On consumerism

I've been in a pensive mood lately, so allow me to expand slightly on a theme I believe I touched on previously - that of the consumer society that exists around me. In Canada, capitalism is a fact of life, much like wind; we live and breathe it, and occasionally rail against it, and sometimes it smells awful and we hate it and a lot of the time it drives us absolutely crazy, but there's really no getting away from it. It is the same in Japan - magnified. The language barrier perhaps has something to do with it: instead of gently permeating my consciousness, the plethora bold kanji and brightly-coloured kana are a wall that my eyes come up against, and hard. However, from what I have seen, Japanese society is not satisfied with being comfortably capitalist: it is aggressively consumerist.




Let me preface this with the fact that I don't watch TV. I have no knowledge of TV commercials in Japan, or televised advertising strategies of any sort, really. This is all strictly garnered from my surroundings as I commute to work in the most popular shopping district in one of Japan's biggest cities. Let's start with subway ads: in Toronto, the subway is modestly papered with ads selling one thing or another, and mostly they are quiet, dismal sort of things that I found easy to ignore. Not so in my subway cars: almost all available space on the walls (and the ceilings) is plastered with bright adverts, and there are rows of paper ads suspended from the ceiling of the car in three-foot intervals. There are ads on the outside of subway cars, too, in a small rectangle, vaguely at shoulder-height, right beside the doors. The walls of subway stations are similarly decorated; when I emerge from the station, the walls of office buildings are lit up with TV screens and neon ads, as part-timers try solicitously to hand me a package of tissues or a hand fan or a flyer*, all with adverts for a different company.

The sorts of things one sees advertised are slightly different than in Canada, as well. For example, what I see most advertised is accessories. Bags, watches, makeup, jewellery, bathing suits, shoes... the list goes on. All of designer make. I read, in a cultural guide to Japan, that this is because the Japanese, historically, have valued authenticity and excellent craftsmanship very, very highly, and continue to do so today. This corroborates with the idea of wabisabi - something which is very hard to translate into English, but I'll give it a shot: old things, especially heirlooms, are of highest value, because the craftsmanship and quality is so good that the object is able to last for generations, and thus one does not need a whole pile of shit to sit on, but merely one or two tasteful, old, valuable objects are enough to display one's wealth and taste. That of course is a dated explanation; I mainly studied wabisabi as connected with the tea ceremony pre-Meiji era, but I see evidence of it surviving even today, after capitalism bulldozed it and replaced the minimalism aspect with consumerism.

I think that Tokyo and Nagoya are the two cities where you will see this the most: Tokyo because it's Tokyo, and Nagoya because apparently there's a lot of new money here. Things are bought at a rapidfire pace each season and summarily tossed out when the fashion changes - which happens a lot, I am told. Of course, it's the fashion-conscious who follow these rules; older people and those who are brave enough not to care are generally more sane about their shopping choices, which gives me hope ;) In any case, the first few months I was here, the urge to buy stuff was completely overwhelming. It still hasn't quite gone away, but I'm trying to channel it into buying useful things for my apartment, or for sending to other people, or food. I think this is one of the reasons why people say it's hard to live cheaply in Japan - not only do things cost a fortune, but you're pressured on all sides to buy them... I'm going to work on my powers of ignoring.



*The great thing about this sort of thing in Japan is that, more often than not, one receives a small package of tissues or a fan, instead of a flyer. It's genius marketing: give people something they can actually use for a while before discarding, instead of flyers that no one will read and are, in effect, a waste of perfectly good trees.