In case you haven’t heard, the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe resigned last week, three days into the new parliamentary session, and way to far into a comically long string of corruption scandals. He immediately checked himself into a hospital for “stress related stomach problems”, neatly avoiding the inevitable shitstorm.
Aera, a weekly general interest magazine, managed to capture all this in one gutsy crop. Now that’s editorial design!
Okayama Prefecture took over the Ginza line a few weeks ago with these ads. The concept is simple. They asked a bunch of locals and visitors what they want to “push” about Okayama. Each was presumably given one of these big posters and a handful of markers.
I really like the series for a few reasons:
They’re authentic. I walked up and down the carriages and couldn’t find any duplicates. Some are even signed: “A. Maeda, age 80″. Because of the gloss of the paper, it was hard to tell if the handdrawn designs were scanned and offset printed, but it sure didn’t look like it.
As far as I can tell, it’s generally considered bad manners in Japan to eat, and to a much lesser degree, drink outside.
There are of course several allowances. Anything served at outdoor festivals, quick shots of canned coffee. But outside of these, you just don’t see Japanese people put much to their mouth outside of homes and restaurants.
This makes perfect sense to me. When they can, the Japanese like to take their time with meals. They fuss over presentation, balance and sequence. There is a whole vocabulary for eating that spans past the easy senses of taste and smell, into touch and hearing. How could any of this possibly be enjoyed wedged between meetings on opposite sides of town?
Besides, in many less restrained cultures than Japan, eating is the most flamboyant bodily function that humans can engage in with mixed company. Eating outside imposes all kinds of potential irritations on strangers. Maybe they haven’t eaten yet today, so your soft bite into an onigiri taunts them. Maybe they just ate, so the smell of your everything bagel nauseates them. Or maybe they’re just having a really bad day, and the last thing they need is for you to spray droplets of melted banana java chip Frappucino onto their suit jacket while they hang from the hand straps in a Ginza Line subway car, gently swaying.
But this has been a tough adjustment for me. I survived the last eight or so years of my schooling eating chunks of bagels in the back of math class, food that requires utensils while driving, and entire fast food meals while jogging across campus. In Japan, I struggle to delay gratification until I find a quiet, stationary stage for the performance of a 3-part symphony of mixed sandwiches.
Which is why this ad in Kudanshita station touched me so. A single line of copy and a simple photograph together defy all this nonsense and make it ok again for me to inhale soft serve in front of ampm.
Japanese print ads have always been more interesting to me than I remember American ads, though the reason probably says more about me than it does about the quality of the ads, namely that:
In addition to keeping my discretionary spending on hair gel and trashy weeklies down, this total communication breakdown has made it easier to pass the time on my commute, deciphering and dissecting these ads. But one gaijin can only take it so far, so I’ve decided to share a few cases here, starting with this series from Mos Burger.
This campaign is running on the Tokyo Metro trains to promote new recipes on Mos Burger’s core products, the Mos Burger and the Teriyaki Burger.
The train ads are as simple as you can get: a product shot, 3 lines of copy, product name, and the company logo and tagline, but let’s try to pull this apart (click on the image to follow along):
Though somewhat at odds with where these MOS ads started, with history, perseverence and reputation, this tagline is perhaps what fast food does best even if it’s for the worst. It places a solution within reach, to answer an urge from within, right now.