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.

I received this charming businesscard from Nobi at a blogger’s meetup last night. The cards are from a Tokyo stationary shop called Winged Wheel.

Readymade graphic design systems (otherwise known as templates) are often frowned on by designers for their mediocrity, mentally shelved somewhere next to clip art and stock photography, but this card reminded me that templates offer quite a lot in exchange for having to share with strangers, and can in fact be beautiful.

Printing costs alone for a 3-color embossed card in 3 variations would be prohibitively expensive for most individuals and small businesses, expecially with staff, addresses and phone numbers changing as often as they do. Nevermind what designers like me charge for the card design and illustration/logo.

What circumstances require an entity to have a custom, unique identity, website or print collateral. Is it simply the budget to pay for it?

What makes a template successful and what are the limitations of even the best template designs?

Photo by Nobi Hayashi

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:

• I don’t watch TV: Many of these ads count on you having seen the TV version, so like an inside joke, they crumble into an innocuous or nonsensical collage of message and image when you haven’t seen it. My failure to recognize all but the most well known Japanese personalities doesn’t help things either.
• They’re not interested in me: Foreigners are simply too small a demographic for most advertisers to be interested in. The products they push and the arguments they use were created to manipulate a whole set of common beliefs, fears, tastes that I often don’t share.

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.

The New Mos

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):

The Teriyaki Ad (top)

• Introduced in 1973: In a country where some businesses last 1,400 years, longetivity counts a lot. From line 1, MOS wants you to know that this comparative blip of a burger has history, it’s been tested by the public, deemed trustworthy, and it’s still here.
• First in the world: Many westerners and even Japanese people characterize Japanese innovation as more refinement than invention. I’m not sure if a teriyaki burger is going to bust this myth, but it at least shows that being first means something here.
• self-confident work (自信作): Like the world’s best pancakes at countless diners across the U.S., many Japanese restaurants have one item they stand behind more than any other, the one you should try before anything else.
• 新. (new): This little beauty mark on the first character of the title really puzzled me at first, but Eiko explained that that little mark elevates the character from a description to a product name. When you consider the stream of products boasting newness, the distinction makes sense. This is not just a new teriyaki burger, it is the new teriyaki burger.

The Mos Burger ad (bottom)

• The Taste of Japan (日本の味): Later in the ad, Mos takes it a step further, stating “this burger matches the tastes of the modern Japanese person more than any other.” (Note: Apologies for the bad crop). This is one of those messages that shows up all the time, not only in ads, but in conversation: Japanese people have unique tastes, and foreign ideas often need to be reworked in order to meet these tastes, preferably by other Japanese people. To many foreigners, this belief rings with ethnocentrism and elitism, unfortunately justified by the occasional assertion that Japanese tastes are not only different, but more refined and sensitive.
• I’m in the mood for Mos today (今日、モス気分): This slogan seems modeled after the recent string of MacDonalds slogans: the vapid “I’m lovin’ it” in the US and “Got 100 yen? Let’s go to Mac” in Japan. All these slogans have two common qualities that are very 21st century. First, they are written from the point of view of the customer, Time Magazine’s “You”. Secondly, they are all in the moment. They’re about today, the money in your pocket and how you are feeling right now.

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.

A few months ago, I was sitting at an Izakaya in Ginza with Paul. I was giddly, proudly sharing one of my old ura-michi finds, a quiet coffee shop in Jimbocho.

It’s not hard to fall in love with a coffee shop, but that doesn’t make the feeling any less real or personal, and I love every detail of this place. The hard, low wooden chairs that make you shift from cheek to cheek every few minutes, the muted ticking clock in an otherwise silent back room, the old maps of Tokyo on the smoke-stained walls. I brought American friends here when they were in town, had pencil-sketching dates with Eiko, and spent many afternoons alone, creating quilt-like pixel patterns for an indulgent Flash portfolio site, that once sat at this very domain, and in the end, brought me exactly zero steps closer to making a living as a designer in Tokyo.

Years later, sitting with Paul, I could sense that my story about the coffee shop wasn’t nearly as interesting for him in content (he doesn’t drink coffee) as it was in spirit, but the spirit he knew very well. He commented on how it seems like all foreigners living in Tokyo have places like this, and how these places and the moments we experience at them shape our personal connection with Tokyo. He wondered whether there wasn’t something special about Tokyo itself that caused this bubbling raw emotion, and whether there isn’t some way of sharing these places and stories that is meaningful for all the people who have, are, or dream of passing through this city.

We knew immediately the idea was exciting, but one that could go horribly wrong, veering off into soggy sentimentality or dry reviews. This site would require a clear concept and editorial discipline to get right. So we called on our officemate Craig, who just happens to make exsquisite English books about Japan and design and develop websites.

A few months and many Royal Host coffee and eggs later, we have hitotoki, a literary website mapping personal narratives about Tokyo, written by curious outsiders.

Hitotoki is exactly 2 days old, 7 stories large, and accepting submissions.

Every pixel and word of this site has been a collaboration of some sort, a privledge I don’t take lightly. Photoshop tennis among designers is not always comfortable, but, I think hitotoki proves it’s not only possible, but can result in beauty. Even the logo evolved from a sketch in my notebook by Paul, iterated by Craig, then back to Paul, before being carved in stone (literally) by Eiko.

Much thanks also to David and Bruce from Chin Music Press in helping us refine the hitotoki concept and voice. Not to make too much of it, but I don’t think it a total coincidence that this blog’s first post is as much about writing as design. I may not be ready to reveal my own hitotoki quite yet, but working on the site with these guys has clearly awoken something.

This is the weblog of Chris Palmieri, an American designer / musician living in Tokyo since 2001.

AQ is a Tokyo-based, multilingual web and graphic design office I co-founded.
dryfishbutterfly is an instrumental rock band. I play keyboards.
Tokyo Art Beat is an art and design event guide. I volunteer design and copywriting.
Hitotoki is a narrative mapping website I co-created with Paul and Craig.

• My del.icio.us page
• My Tokyo Art Beat event feed
• My photos on Flickr