Marketing and Consumption in Modern Japan

Kazuo Usui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134350735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book explores the development in Japan throughout the twentieth century of marketing and consumerism. It shows how Japan had a long established indigenous traditional approach to marketing, separate from Western approaches to marketing, and discusses how the Japanese approach to marketing was applied in the form of new marketing activities, which, responding to changing patterns of consumption, contributed considerably to Japan's economic success. The book concludes with a discussion of how Japanese approach to marketing is likely to develop at a time when globalisation and international marketing are having an increasing impact in Japan.

Part I

Marketing and consumption from c.1905 to 1937

Historical settings

Modern Japan was stimulated by the discourse of westernisation from the outset. Soon after overthrowing the feudalistic Tokugawa regime (1603–1868), which had maintained national isolationism for well over two hundred years (1633/39–1854), the Meij¹ government launched the movement of modernisation and westernisation called ‘Civilisation and Enlightenment (bunmei kaika)’. With the watchwords ‘Change everything (hyakuji go-isshin)’ and ‘Scrap outmoded conventions (kyuhei daha)’, the government took a strong lead in transforming Japan into a modern and westernised society in every dimension. This movement was part of the nationalistic programme to transform Japan into a modern, wealthy and powerful nation that could rank with the Western countries dominating the world, as directly represented by the slogan to build the ‘Wealthy Nation with the Strong Army (fukoku kyohei)’.

Soon after capturing power in 1868, the new government dissolved the old regime by replacing more than 260 feudal domains called ‘han’, which had been fragmentally ruled by local lords, ‘daimyo’, who had their own armies and treasuries, and establishing local prefectures ruled by prefectural governors (1871). The social ranking system, which had defined the warrior class (samurai or bushi) as the top, followed by peasant, craftsman and merchant classes, was abolished with the declaration of ‘equality of all four classes’ (1871), although only a small number of people (former local lords and court nobles) were appointed to the nobility (kazoku). The scrapping of the social ranking system meant breaking up the warrior class that was the prop and stay of the former regime. This was completed by the universal conscription system for men (1873), which denied the hereditary right to a military career monopolised by the warrior class, and by the law banning sword wearing (1876), which had been afforded only to that class, and the ordinance requiring the cutting off of the topknots (1873) that had been their symbol.

Such a breathtakingly rapid change in the political order was accompanied by policies to modernise Japan by borrowing many Western ideas and attitudes. These policies were accelerated especially after the return home in 1873 of the so-called Iwakura Delegation, which was composed of top leaders of the new government, and about 60 students (who were to be left to study abroad and actually became involved in modernising Japan in various fields later). The Delegation was originally dispatched to revise the unequal treaties which the former regime concluded in 1858, but this proposal was refused by many countries involved. Instead, the Delegation derived wide knowledge and information by their observations of many modern institutions and practices during their travels in the USA and 11 European countries, such as parliaments, government offices, factories, schools and hospitals. The strong impressions and the profound respect which the Delegation derived for the values and ideas that had caused these Western countries to progress, merged into the driving force toward westernisation.

At the same time as transforming the political order, the Meiji government started the modern school system, and introduced modern infrastructures and an economic system receptive to modern technologies and social institutions. The government implemented these ideas often by hiring Western engineers and specialists (called ‘oyatoi’) on high salaries.

The government set the Educational Rule (gakusei) in 1872 and began primary schooling for every child. The attendance ratio increased from 28.1 per cent at more than 12,500 schools (incl. public and private) in 1873 to 51.0 per cent at more than 30,000 schools a decade later. Although the attendance of female pupils was much lower than male at first (67.2 per cent of boys and 33.6 per cent of girls in 1883), it quickly increased around the turn of the century to surpass 90 per cent in 1903 (in the case of boys this occurred in 1900). In 1912, the last year of the Meiji Era, the attendance ratio reached 98.2 per cent on average at more than 25,000 schools, 98.8 per cent of boys and 97.6 per cent of girls (SB 1988b: 212–15).

