japan wu

n the west, people seem to prefer to keep the business of buying and selling separate from their aesthetic pleasures. In Japanese consumer culture, by contrast, it has for decades been established practice for shopping to go hand in hand with art. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, department stores in Japan have set up exhibition spaces within their premises as an extra attraction to entice customers to cross their thresholds. The development was part of the evolution that they underwent from their distant origins as kimono shops—the stores, as elsewhere, gradually transcending their original commercial function, and assuming a new and wider role as monuments to urban modernity. Like Bon Marché in Paris, the Tokyo stores would become ‘a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure’.footnote1 Not only were they sites—that is, loci—of consumption, but sights—spectacles—of consumption, too.footnote2 Here the Meiji period’s preoccupation with Westernization was given concrete form—in the ornate Renaissance-style buildings constructed to house the stores, as well as in the large variety of foreign goods on display for sale. Being sites of a spectacle of Westernization—an imagined West, of course, infused and conflated with Japanese values, rather than a real one—Tokyo stores could, from the beginning, encourage consumption by associating it with images of quality and prestige. The status accorded to foreign goods was such that they immediately took precedence, in terms of visibility and glamour, over domestic products. Theatricality and appearance, the marketing of an image, were to become an integral part of selling practices. The package on offer included not only displays of merchandise designed to dazzle the eye, but also music, drama and other cultural events, art exhibitions, mini-zoos, roof gardens with panoramic views of Tokyo, hot houses, Shinto shrines, bandstands, huts for tea ceremonies and pergolas, not to mention in-house magazines, advertising campaigns and a whole range of other innovations. With the cultivation of the new consumerism went the promotion of a whole lifestyle.footnote3 More specific to Japan was the birth of the terminal depato. In 1929 the Hankyu Railway Company founded the prototype in its Osaka Umeda Station, heralding not only a new form of shopping, but a wholesale reorganization of contemporary urban life in Japan. While earlier department stores had still catered primarily to the more affluent, upper-middle-class clientele that had patronized the kimono shops, the terminal depato was targeted at an emergent middle- or lower-middle class who used the railway terminus as part of their everyday routine. The mass-transit companies who set up these terminal depatos at the end of their lines imitated the promotional styles of the established department stores by providing, for example, hairdressing salons and marriage bureaux, as well as restaurants selling delicacies such as swiss rolls and choux-cream éclairs (which immediately launched a popular new culinary fashion).footnote4 They also built amusement parks to cater for family weekend trips. Housing estates were constructed on land immediately adjacent to the railway lines, with the aim of increasing the number of commuters on their trains. The ultimate goal of these exercises in social engineering was to facilitate and encourage consumerism—and to attract the passengers into the department stores, strategically situated within the urban rail termini. In this chain of endless consumption, created and sustained by different groups of railway conglomerates, the terminal depato can be seen as a sort of consumerist nirvana, to which every aspect of the daily lives of Tokyo commuters is directed, their every need catered for, and their every desire potentially fulfilled—their ultimate destination, in other words, as well as their time-tabled point of arrival. Consumer vanguardism Though badly affected by the long economic downturn, the terminal depatos once housed some of the best examples of department-store art galleries in Japan. Anyone visiting Tokyo for the first time during the economic bubble of the 1980s would immediately have become aware that any self-respecting store had to have its own ‘culture hall’—whether a modestly sized display area or a more ambitious museum, with full-time curators and professionally organized exhibitions. Whatever their size, these were nearly always located at the top of the department stores. This was designed to facilitate what the Japanese call the shower effect—the process whereby, once the visitors have been enticed up to see the art-works on the top floor, they can be counted upon to come down to the lower levels to spend their money.footnote5 There were few exceptions to this ergonomic rule, and in the rare cases where galleries were located either on the ground floor level of the store or in an adjacent building, the route to the store itself was prominently signposted. How much this ‘shower effect’ actually contributed to the commercial turnover of the stores is, however, unknown. A substantial number of free entrance tickets to exhibitions were routinely given away in order to encourage people to visit the stores via their galleries. Few statistics exist outside the stores’ own private records to allow any conclusions to be drawn on what, if any, commercial