Future Beauty. 30 years of Japanese fashion

It really surprised me to find this ad boldly headlined in katakana writing. Not that the advertiser –the Barbican Art Gallery– probably expected its audience to be able to spell it out, but the point was made notwithstanding; the poster was for an exhibition on contemporary Japanese fashion and, apart from the unmissable hint to the Japanese rising sun flag in the poster design, the medium guest-stars as the message: the use of Japanese characters goes straight to the point denoting 'Japaneseness'; whatever is the actual meaning of those characters is irrelevant; 'Japaneseness' on its own appears to be cool enough (and I’d also add fun and playful and quirky and edgy and kooky and even cute and so feather-light), and that is simply the perk. Even the skin is deeper, but I guess that’s what we have around these days.

By the way, the katakana headline –if you were curious to know– just reads “Barbican” (バー = ‘Bar’; ビ = ‘bi’; カ = ‘ca’; ン = ‘n’); it could have been expected, couldn’t it?

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Barbican Art Gallery: Future Beauty. 30 years of Japanese Fashion
Leicester Square Station (LU)
London

Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition

Same campaign as on the previous year [see 2009 related post], but the so typical geishas are now replaced by the also typical Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, a distinctive landmark of the imagined Japanese cityscape, as fair a representation of real Tokyo –and by extension of Japan too– as Piccadilly Circus is of London and Britain and Times Square of New York City and the USA, this is, not really a fair representation at all.
However, most often this ‘fairness’ does not concern tourism much: tourism seems to be less about truth than about fantasy; more about dreams than about being awake. One could say that ordinary people have plenty of truth in their usual lives (although this is of course very debatable), so when they ‘dress’ as tourists they rather do it in pursue of fantasy, not truth. Maybe too broad a simplification and a generalisation, I admit, but I think the point is made. Fantasy can be packaged and sold in commercial denominations; truth is just a trickier thing, not what one’s most likely to find in the realm of advertising.

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JNTO: Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition
Leicester Square Station (LU)
London

Premium Down

This is just one of the corridors of Oxford Circus station flooded with Uniqlo advertising.
What interests me of Uniqlo is how they play with their Japanese identity, not just in the ad above, where 'Japaneseness' is somewhat subtly implied by the logo in katakana writing (ユニクロ) and the Asian model, but in general in the stores, web and all public image.

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Uniqlo: Premium Down
Oxford Circus Station (LU)
London

Be part of the times

Japan unusually portrayed in an ad that does not include a geisha. A bit disappointlingly, however, it features a robot

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The Times: Be part of the times
Leicester Square Station (LU)
London

Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition

The Japan National Tourism Organization, the Japanese governmental institution behind this ad, knows well how much geishas are liked over here, that’s why it’s geishas they give us.

How many tourist brochures, articles in travel magazines, guidebooks on Japan, covers of Japanese novels, souvenirs, etc., feature images of geishas! And yet, how few actual geishas will average Japanese people ever encounter in their lives these days.
But, hey, geishas are a well-established symbol, widespread, recognisable and unmistakeable; in many readers’ minds ‘geisha’ (or maiko, or for that matter any girl dressed in a fancy kimono) = Japan; quite a temptation for advertisers. At the same time, it is worth noting that the symbol ‘geisha’ renders a particularly exotic, erotic and feminising representation of its object, i.e. Japan, with all the discursive implications involved in such process (on which I won’t go about here).

This said, these geisha girls in the picture do not seem very serious geishas to me; one could think they might actually be just posing as geishas, playing at being geishas, phoney geishas; they are geishas with a twist. And I reckon such twist must be close to what this “cool Japan” brand is all about. “Fusion with tradition”, they say. Rather, I’d say, a re-invention of that tradition; recycling with a marketing agenda; ‘tradition’ reshaped to fit around the commodity mould.

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JNTO: Cool Japan. Fusion with tradition
Waterloo Station (LU)
London