As for development of infrastructure and the economic system, the government introduced not only telegraph services (1869), postal services (1871), railway services (1872), gas street lighting (1872), telephone (1877) and electricity services (1882), but also the new monetary system with the gold standard (1870–71), a bank system based on the national law (1872–73) and the joint-stock company system (1873). Furthermore, the government built model mines and factories, such as silk reeling and cotton spinning factories, glassworks and shipbuilding yards. These premises and factories were then sold to private firms. As a result of these policies, from 1886 onward many private stock-holding companies were established in the industries such as railways, cotton spinning and coal mining — this movement is called the ‘rapid increase of firms (kigyo-bokko)’ (Takamura 1992) — and this has been generally recognised as the start of the period of the so-called Industrial Revolution in Japan. While economic historians have differed in their estimate of the completion of this period, depending on how they recognised the concept of Industrial Revolution itself, it can be considered complete by around 1900 or 1910 (Oishi 1975: 10–13). The Industrial Revolution established machine-based manufacturing not only in the light industries such as silk reeling and cotton spinning, but also in the heavy industries such as iron production, ship building and machine-tool manufacturing, and served to lead the Japanese economy to capitalism. This achievement is seen in the emergence of Japan as the single industrialised state in the Far East.

Such a dazzling reform naturally exerted many visible effects on the everyday life of ordinary people. For instance, new townscapes appeared with the introduction of new technologies and Western-style buildings. The new night views of Tokyo illuminated by gas street lights (1874), and later arc street lamps (1882), attracted many people and made them recognise that the ‘enlightenment’ was bright. The opening ceremony (1872) of the railway service between Shimbashi Tokyo and Yokohama was a celebration for the country, encouraging recognition that the ‘civilised’ life was speedy and had a regular style according to the timetable. The government supervised the development of Ginza in Tokyo (1872–77) after a major fire, with brick-built constructions in the style of Regent Street in London (see Figure I.1), exhibiting a totally different townscape the westernisation movement could recognise.

With regard to food and drink, unfamiliar products suddenly appeared before people’s eyes, such as beer, wine, milk, coffee, ice cream and beef. In the sphere of clothing, after the military adopted Western-style clothes and shoes (1866), a court suit and a court dress were defined in Western-style (1872), and the government selected a Western-style uniform for national officers, police, railway officials and post-office clerks (1870–72). The providers of these new products were adventurous entrepreneurs. They were the first marketers who scented the new possibility of the ‘domain of availability of offerings’ (see Introduction, Figure 0.1) expanded by the westernisation movement. While some examples will be explored in the following chapters, here is the famous instance of ‘beef cooked in a pan (ushi-nabe)’ (Hattori [1914] 1992: 89–95, Ishii 1936: 697–708, Okada 1968: 18–42, Research Laboratory on Food Science 1971: 7–10, Yumoto 1996: 286–7). For more than a thousand years, the Japanese had widely observed a taboo in their meat diet which is believed to have come from the vulgarisation of a tenet of Buddhism; now, as early as 1862, a brave restaurateur called Isekuma overcame his wife’s strong opposition and began to offer beef to foreign people in the residential area of Yokohama. The Meiji government itself powerfully supported this new dietary habit, by publicising in 1872 that the Emperor officially ate beef. Thus, ‘beef cooked in a pan’, although seasoned with typical Japanese flavourings, soy sauce (shoyu) and sugar (sato) (Yumoto 1966: 286), became a symbol of the westernisation movement; as a popular novelist, Kanagaki Robun ([1871] 1995: 5), described, ‘without distinction of which class they used to belong to, the warrior, the peasant, the artisan or the merchant, without distinction of age or sex, and without distinction of the rich and the poor, any folks who dare not eat beef cooked in a pan are neither civilised nor enlightened’.