benefits accrued from the display of art-works, although an insider estimated that sales increased by some 20 per cent when an exhibition was being held.footnote6 But as with other forms of corporate intervention in the art world, direct monetary return is not the businesses’ ultimate concern. The true reward of running a gallery is far less tangible but no less real: the enhancement of the patron’s social image. One of the most successful examples of this is the Seibu Museum—‘the Mecca of Modern Art’, according to one critic.footnote7 Operated by the Seibu Saison Group and located at its Ikebukuro terminus department store, the Seibu Museum was, when it opened its doors in 1975, the first with its own full-time curatorial staff ever to be run by a department store. So unique was it, indeed, that the Museum was to become the backbone of the group’s entire image strategy. Some idea of how crucial this was for the group can be gauged from the fact that its ceo, Tsutsumi Seiji, actually took personal charge of the store’s entire publicity department. The reason for this was that the reputation of the Seibu Department Store had suffered a great deal since its opening in 1952—first and foremost because the Ikebukuro district, in northwest Tokyo, along with the area covered by the Seibu Ikebukuro railway lines, were considered working-class backwaters populated predominantly by poorer country people. The floors of the Seibu store were said to be ‘spattered with mud from the clogs and straw sandals of lower-class shoppers from the countryside’.footnote8 But as far as its exhibitions were concerned, the Seibu Museum of Art was not the sort of institution that sought easy popularity by hosting, for example, Impressionist or Post-Impressionist shows or by concentrating on Western masters. Although it did feature painters such as Degas and Vuillard, it also exhibited works by Kandinsky and Antoni Tàpies as early as 1976, and Max Ernst and Richard Avedon in 1977, not to mention subjects such as ‘Hungarian Paintings from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ in 1976 and Hundertwasser in 1977.footnote9 Despite what one writer described as a ‘mad rush of visitors’ to see some of its early exhibitions—some 70,000 in the case of the Kandinsky, for example—audiences for these avant-garde shows were understandably small. These were no ordinary gallery-goers, however; they tended to be professional, middle-class opinion-formers, and contributed to the Museum as well as the store by attracting a great deal of attention from the media and general public. By the mid-70s the store’s customers, who had previously been drawn from the immediately adjacent neighbourhoods, now also came from the east and south of Tokyo, transforming it from a predominantly local shop into a truly metropolitan store with a comparatively high-income clientele. This shift was not, of course, a function of the Museum alone. From as early as the late 1960s the store had launched a massive marketing campaign to promote a new image of non-conformist commercial self-confidence.footnote10 The additional aura of sophisticated intellectualism that the Museum brought to the Ikebukuro terminal depato in particular, and to the Seibu Saison Group in general, convinced the group that they should make a long-term commitment to this least profitable part of the business; which they did, for the next twenty-five years. Among the prerequisites for this unlikely marriage between consumerism and the art world were a convergence of widely different interests (the artistic sublime meets the profit motive); a willingness to combine different social and economic codes (tradespeople as cultural critics, gallery-goers as avid shoppers, all under the same roof); and a readiness to dissolve symbolic hierarchies (bringing the highbrow down to the bargain basement, linking money-making to fine art). Fredric Jameson’s categorization of culture as ‘the very element of consumer society’ inevitably springs to mind here. Conglomerates and colonies What above all else enabled Japanese department stores, these ‘palaces of consumption’, to become patrons of culture was their partnership with big media interests. In the West newspaper or tv chains are generally content merely to sponsor art events. Their Japanese counterparts assume a more active role, actually organizing the shows themselves. Although this is not the place to detail the many ways in which media conglomerates in Japan intervene in the arts, it should be noted that they have almost as much experience as department stores in curating art exhibitions and other cultural events. To get some flavour of how significant a role mass-media groups play in the Japanese art world, one need only take the example of the Asahi Newspaper Group—perhaps equivalent to The Times of London—which had some eighteen members of staff working directly on the production of thirty exhibitions in 2001, along with another thirty to which the group lent its name as sponsor. Ten years ago, when the Japanese bubble economy was at its height, the Asahi Newspaper Group was associated, in one way or another, with as many as ninety art exhibitions.footnote11 Statistics do not, of course, tell the whole story of media involvement in the arts in Japan. But, as in the West, arts sponsorship by media businesses automatically generates a great deal of publicity. For the