Thoughts on Japan

Kingaku kara no omoi - 金額からの思い

Thoughts on Japan from the National Institute of Japanese Studies. University of Sheffield

Thomas McAuley

University of Sheffield

In my last column, I talked about how many of the Nihonjinron myths about Japan and the Japanese have become part of the ‘received wisdom’ about the country and its people, both for the Japanese themselves, and many outside observers. This week I’d like to talk about another fertile source of images of Japan, both positive and negative: advertising – for reasons which I’ll get to shortly.

If you type ‘Japanese advertising’, or ‘Japanese commercials’ into any search engine, you’ll come up with a large number of You Tube hits where people have uploaded Japanese television commercials – usually of the wacky and bizarre sort – and often featuring various American, or occasionally British, celebrities plugging all manner of Japanese goods (my current favourite is one of the series where Kiefer Sutherland does a Jack Bauer routine to sell Calorie Mate). In fact, the image of the, slightly washed-up, film, or sports, star demeaning himself (the vast majority are men) by making Japanese commercials is so well-known that it has become a plot device in its own right, with the best-known example of this being Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.

Japanese advertising, and the differences between it and advertising in other markets, however, has also been a subject of academic study, with scholars looking at the subject from a wide variety of angles and in many different ways. For example, research shows that the reason why celebrity adverts are so common in Japan is that Japanese consumers find celebrity endorsements reassuring, and thus they help to build trust in a brand, while US consumers tend to be suspicious of celebrities’ motives and think ‘they’re only in it for the money.’ Comparative studies have also revealed other general tendencies in Japanese advertising – commercials tend to be aimed more at building brand awareness and creating associations with particular companies and products, rather than ‘selling’ per se.

There’s also been a good deal of work done on the language used in Japanese advertisements, and the subtle differences which are introduced, even if the campaign is an international one. For example, in the 1992 campaign for Coco Chanel, Vanessa Paradis was portrayed as a bird in a cage:

In the commercial you can clearly see that she’s wearing fishnet stockings and these were shown in print ads in the same campaign in magazines in France and the UK. When the same photos were used in Japanese magazines (and US ones, too, I think), the fishnets were converted to sheer stockings (Tanaka 1994), as they were considered too crudely sexual, and thus inappropriate in the Japanese market for selling an elite product like French perfume.

Nevertheless, the classic advertising adage ‘sex sells’ is just as true in the Japanese market as anywhere else, although the type of products sold in this way could be thought of as somewhat unusual. For example, according to Bailey (2006), sex, or more precisely erotic potential is a major feature of Japanese eikaiwa advertising. In an amusing article, whose impact is slightly diminished by his obvious ignorance of some aspects of Japanese popular culture, and some mistranslations of Japanese expressions, he argues that eikaiwa is primarily marketed to young Japanese women, and one of the major tools for this is the presentation of the white, male, English-speaking eikaiwa teacher as an erotic object. This is done as a result of ingrained class-based associations whereby:

a Japanese woman's own characteristics of `sophistication', `attraction', and `talent' can be measured by her English-language skills. Class status is conferred both by facility in English and through establishing a relationship with the white male, the signifier of upward mobility

Thus, in a 2002 promotion, ECC produced an ad in which a larger picture of a smiling office-lady has underneath it an arrow bearing the words ‘What’s next?’, with the arrow pointing at a smaller picture of a white, male eikaiwa teacher.

The relative size and position of the office lady and the instructor emphasizes the office lady’s capacity for choice, telling viewers that the office lady is in control and makes decisions, while the English instructor performs in whatever role she wishes. He is thus positioned as an object of consumption [for her].

Similarly, a promotion for GABA, also in 2002 featured a picture of a serious-faced young Japanese woman handcuffed to an equally serious, blond, white male, meaning that ‘the Japanese woman was using the handcuffs to bind the Western instructor to her purpose…the woman is the active agent: GABA visually promises the female client control, if not outright domination, over the bodies of the male gaijin instructors’ (Bailey 2006: 177).

