long way he traveled, from tradition to modernity, and how appalled and inspired his spirit might be by the graphic cities we live in today.