Local Spaces and Identities— consuming nationality
“We Japanese prefer quality over cost,” is one message, used to deflect the growth of large-scale discount retailers. “We Japanese are wary of the use of insecticides on our food,” is another message, used to close the gates on the import of apples and other fruits1. But shinjinrui have their own uses of this message.
Apart from what Baudrillard would call the “simulation” of difference—multiple product lines produced to create an illusion of consumer choice—the internal consumer market in Japan shows visibly less variation than similar markets in the European Union or North America. One reason for this is the collaborative market domination of a few Japanese manufacturers. And so Sanyo’s quarterly catalogue mirrors that of Hitachi (below) and others. Lifestyle differences in Kyoto are marked by the location of one’s residence, and by a gender-specific progression of life-course changes through an expected portfolio of uniforms, fashions, hobbies, and duties.
|
Within market-driven image consumption too, there is a visible lack of variation in Kyoto, and Japan. There are a large number of life-style magazines—each targeting an age/gender cohort— but there are surprisingly few available television and radio channels, and the advertising on all media is controlled mainly by one corporation, Dentsu, which produces nearly all the media advertising (and much of the TV programming) in Japan.
“The Japanese consumer” is a cohort that receives regular narrative attention from the government and the marketplace. When the government is pressed to explain the lack of market penetration by imports, it replies that “the Japanese consumer” is very conscious of quality and design. When asked about imports of food, we have been told that the Japanese consumer has a digestive tract that is different from that of others, and so imported beef is difficult to digest. When asked why cosmetics in Japan cost so much more than the same products in Europe, Shinseido, the main Japanese supplier of these products points to the special skin of the Japanese consumer. But Japanese manufacturers, such as Hitachi have few problems making products for this market and for the international market.
|
Despite the large size of its population and economy, there is a surprising lack of internal diversity either on the advertising side, or on the product side. The product lines of the large domestic household-goods manufacturing firms (Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Matsushita, Sanyo, etc.) are so similar that little customer choice is needed to make a purchase from one or the other. It is mainly when goods are made for export that the variety of features begins to expand.
The “Japanese consumer” is also a regular feature of the “We Japanese...” discourse (See also: Nihonjinron). The bodies, desires, tastes, and moods of this cohort have been proclaimed to be unique in ways that foreign manufacturers tend to overlook, which explains (without reference to structural impediments) why the local market contains so few imported goods, despite the fact that these goods would generally be highly competitive in price and quality.
The Japanese Government’s Japan Travel Bureau runs week-end tours to the summertime festivals throughout Japan. This one advertises “The height of the summer. The height of festivals: Japanese Festivals.” At a hundred-thousand Yen a day per couple (about a thousand dollars), the tours choose festival destinations that are the most colorfully spectacular (NOTE: no Kyoto festivals were included in these summer tours).
The subtext reads as the following: “In the blossoming dusk of a summer day there are lanterns.
In the village that was calm, the scroll of history unfolds:
At times heroic, and then solemn, cheerful, energetic: because it is at the peak of its season, this dream story of summer is now visible.
Fleeting, passionate, fantastic, yes, welcome to the world of dream phantasms.”
From my own limited experience of shinjinrui (See: We Japanese...), I would propose that the narratives of nation and history may be getting more than a little stale of late.
The annual Japanese cultural festivals that are held in the public schools, the day-trips to cultural museums and memorials, the longer school trips to national sites of culture, such as those in Kyoto, are all designed to add content and a weight of collective experience2 to the notion “We Japanese....” So too does cultural tourism, as Ivy (1995) discovered in her exposition of the domestic publicity campaign that the Japanese Government’s Japanese National Tourist Organization ran in the 1970s (“Discover Japan”) and the 1980s (“Exotic Japan”).
all for one and one for us
The main internal counter-discourse (although not organized as such) to the “We Japanese” discourse are the many practices that promote the fortunes of particular families and individuals in competition with one another in Japan (see: kone and kane: connections and money.) After all the discourses have spoken on shared nationality and homogeneous culture, one does not need to look far to see that individuals in Japan are also determined to create distinctions in social circumstances, differences that offer a differential advantage to their family in the competition for capitals (cultural and cash).
This competition promotes the use of personal connections often made through institutional auspices (universities, corporations) but also reflecting familial histories (social position and marriage alliances). Practices that should, by their own definition be “public,” are made private by this exercise of personalized contact. Even the “public sphere” can become privatized in this fashion: see Private public sphere.
1Although the government does not make public information on the use of agricultural insecticides in Japan—the use of which is suspected to be quite intense, given the market for cosmetically perfect fruit.
2This is precisely why certain school lunches, on one day a year, contain a small bite of whale meat (carefully distributed from the catch allowed by the international agreement “for research purposes”): the bite that gives every child the taste of (if not automatically a taste for) this “traditional” food: what “We Japanese” eat. Students in my university classes had all tasted whale.