department-store museum, joining forces with a big newspaper group not only provides it with a valuable partner to help coordinate exhibitions, but also provides a national platform for the shows’ publicity campaigns, as well as furthering the department store’s reputation on a wider front. It has thus been normal practice in Japan for an art exhibition to be initiated either by a department-store gallery or by a media group, and for it to open first at a commercial venue before moving to state museums. Collaboration with the state sector, of course, provides further legitimation for the department stores’ interventions in the cultural sphere. In a global economy, the Japanese department-store museum has been exported to the companies’ overseas branches, most notably in Asia, where Japan was once the predominant imperial power. Japanese hegemony and influence did not, of course, suddenly vanish with the independence of its former colonies, and what Edward Said termed ‘the legacy of connections’ still binds some previously conquered territories to Japan. In Taiwan, for example, a Japanese colony for some fifty years, there are numerous branches of Japanese department stores, each with its accompanying ‘culture hall’. There are, however, crucial and significant differences. For Japanese consumers, a store might well host an exhibition of Western masterpieces, such as Rembrandt’s portrait of his wife from the Karlsruhe Museum, for example. For Taiwanese customers, on the other hand, a ‘culture hall’ could well be little more than a room where miscellaneous objets d’art or bric-a-brac are displayed and sometimes offered for sale. Could it be that their unequal treatment of home and overseas customers reflects some sort of anachronistically colonialist attitude on the part of Japanese corporations? The economic interests of global conglomerates may make it imperative for them to expand their trade into foreign lands, but the profit-making machinery of department stores does not necessarily guarantee that their native cultural mechanisms will be exported on anything like an equitable basis. It may well be that for their Taiwanese customers, Japanese department stores qualify as patrons of culture only in the most token and gestural sense of the term. Perhaps today’s economic globalization is bringing with it not the innovative cultural exchanges and inclusivity to which it professedly aspires, but old cultural habits and an exclusivity more characteristic of the nineteenth century. Packaging commerce In the late 1960s Roland Barthes went on a trip to Japan—not, of course, as a tourist (‘I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence’, he wrote, ‘to me the Orient is a matter of indifference’), but as a student of cultural sign-systems. Japan, he writes, ‘merely provid[es] a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay—allows me to “entertain” the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.’ Barthes was impressed above all by the artifice of daily life in Japan, its elaborate etiquette, its preference for surface over depth—in short, by its cultural opacity, its impenetrability for the foreigner. His Empire of Signs hardly acknowledges the existence of the political or the economic, but there is one public institution that attracted his critical attention, and brought him as close as he was ever to come to the Japanese department store. In Tokyo, he writes, The station, a vast organism which houses the big trains, the urban trains, the subway, a department store, and a whole underground commerce—the station gives the district this landmark which, according to certain urbanists, permits the city to signify, to be read. The Japanese station is crossed by a thousand functional trajectories, from the journey to the purchase, from the garment to food: a train can open onto a shoe stall. Dedicated to commerce, to transition, to departure, and yet kept in a unique structure, the station (moreover, is that what this new complex should be called?) is stripped of that sacred character which ordinarily qualifies the major landmarks of our cities: cathedrals, churches, town halls, historic monuments. Here the landmark is entirely prosaic; no doubt the market is also a central site of the Western city; but in Tokyo merchandise is in a sense undone by the station’s instability: an incessant departure thwarts its concentration; one might say that it is only the preparatory substance of the package and that the package itself is only the pass, the ticket which permits departure.footnote12 Had Barthes seen the art galleries of the railway-terminal department-store complexes at their height, he might have been even more impressed by the multi-functional character of Tokyo’s railway stations. At its heart lies the ability to juxtapose, in a complex cultural sign-system whose signifiers appear alien to Western eyes, what seem to be incompatible or even contradictory entities. Art—to take up Barthes’s image—fulfils the function of the wrapping paper: the cultural packaging, in other words, of the consumerist parcel. The process at work is one in which the status of the commercial is enhanced by investing it with the meaning of the cultural. In this sense the Japanese department-store museum can be seen as deepening Barthes’s insight, in his well-known study of fashion, that ‘meaning is what makes things sell’. footnote13