Japanese culture, Shopping

One of the things that surprised me the most when I first came to Japan was the amount of shopping streets and malls that seemed to be everywhere. Just in Osaka there are two main shopping areas, Namba and Umeda, and an arcade, full of shops and with severall malls, that is more than 600 m in lenght connects them. In there, every three shops you can see clerks in the doors, yelling special announcements about sales in their shops or just welcoming customers to get inside, making the shopping experience quite noisy sometimes. But the most amazing thing, is that they are never empty.

Popular culture in Japan is very big, there are trends associated with it, and if something starts to get attention it might go from nothing to national-wide famous in a week. People pay real attention to your looks and the fan-related accessories that you wear. That can be because anything you might like or be following provably has a lot of related merchandising, but it can also relate to the fact that shopping seems to be one of the national sports. When I first met a lot of Japanese people, asking about their interests and what do they do when they meet with friends, or to have fun, about 80% of the female ones included shopping in their lists. The same situation happened when they asked me to meet them somewhere, almost always was “to go shopping”.

                                                                                                                                                    

The other point that I realized while living here is that Japanese love brands. Japan is known worldwide as a very fashionable country since the 70s when the Japanese designers started to get attention from the high-fashion catwalk, and it has been growing since then. With lots of different clothing styles and changing trends, there is also urban tribes with very specific clothing (and sometimes behavior) rules, which just adds to the main shopping trend. Last November, a new three flour H&M store opened just in front of their only other store in Osaka, in ebisubashi, and the marketing for it was launched more than a month before, along with their new collaboration with the brand Versace. They had an opening party, with special VIP guests, between them the most famous      

 Japanese bloggers, that gathered around 300 people in the door just to get a chance to see the new clothing pieces on the famous guests before everyone else. The opening to the public was made two days later, and the lines for it started the previous night with approximately a 100 people according to the news, with more than 600 people when the opening started. Within two hours the top rated items were sold out. Just another example of how consumerism is present in Japan, even without getting into the technological related market.

A Cartoon by Hiroshi Takatsuki (High Moon) , about consumerism:

Also check out this interesting blogs related to consuming patterns in Japan;
http://ethicalnippon.nbunce.com/2010/04/hyper-consumerism/
http://www.claireburdett.com/2010/05/going-japanese-trends-in-consumerism/

What do Japanese People do?

They eat a lot of ready-made meals. 

Japan is known for having a very healthy cuisine, they eat a lot of vary foods, and they mix them a lot in every meal, so that provides them with a very healthy diet... in general. When I first came to Japan I experienced this side of the eating patterns, I was staying with a lovely host family who had cooked meals almost every day and rarely ate instant noodles or frozen food. When I helped in the kitchen though, I realized that they did use some precooked food, but always complemented it in a way that ended making the meal like home made, never really just having the packaged thing.

But thruth is thst there are huge sections of frozen food in the supermarkets, and almost all of them have “cooked in the supermarket obentos”, even the 100 yen ones. Also, nearly 10 million rice balls or onigiri are sold at conbini (convenience stores) every day, and instant noodles are available in every conbini, not only supermarket, every day at every hour, since conbinis open 24/7. This impression came lately in my stay in Japan, but you can have almost any type of food in a ready-made package if you look for it. There are from gyoza or korokke, wich are more likely to be in the frozen food section, to pasta (sauce included), sushi or deserts.

My previous thoughts about japanese food have been certainly affected by this facts, while it is still tru that you can eat very healthy if you want to, it is also true that they have a huge market for frozen and ready-made food. Conbinis sell all sorts of them, onigiri, fried chicken, nikuman, obento... and some even have a resting space where you can eat them while sitting in the same store. It is a common image to see workers sitting in the curb outside the store, or hurried salaryman filling their bags with onigiri and energy drinks at lunch time. Of course, they could also have delicious home-made obento, which is what I though it would be the most present, but apparently it is way easier to just buy a quick meal on your way to work or at your lunch break, and I have to say that some of them are surprisingly good.