Figure I.1 Brick-made buildings in Ginza, Tokyo.

Note: Ginza Street became a landmark in terms of the movement of civilisation and westernisation in the 1870s. After a major fire, the street was reconstructed in Western style with a row of brick buildings (1872–77), imitating Regent Street in London. Many of the original buildings were then gradually renovated or rebuilt, but the whole street was destroyed in the Great Kano Earthquake in 1923. As a result, this townscape completely disappeared.

Reproduced courtesy of Chin-ya, a restaurant of sukiyaki established in 1880 in Asakusa, Tokyo. (Picture was drawn in 1873)

It should be noted, however, that the alterations fundamentally came from the upper echelon of society. This meant that no matter how practical these revolutionary changes were, it took a long time for them to penetrate every dimension of daily life for almost all Japanese consumers. The consuming habits people had acquired over time were not easily changed. Some adventurous consumers explored new products and services, but changing overall consumption patterns to Western ones, or more precisely, to a Japanese form of them, needed time. There were plenty of interesting stories of interplay between marketers, who solicited consumers to accept unfamiliar products and services, and consumers, who tried them timidly at first, and enthusiastically welcomed them in the end. This will be the focus of Part I.

The dazzling transformation of society brought about by importation of many Western things was supported by the view that the ‘essence of being a Japanese patriot was to embrace change’ by the early 1880s, but questions arose about the Japanese identity (Gordon 2003: 111). Criticisms of ‘Westernisationism (ooka-shugi)’ grew, censuring the accommodating attitude to the West. A target of this criticism was the events at Rokumei-kan (a Western-styled two-storey house made of brick constructed by a British architect in 1883), which was the setting for a series of Sunday evening balls to invite foreign dignitaries and Japanese women wearing bustle-style dresses. The events were sponsored by the Foreign Minister and aimed at amendment of unequal treaties (McClain 2002: 181, Tanabe 2010: 305–6). Conservatives also increasingly insisted on the necessity of ‘preservation of nationality (kokusui hozon)’, although as Pyle (1969) described, some leading advocates of this concept were not the hardliners, but open-minded nationalists who had already gained westernised education and recognised the value of Western civilisation. Furthermore, especially after the victories in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), a chauvinistic mindset spread in society.

This narrow-minded, aggressive version of nationalism did not wholly sweep across the country until 1937 when the Second Sino-Japanese War was ignited and the wartime regime, which was to lead to the Pacific War (1941–45), was established. Rather, the years from c.1905 to 1925 have been called the period of ‘Taisho democracy’¹ (see Shinobu 1954, 1958, 1959, Matsuo 2001, Narita 2007), when various types of liberalistic ideas and movements developed in Japanese society, such as the idea of democracy (called ‘minpon-shugi’), the movement towards universal suffrage, the labour movement, the women’s movement, local residents’ campaigns, etc. Along with the political movements, ‘Taisho democracy’, ‘Taisho modernism (Taisho modern)’ and ‘Taisho romanticism (Taisho roman)’ were recognised in a new awareness of a modern sense of the self and individuality and a recognition of free love which threw off the yoke of traditional relationships. European art movements became popular, such as Aestheticism, Art Nouveau, Expressionism or Dadaism, with popularisation of illustrations, pictures and music. Mass media such as newspapers, magazines and radio became popular, and town-scapes were transformed with Western-style buildings, billboards and crowded shopping streets. The cities welcomed the employment associated with modern entertainments such as cafés, beer saloons, ballrooms, theatres, movies and department stores, although the gap widened between urban life and rural life and between the haves and the have-nots. While Japan borrowed many influences from the West, she assimilated and made them Japanese, not only during the ‘Taisho’ period described above but through several decades of the early twentieth century.

Many of these changes, though not all, had stron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Marketing and consumption from c.1905 to 1937
• Part II Marketing and consumption, High Economic Growth to the present
• Summing up
• Bibliography
• Index