Welcome To Japan -- Now Start Shopping
These are the first three signs you see when arriving at Narita International Airport outside of Tokyo. The signs are in English, and they speak for themselves.
Sign One: Welcome to Japan! See Mt. Fuji!
Sign Two: Japan welcomes Visa (and the humans that carry it!)
Sign Three: The competition speaks! As Pepsi is to Coke, as Reeboks are to Nike, as Burger King is to McDonald's, so too is MasterCard to Visa. The second place in the global infotainment marketplace also wants a piece of your high-interest-yielding purchases beyond your income level.
Notice too the subtle gendering of the two ads: The Visa ad is clearly aimed at men with money to spend. The MasterCard ad is clearly aimed at women. It is reminiscent of the color theory and store layout differences between Home Depot and Lowes Home Improvement Center. Home Depot is industrial strength orange, a man's man shop for men who crave power tools. Home Depot is the home improvement store For Her , and highlights the feminine side of domestic aesthetics.
But if the recent article in The Economist is any indicator ("The Sun Also Rises"), then Japan is doing precisely what it should be doing by the absolute law of contemporary technological capitalism: drive sales at every possible point. Economic business is the only business of culture anymore, and there is no place like Japan to see this in action. All of history, religion, culture, arts and crafts still exist, but they exist only insofar as they can drive sales, turn profits, generate revenues, or become cash cows.
This takes a lot of work, and you may find yourself thirsty -- in which case you should grab a nice cold bottle of Pocari Sweat. This was the first of many surprising product names we encountered, whose nutritional and flavorful qualities were nevertheless dimmed by our mind's linguistic suggestion that we were perhaps drinking the chilled and bottled sweat of a man named Pocari...
Sign One: Welcome to Japan! See Mt. Fuji!
Sign Two: Japan welcomes Visa (and the humans that carry it!)
Sign Three: The competition speaks! As Pepsi is to Coke, as Reeboks are to Nike, as Burger King is to McDonald's, so too is MasterCard to Visa. The second place in the global infotainment marketplace also wants a piece of your high-interest-yielding purchases beyond your income level.
Notice too the subtle gendering of the two ads: The Visa ad is clearly aimed at men with money to spend. The MasterCard ad is clearly aimed at women. It is reminiscent of the color theory and store layout differences between Home Depot and Lowes Home Improvement Center. Home Depot is industrial strength orange, a man's man shop for men who crave power tools. Home Depot is the home improvement store For Her , and highlights the feminine side of domestic aesthetics.
But if the recent article in The Economist is any indicator ("The Sun Also Rises"), then Japan is doing precisely what it should be doing by the absolute law of contemporary technological capitalism: drive sales at every possible point. Economic business is the only business of culture anymore, and there is no place like Japan to see this in action. All of history, religion, culture, arts and crafts still exist, but they exist only insofar as they can drive sales, turn profits, generate revenues, or become cash cows.
This takes a lot of work, and you may find yourself thirsty -- in which case you should grab a nice cold bottle of Pocari Sweat. This was the first of many surprising product names we encountered, whose nutritional and flavorful qualities were nevertheless dimmed by our mind's linguistic suggestion that we were perhaps drinking the chilled and bottled sweat of a man named Pocari...
posted by RMS at 2:28 AM
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