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Advertising and popular culturein JapanAlan Rix aa University of QueenslandPublished online: 03 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Alan Rix (1992) Advertising and popular culture in Japan,Japanese Studies, 12:2, 44-51, DOI: 10.1080/10371399208521908

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Advertising and Popular Culture in Japan

Alan RixUniversity of Queensland

There can be no doubt about the exposure of Japanese society andculture to advertising. It is pervasive and, for some, invasive.Japan's media society has made Japanese advertising into amultinational business in its own right; at home, it has become anart form. This essay will examine what little information isavailable to us in English about Japanese advertising, and place itin the context of Western popular culture studies of Japan.!

Advertising as an Industry

The facts about Japanese advertising are well known. It is one ofJapan's major service industries, providing 1.26 per cent of GNP in1991. It has international reach, Japan's two largest agencies,Dentsu and Hakuhodo control around 80 per cent of all billings inJapan, and are among the world's largest agencies. Newspapersand television provide just over half the advertising revenuebetween them, with television now the largest single outlet foradvertising, although there has been some slowing down in growthin this area. Magazines and radio advertising have remainedsteady at about 10 per cent between them, while sales promotionsand new media advertising is gradually increasing its share.2

Advertising is still the major revenue source for newspapers andtelevision.

The Japanese food/beverage/tobacco industry remains the mainpurchaser of advertising (16.3 per cent of the total in 1991),followed closely by the service and leisure industry 03.3 per cenO,with cosmetics/toiletries (7.4 per cent) and automobiles andhousing next (6.4 and 6.1 per cent). Those industries using mainlytelevision were foods, cosmetics, home electronics,pharmaceuticals, while books etc were advertised mainly throughthe newspapers, as was real estate, while fashion was balanced

1 My thanks to Donna Weeks for her assistance in the preparation ofthis article.

2 Dentsu, Inc., 1991 Advertising Expenditures in Japan, DentsuInformation Series.

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between magazines and television. Likewise, television receivedabout one quarter of its revenue from the foods industry, withcosmetics about 10 per cent, and the rest spread across a range ofindustries. Newspapers relied heavily on the service, publishingand education industries for just under half of its advertisingrevenue.

There is thus a strong concentration of the advertising industry onsome key sectors of industry -- food/beverages/tobacco,service/leisure, cosmetics/toiletries, automobiles and real estate.Together they spend half of Japanese advertising revenues.Despite these entrenched industry interests, and the saturation ofthe various media with their advertising, there is no research inEnglish on the Japanese advertising industry, its structure,methods, ethics and standards, client relationships or financialpractices. What do we know about agency control of advertisingspace? How is what we see in the major newspapers, in the popularmagazines or on prime time TV, controlled by the main agencies?Page space and time is limited (Japanese newspapers have notincreased their overall pages for many years), and Watt arguesthat 'most major advertising agencies here began life as spacebrokers. Barring the rare exception, unless an advertisement isplaced through a leading agency... the wait for a crack at thelimited space in a national paper can be a long one'.3 In 1988 onecolumn centimetre in the national edition of the Yomiuri shimbuncost 119,300 yen, base price only.4

Understanding Advertising

The study of advertising as an economic, social, political andcultural phenomenon is an entrenched part of Western socialsciences, notably communication studies. The role of advertising notjust in sellin~goods, but in selling culture and representing culture, iswell known. Some see it as the prop for modern consumer culture,6

3 Andrew Watt, 'Japan's Newspapers - a dynamic medium', ADMAP,February 1987, p. 40.

4 PHP kenkyujo, Zusetsu: yo no naka ko natte iru, Part 7, masu mediano shikumi, 1990, p. 94.

5 Giancarlo Buzzi, Ad'Oertising: Its Cultural and Political Effects,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968.

6 Fred Inglis, Popular Culture and Political Power, New York: StMartins Press, 1988.

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other studies have demonstrated the role of advertising intransnationalising consumption habits and culture? and advertisingis seen as a force that 'cannot help but promote and reinforce thevalues and visions of Western capitalist society,.8 It is part ofsociety's 'cultural apparatus', and the growth of mass consumptionand modern advertising 'reaches to the root of.. ,"mass culture" '.9

Despite the wealth of research on Western advertising, we have nosubstantial research in English on Japanese advertising and culture.This is despite a significant Japanese effort to analyse their ownadvertising. Japanese communication studies is a vibrant field, theinteraction of the media and society has been well worked-over byJapanese scholars. Bookshops bulge with volumes on kokoku,senden, masu media or masu komi. Journals such as Hoso bunka arewidely read and focus intensively on the eM phenomenon. TheNational Diet Library's Zasshi kiji sakuin contains several pagesof references to journal articles on advertising in each five-yearcumulative index over the last 15 years. The entries are growingand their scope widening, with greater attention to language andadvertising, marketing and product images, advertising and itssocial impact. Not even the boom in specialist and photo­journalism magazines in recent years has produced foreign studies inadvertising trends in these magazines, when advertising rates forjournals such as Pia, Focus or Friday were, in 1988, substantiallyhigher than those for the traditional weekly magazines, andcirculations burgeoned. Buruma's Behind the Mask makes nomention of the role of advertising in portraying women or hisvarious 'cultural heroes'. Japan Quarterl~ has had one brief articleon advertising over the last ten years, 0 and the most detailedanalysis in English of the advertising industry appears to be the