Whether or not you accept Bailey’s argument about the sub-text of this type of commercial, the ECC advertisement I mentioned earlier contains another common feature of much Japanese advertising: the use of English. Now, obviously, in an advertisement for English conversation classes, it’s not that unusual to see some English used, but the language’s use in Japanese advertising is pervasive, as I’m sure you know. This is a subject which has been studied extensively, with many scholars considering whether this type of English usage is evidence of the spread of English linguistic imperialism. The general conclusion, however is that:

the widely observable phenomenon of English codeswitching in Japanese commercial discourse…works as a metaphoric commodity with the power to invoke an occidental identity, that is, an image related to the Japanese conception of Western-type cultures

(‘Codeswitching’ is a technical term in linguistics broadly referring to the phenomenon of speakers, or writers, changing between languages (‘codes’) in the same utterance. To give a Japanese-related example, which I expect many of you can relate to: Speaker A: ‘How are you today?’ Speaker B: ‘I’m feeling pretty genki!’)

Getting back to advertising, Loveday (2008) analyses the use of English on chocolate bar wrappers in Japan, and comes to the conclusion that while the use of English can have powerful effects – ‘the West’ being associated in many Japanese consumers’ minds with wealth and sophistication – there are regular conventions observed as to where the English is placed and how it is used, all of which serve to delimit and demarcate its effects – he uses the rather emotive term ‘spatial apartheid’ (Loveday 2008: 146) to describe this – meaning that the extensive use of English:

is not a reflection of cultural domination and global neo-imperialism but more a manifestation of its containment and peripherization. English has not succeeded in ousting Japanese but has been segregated to a different graphic position; English does not fundamentally mix and blend with Japanese but is compartmentalized. Crudely stated, it is relegated to the level of eye-candy

If the use of English in Japanese advertising is contained and controlled, and used in order to create positive associations for products in Japan, one cannot help but be curious of how obviously Japanese products are promoted in American and European markets. I’m not talking here about global mega-brands like Sony and Nissan, but instead smaller scale products, like, for example, Pocky chocolate biscuit sticks. I’m sure you all know what these are, and may have eaten a few in your time, but you may not know that these have been marketed in continental Europe for some time under the brand-name ‘Mikado’ – immediately identifying them as a Japanese product. Within the last few weeks, a TV ad campaign has been launched on UK television to try and sell ‘Mikado’ to the British, and how have the marketing men decided to do it? Take a look at the video below:

Two things immediately strike me about this commercial: first, that it’s a classic example of the cannibalistic nature of advertising, as it’s an almost exact copy of a Dutch advertisement for photocopier paper:

Note that the young woman in the second ad seems rather more embarrassed by her predicament than her Japanese counterpart – I wonder why?

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the commercial has nothing whatsoever to do with the product being advertised, but is, instead, wacky and humorous. Again, why should this be? Well, it’s entirely possible that there’s been a recognition on the part of the marketers that the only hope for a new product on the British market is to create a ‘water-cooler moment’ by producing something that people are going to talk about – if that’s the case I suppose I’m doing their job for them – or that this is simply building on the European campaign for the product, whose commercials have also been characterised by their oddness:

But that still begs the question of why did the European marketers chose to sell ‘Mikado’ in this way. I have to think that a major component is a general idea that anything to do with Japan is bizarre and odd, and so to sell something with a clearly Japanese name, you have to trade on, and exaggerate, these associations, while in the UK ad simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes about Japan and the Japanese (salarymen, demure and subservient Japanese women, deviant sexual practices, etc.).

I don’t have any academic evidence for the above, of course, but it is an example of the tight grip national stereotypes can have on popular consciousness, and how easy it is to fall into using them.

Next week: why do Japanese writers not stick to the point?

References:
Bailey, Keiron (2006), "Marketing the Eikaiwa Wonderland: Ideology, Akogare, and Gender Alterity in English Conversation School Advertising in Japan" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 105-130.
Loveday, Leo J. (2008), "Creating a Mock-Western Identity through English in Japanese Ads: A Study of Occidentalist Invocations" Journal of Creative Communication 3 (2), 123-153.
Tanaka, Keiko (1994) Advertising language : a pragmatic approach to advertisements in Britain and Japan. London: Routledge.

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