Quarantine Day 6
Today I decided to buy myself some special happiness-inducing snack and went to the closest shopping mall — the most certain source of good supermarkets and take-out food in Japan if you’re new to the area. But also, shopping malls are the biggest source of bleak commercial architecture and nightmarish kitsch, especially if you’re oversensitive to the dark side of capitalism like me. When I entered the building, I saw a massive, awkwardly misplaced Christmas tree and heard THE music (thanks god it wasn’t “Last Christmas”), and a feeling of cognitive dissonance continued to haunt me long after I left the building. Before that day I went out on my short walks around the neighborhood and couldn’t see Christmas “vibe” being promoted anywhere else yet. It’s 22 degrees C outside, the autumn leaves are still beautiful and have just started paving the ground a little, but as soon as you enter a shopping mall you fall into a parallel universe with Santa Clauses on the ads, and Christmas lights and trees in inappropriate places. The feeling I got was very similar to what I described on Day 2 when I went to Cinecitta — “Italian-style” open-air shopping area, that was composed of valid Italian symbols and elements in wrong contexts, scales and proportions. Christmas in Japan is the same — only the most distinct, easy-to-abstract elements were taken from the original Western tradition, then they were replicated, exaggerated and multiplied to provide maximum profit. Historically, most Western products/styles in Japan are considered modern, cool, mysterious and inaccessible (even simply in terms of distance and travel costs), therefore local ads exploit these high-class connotations and of course nobody cares about the original story of Jesus when they enjoy their winter holidays here. Example: 40 years ago KFC made a genius campaign that convinced the entire Japanese population that eating deep fried chicken drums is a must for Christmas dinner in developed countries (namely the US, the ultimate authority for Japan). Now people are placing orders for special Christmas KFC sets two months in advance, otherwise they’d spend the entire December 24 in a queue. One feature of traditional Christmas that’s especially effective for Japanese advertising is “being together with the loved ones”. A classic way to encourage buying gifts in the Western advertising, too, but in Japan it also conquered the market for couples: Christmas dates are an absolute must for any romantically-involved pair of people (and are surprisingly higher in priority than family dinners). Here it goes beyond gifts: restaurants promote extra-expensive dinner courses for two, shopping malls organize light shows (so-called illumi) and entire seasonal theme-parks are built for a “perfect Christmas date experience” and then dismantled until next December. I have a strange love/hate relationship (hate to observe but love to analyze) with these monstrous products of Japanese capitalism and will probably write more about them in a few weeks (ho-ho-ho), but if you want to dive into a classic Christmas date right away, someone already described it here in detail.
Today I decided to buy myself some special happiness-inducing snack and went to the closest shopping mall — the most certain source of good supermarkets and take-out food in Japan if you’re new to the area. But also, shopping malls are the biggest source of bleak commercial architecture and nightmarish kitsch, especially if you’re oversensitive to the dark side of capitalism like me. When I entered the building, I saw a massive, awkwardly misplaced Christmas tree and heard THE music (thanks god it wasn’t “Last Christmas”), and a feeling of cognitive dissonance continued to haunt me long after I left the building. Before that day I went out on my short walks around the neighborhood and couldn’t see Christmas “vibe” being promoted anywhere else yet. It’s 22 degrees C outside, the autumn leaves are still beautiful and have just started paving the ground a little, but as soon as you enter a shopping mall you fall into a parallel universe with Santa Clauses on the ads, and Christmas lights and trees in inappropriate places. The feeling I got was very similar to what I described on Day 2 when I went to Cinecitta — “Italian-style” open-air shopping area, that was composed of valid Italian symbols and elements in wrong contexts, scales and proportions. Christmas in Japan is the same — only the most distinct, easy-to-abstract elements were taken from the original Western tradition, then they were replicated, exaggerated and multiplied to provide maximum profit. Historically, most Western products/styles in Japan are considered modern, cool, mysterious and inaccessible (even simply in terms of distance and travel costs), therefore local ads exploit these high-class connotations and of course nobody cares about the original story of Jesus when they enjoy their winter holidays here. Example: 40 years ago KFC made a genius campaign that convinced the entire Japanese population that eating deep fried chicken drums is a must for Christmas dinner in developed countries (namely the US, the ultimate authority for Japan). Now people are placing orders for special Christmas KFC sets two months in advance, otherwise they’d spend the entire December 24 in a queue. One feature of traditional Christmas that’s especially effective for Japanese advertising is “being together with the loved ones”. A classic way to encourage buying gifts in the Western advertising, too, but in Japan it also conquered the market for couples: Christmas dates are an absolute must for any romantically-involved pair of people (and are surprisingly higher in priority than family dinners). Here it goes beyond gifts: restaurants promote extra-expensive dinner courses for two, shopping malls organize light shows (so-called illumi) and entire seasonal theme-parks are built for a “perfect Christmas date experience” and then dismantled until next December. I have a strange love/hate relationship (hate to observe but love to analyze) with these monstrous products of Japanese capitalism and will probably write more about them in a few weeks (ho-ho-ho), but if you want to dive into a classic Christmas date right away, someone already described it here in detail.
Quarantine Day 7
Just pictures from yet another supermarket walk for today! Taking a rest from writing for the weekend, because tomorrow I will need a lot of creative energy to be a guest in an architecture podcast.
Just pictures from yet another supermarket walk for today! Taking a rest from writing for the weekend, because tomorrow I will need a lot of creative energy to be a guest in an architecture podcast.
Quarantine Day 8
A 4-hour podcast talk was a huge accomplishment for me today, I'm sooo looking forward to the edited episode (or several episodes, because we touched on too many topics at once and it went far beyond Japanese architecture). If you wanna listen to the previous episodes for now, you can find them here. It's in Russian. And above, you'll find some pics from my everyday ritual walk.
A 4-hour podcast talk was a huge accomplishment for me today, I'm sooo looking forward to the edited episode (or several episodes, because we touched on too many topics at once and it went far beyond Japanese architecture). If you wanna listen to the previous episodes for now, you can find them here. It's in Russian. And above, you'll find some pics from my everyday ritual walk.