7 Noreene Z. Janus, 'Advertising and the mass media: transnationallink between production and consumption', Media, Culture andSociety, Vol. 3, No.1, January 1981, pp. 13-23.

8 Michael Schudson, 'Criticizing the Critics of Advertising: towards asociological view of marketing', Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 3,No.l,January 1981, pp. 3-12.

9 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the SocialRoots of the Consumer Culture, New York: McGraw Hill, 1976.

10 Takano Hiroaki, 'Poster Madness', Japan Quarterly, Vol. 31, No.3,July-September 1984, pp. 309-13.

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small JETRO Marketing Series publication on Sales Promotion inJapan. 11

The Study of Japanese Advertising

Clearly, we have not even begun to study Japanese advertising inany thorough or consistent way. While study of Japanese popularculture itself is thin enough, advertising tends to feature as afootnote, a few spare paragraphs or a chapter at best. Nothing issystematic, and it is not possible at this stage to give students acomprehensive treatment of the role of advertising in Japanesesociety and culture. There are, however, several minor discussionsof Japanese advertising of which we should be aware:

(a) advertisin& as part of the new, electronic popular culture:Kogawa Tetsuo has referred to the importance of 'advertisingspots' on television as a means of revitalising programs. Theyhave, he says, 'a very strong influence on mass culture andhave changed viewers' time consciousness'.12 He does notexplain this any further, but there is clearly scope for somemajor research on the role of advertising in Japanesetelevision programming, especially given the heavydemands by a few industries on TV ad space. To whom are adsaddressed? What type of message are they delivering?

Fujioka extends this idea into his critique of the 'micromasssociety'. Advertising is symptomatic of this trend, where'the increasingly subjective, aesthetic, and emotionalorientation -- of people's needs and behavior is leading to thebreakdown of the "masses" into small groups of like-mindedindividuals, or micromasses'.13 He uses beer marketing as anexample, deploring the proliferation of beer types andpackages:

11 JETRO, Sales Promotion in the Japanese Market, JETRO MarketingSeries, No.7, 1983.

12 Kogawa Tetsuo, 'New Trends in Japanese Popular Culture', inGavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds), The JapaneseTrajectory: Modernization and Beyond, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988, p. 58.

13 Fujioka Wakao, 'The Rise of the Micromasses', Japan Echo, Vol.XIII, No.1, 1986, p. 31.

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This generation sees the plethora of beer containersas 'amusing' and 'fun', and what is amusing and funis what survives their selection process. Packagingis determined by the market mechanism no lessthan is product price. In the new intuitive consumermarket, the uninteresting will perish and theamusing will prevail. For members of the intuitiongeneration, this is the only issue. Theirphilosophy of consumption has never admittedsuch concepts as excess or waste.14

Marilyn Ivy has discussed the consumption andrepresentation of knowledge in contemporary Japan. Shepoints to extensive debate by Japanese scholars andcommentators on the eM-ka shakai, the 'commercialisationof society'. As we point out below in relation to advertisingand language, Japanese advertising (in particular, televisioncommercials) appeals more directly to desire within thesymbolic economy'.15 More broadly,

Commercials undercut the oppositional distinctionsthat define daily life -- what is good and bad, uglyand beautiful, sacred and profane. In Japanesemagazines as well, the distinction between text andcommercial is often blurred; in fact, with theirhighly developed graphics, visuals, andadvertising concepts, Japanese commercials oftenoverride program or text in interest...Meta-mass [arecent trade magazine] maintains that Japaneseculture today no longer exhibits the verticalcleavages of the past -- the distinctions betweenhigh culture and mass culture, dominant culture andsubculture, no longer apply. A hierarchical modelof culture no longer fits reality; instead, culturetoday is a mosaic of cultural styles. Culture is

14 Fujioka, 'The Rise of the Micromasses', p. 32.15 Marilyn Ivy, 'Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of

Knowledge in Postmodern Japan', South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 87,No.3, Summer 1988, Special Issue on Postmodernism and Japan, p.436.

