Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Thoughts on Tokyo – Part VI – Tokyo – it’s all about the hair and the mask

9:30PM on Sunday night in Tokyo and the Hair Salon is bustling. There are actually people waiting their turn to spend more than $ 100US to color, tease, and style the head s of 36,000,000 people. Maybe it’s just sheer numbers but I have never seen so many hair salons in my life. The Japanese are so very into their hair. Guys too. I had great difficulty in processing that fact. The guys had colored their hair – that Henna color being the preferred shade. Then the teased odd hairdo’s that were I assume to suggest a highly self-expressive individual. I felt it made men look like a bunch of wusses. Maybe the women like that but I can’t really say for sure.

But servicing the customer is what the hair salons are all about and staying open late on a Sunday night speaks to that more than anything else could. I am also aware that so many young unmarried Japanese women live at home with their parents (cultural and economical) and have ‘disposable’ income. That income seems to direct line to their hair and clothes. But the guys too? I fail to understand how looking like someone should beat you up would attract the ladies. Yet another reason why hard as I try I just don’t really understand the Japanese.

Almost all the Japanese dress stylishly even to go to the market. On Saturday or Sunday as well. Many of the outfits are chic and tasteful and then there are those that border on the provocative. They guys look more like they stepped out of a bad George Michael Video. Then there is the mask thing. I was there during allergy season but even though I had seen photos of Asian people wearing hygiene masks I was not prepared for the amount of people wearing them as they walked around and rode the subway. Apparently after WWII a host of cedar trees were planted in Tokyo and the residents suffer miserably in the spring during allergy season. But at times it was 50% of the people. Alarming. And something you would never see in the United States.

The other mask I noticed in Japan was the one worn by people when they were alone just walking around going about their business. Implacid faces, vacant looks, I am trying not to think it was just me but their overall demeanor was radically different when there were two or more people. Americans may not be the most friendly people on the planet but they will at least look at you when you walk by. The mask must protect people but I admit I had no success in getting used to it.
There are many things that make Tokyo so very different from the western world – I keep thinking of new ones all the time.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Thoughts on Tokyo – Part III – Tokyo is no place for direct mail

I remember the first time I went to Tokyo in 2000. The area in which my friends were living was very chic and filled with westerners. Where my friends live now (they have moved around several times) is also a very nice area but more typically Japanese with few westerners (that’s means you!). But the thing all these areas seem to share is that there are (except for major thoroughfares) no street signs and no street addresses posted. How does the mailman know where to go? They do it by neighborhood and somehow it works. But it does not work if you want to send any kind of offer to the household aside from a generic message on behalf of a neighborhood business.

Japan does not have lists of people to buy and sell as is the case in the U.S. and many other places. Since the population is so homogenous there is no need for demographic and psychographic profiling. People are not all that different – at least city people are city people and country people are country people. In Japan mail is delivered 7 days a week and you pretty much have to check your mailbox every time you return home. I did not get to see any offers from companies that may have provided services to my friend but I imagine that there may be some mailing to customer files but then again maybe not. I was told how efficient the Japanese postal service is, and that would be consistent with just about everything in Japan. The Japanese postal service is being privatized over the next 9+ years. This is something that is often discussed about the USPS but never really seems to gain any real traction.

The cultural reasons would seem to be many for why there is no customer list industry in Japan but I am sure that there are many Americans that would prefer if there were little advertising mail in the United States. There are however no shortages of direct response television ads and some of the same characters that hawk products on American television can be seen doing the same complete with dubbing, subtitles etc. for selling those products in Japan. I wonder if the Japanese will use the mail any differently as the amount of advertising messages continue to increase there as much as in the U.S... I for one think it is a channel that could be leveraged but it would not be easy (what is easy these days?).

And don’t ever just throw your unwanted mail in the garbage. In Tokyo your neighbors make up what I call the ‘garbage police’. The recycling standards are quite high in Tokyo and as gai-jin (foreign people) are not fully familiar with garbage protocols you can spend fifteen minutes being admonished by your neighbor due to your errors in separating your garbage. These people take this stuff seriously! Good thing though – 36 million people have big time garbage potential. And even with the strict standards there are mutant super crows that prowl the streets of Tokyo. These birds are scary big and appear to have hit the steroid stash. They make noise 24 hours a day and frequently made me feel as if I were in an Edgar Allen Poe story or Alfred Hitchcock movie. I have heard that the crows have actually gone after people and they take small animals regularly. One final observation about garbage in Tokyo (and Europe for that matter) – re: public garbage cans. There aren’t many. Having been to Europe twice in the past 9 months as well as Tokyo I have never carried my trash around more in my life. However the streets of Europe and Tokyo were infinitely cleaner than in New York (not saying much) or most other places in the U.S. Yes there is a correlation. But it would take an American quite some time to get used to that!