SUGOI! Imagine the shriek of glee when, in an ill-advised attempt to break the awkward first-lesson ice, I revealed to my class that I, too, was a consumer of brands. Yes, that’s a Swatch, this is a Canon, these jeans might look like Levi’s but they came from the discount section of Aeon Mall. My poorly constructed lesson plan falls to pieces; the intended use of brands as a springboard for discussion of consumer culture gives way to a frenzied scramble for LV bags and Hello Kitty stationery.
Like most countries, Japan is filled to bursting point with brands, but here their reign is enforced with a unique and often unsettling vigor. They scream at us from billboards, interrupt the TV programs they sponsor, and fill vending machines with more varieties (I use the word lightly) of coffee than even the most exhausted salaryman could want or need. People are, more than anywhere else, walking advertisements: the nation teems with armies of over-equipped hikers, high-tech spandex-clad cyclists, wielders of the latest and most enormous DSLR cameras. And with any successful brand, it is of course the name that matters more than any particular qualities of the thing itself.
Which brings us to the other tendency that sets Japan apart: the proclivity for applying this ‘brand logic’ to things beyond mere consumer goods. Foreign places, for example, are often sold to the Japanese consumer with a reliance on easily-identifiable landmarks and cliches. And when reality fails to match expectation the shock can be enormous: witness ‘Paris syndrome’, the psychological breakdown experienced by a handful of Japanese tourists every year when they visit the French capital and find it doesn’t correspond with the fashionably romantic version they were fed through magazines and television. (If you’re wondering how bad it could possibly be, Wikipedia says symptoms include ‘acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia and sweating’.) I am repeatedly told that Mont Saint Michel is the most beautiful place in France, but one person I talked to seemed to think it was a sort of Disneyland located somewhere ‘near Italy’. These mysterious far-flung places are sold to the consumer in just the same way as the latest camera or smartphone or yoghurt, with the same emphasis on an easily-recognized brand identity at the expense of factual accuracy.
On occasion I feel that I too have become a branded product, specifically that of the Igirisu-jin, a variety of European, which can be considered under the umbrella term gaikokujin (or gaijin, depending on how much offense I’m causing at any given moment). I come with certain guarantees – the usual cliches about tea, bad weather, and a fondness for Wayne Rooney – and can be filed under the English label, to the relief of all involved. The aforementioned jeans were once groped by a passer-by in Tenjin, who claimed they were ‘Beckham fashion’. This caused almost as much confusion as it did alarm, since as I said they were discount mall jeans, until I realised that this was probably more an exercise in Igirisu-jin window-shopping than a display of refined taste in denim. When you become a brand, you become an accessory, an acquisition to be paraded around town. One particularly odd evening involved a friendly shoemaker inviting a friend and I to his apartment ‘to show us his shoes’ before calling up various friends who, lured by the promise of real live English people, proceeded to have a party around us.
Sometimes, though, I think we like to be labelled. Not only are we afraid to cause Paris syndrome levels of mental turmoil by going against the grain, but there is also an undeniable comfort to be drawn from the ease with which a reference to Manchester United or the Queen can get us into a conversation. And, while their starting points may be the same tired cliches and appropriate responses, chats like those can lead you anywhere. The reason they often don’t is more likely to be our limited Japanese than any tendency on the part of our conversation partner to slot us into the predefined boxes required by brand mentality. That is ultimately the biggest challenge: not simply that as gaikokujin we are liable to become one more brand among many, but that it is our own choice whether or not we allow ourselves to be labelled in such a reductive way – and our own fault if we do. Dodesho?
by Jesse Kirkwood, Lake District, UK, Student / teacher
Originally published in Fukuoka Now Magazine (fn172, Apr. 2013)
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