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dispersed, fragmented, and decentered.Intellectual distinctions are levelled....16

(b) advertisin& as popular art: Tsurumi spends only two pages onthis topic in his broad survey, A Cultural History of PostwarJapan. He argues that advertising is the art form mostaccessible to the general populace, and that popular arts tendto be drawn towards contemporary advertising, and to take onits character.17 But he provides no examples of thisphenomenon, and leaves us wondering how this process hasdeveloped in postwar Japan. Takano reinforces this view, inhis brief article on advertising posters:

Along with greater concern with copy has come agreater emphasis on typography. Unusualcharacters in unusual arrangements are thought tobe more effective than conventional characters. Atthe same time, white space -- once only used toenhance photos and illustrations -- is now a majordesign element. Printing technology has advancedto the point where posters can be attractive enoughto serve as decorations, and indeed they aresometimes put to that use in store windows. Insubway stations and on the walls of undergroundpassageways, they add a welcome splash of colorto the drab surroundings.I8

Several articles in an Australian journal of arts, Tension, givea taste of the sort of analysis we need: they look at severalJapanese creative directors and their work, at the work ofDentsu, and the interaction between products, advertising andart.19

(c) advertisin& and lan&ua&e: many commentators havementioned the heavy reliance of Japanese advertising copy onthe English language.20 The only major analysis in English of

16 Ivy, 'Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts', p. 432.17 Shunsuke Tsurumi, A Cultural History of Postwar Japan 1945-1980,

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 87.18 Takano, 'Poster Madness', p. 309.19 Tension, Vol. 25, March-April 1991.20 Tension, Vol. 25, p. 45.

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the language of Japanese advertising is that by Moeran, inhis book Language and Popular Culture in Japan. His mainargument is that the structure of Japanese advertising slogansdiffers markedly from those of Britain, 'an emphasis onalliteration, assonance and structural completeness inEnglish, as against a preference for association, suggestionand structural incompleteness in Japanese' .21 Japanese istypified by a number of keywords that cut across differentaspects of social life and activity; the word kokoro, he says,is the most popular word in Japanese advertising copy.Advertising is therefore about emotions, and it 'supports an"internal cultural debate" on the respective roles of group,individual and seishin in contemporary Japanese society'.Comparing British and Japanese advertisements, he findsthat 'whereas the language of English advertisements wouldappear to prefer to play on grammatical structures...Japaneseslogans are more likely to focus on lexical items, which thenbecome "keywords" in the advertising discourse.'22 Japaneseadvertising also has developed certain stereotypical verbaland visual images that reinforce the contemporary culturaldiscourse.

Moeran's work is the only detailed analysis of the languageof Japanese advertising -- indeed, the only analysis ofJapanese advertising at all -- in Western studies of Japan. Itis somewhat sketchy, but it is a start, and poses someimportant questions about the way our analysis of Japanesesociety can be affected by the images that the society itselfdelivers, how advertising deals with the message, and howcertain themes come to dominate the advertising discourse inmedia-saturated Japan.

(d) advertising and women: although the portrayal of women inthe Japanese manga has been analysed, there is very littleresearch yet available in English on the portrayal of womenin advertising in Japan. Muramatsu has conducted a study ofthe portrayal of women in the media, and notes that womenin Japan are 'increasingly important as a target for retail,

21 Brian Moeran, Language and Popular Culture in Japan,Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989, p. 112.

22 Ibid.

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advertising and other industries',23 because of their value asconsumers and as household financial managers. She showsthat women's magazines are dependent on advertising, andthat the distinction between the articles, stories andadvertising was very thin indeed. This corresponds tofindings in Britain that the dependence of women'smagazines on advertising affected their content, in thatmagazines deliberately pitch their content at the type ofwomen advertisers seek to influence, and that publicationscompete for advertisers' patronage by 'offering advertisers ashowcase for their products'.24 Representations of popularculture in such magazines needed to be considered in the lightof the economic pressures on magazines to adjust to thedemands of the advertisers.

Muramatsu did not go this far in her analysis, but she didfind that television advertising stereotyped both men andwomen, especially in advertisements aimed at children.Japanese television, Muramatsu found, 'carries the messagethat women are valuable if they are young and beautiful',and overall she found that the Japanese media subscribe totraditional attitudes towards women's roles.

Conclusion

This is not a strong research base for an understanding of Japaneseadvertising. There is clearly a major task ahead to assess theJapanese research that is prolific, but at this stage there is stillvery little indeed for our students to work with. It is clearly timefor some concerted research into Japanese advertising, not only toreflect the wealth of research carried out in Japan itself, but toexplain better to Western observers of Japan the massive industry ofadvertising, its role in the media and its place in shapingcontemporary Japanese culture.

23 Yasuko Muramatsu, 'Of Women by Women for Women?:Japanese Media Today", Studies of Broadcasting, No. 26, March1990, p. 85.

24 Stella Earnshaw, 'Advertising and the Media: The Case of Women'sMagazines', Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 6, October 1984, p. 421.

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