Book Info: Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers: An Anthropologist Reads Research by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (Consumasian Book Series) By John L. McCreery University of Hawaii Press; (December 1, 1999); pp. 278
	Conspicuous Consumption The author's website   Hakuhodo   Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living   And Hakuhodo's main competitor Dentsu

Prada or Playstation?
By: Yuki Allyson Honjo

There is a prevalent myth both inside and outside of Japan that the land of the Rising Sun is, as it were, a country with a monolithic culture and uniform tastes—the dark suit, the Hermes tie, the black leather shoes with white socks. A walk in Shibuya, an area of Tokyo where one is hopelessly passé once over the age of twenty, tells a different story. There are the freaks, dressed like Bozo the Clown complete with Day-Glo colored wigs, the Goths with their artfully bloodied wrist bandages, boys in too-sharp zoot suits, the trendy princesses with their Kate Spade bags, and of course, the ganguro girls who lace-up platform suede boots, sport dark tans and bleached hair, and have a penchant for ice-blue eye shadow by the pound.

John McCreery asks us, "Can we safely ignore the fact that while all these generations have grown up in place called Japan, each has come (or is coming) of age in a radically different world?" His book, Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers, An Anthropologist Reads Research by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, attempts to explain not just Japanese consumer behavior but various lifestyle choices.

McCreery sets out a number of tasks for himself: first, he seeks to show that the Japanese consumer is more than a mere blue-suited "worker bee." McCreery points out that even the Japanese "salaryman" has different faces: his private self, his work self, his social self, and his family self are all different, with distinct consumer preferences. Women, children and the elderly, often neglected in a generic image of Japan, Inc., are also important consumers and have their own lifestyle patterns. McCreery's other major objective is to write an ethnography of Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (HILL), Japan's first think tank dedicated to consumer behavior.

The title is ultimately misleading: the main focus of the book is not on the Japanese consumer per se, but those at HILL who observe Japanese consumers. Created in 1981 by Hakuhodo, Japan's second largest advertising agency, HILL is a commercial think tank best known for its topical market studies in its publication The Lifestyle Times (Seikatsu Shinbun), which specializes in brief "guerilla ethnographies," on unfolding trends.

The Lifestyle Times does not seek to give dry objective analysis, but instead works to capture the emotional responses of its subjects and, at the same time, be an interesting read in itself. Each issue of The Lifestyle Times is individually designed, often with unique drawings, layout and typeface specially created for each publication. As an ethnography, McCreery's book is successful: he translates and reproduces interviews, surveys, and newsletters that illustrate the goals and aspirations of HILL. He gives the reader a nuanced flavor of the group and its ideals, and the reader can sense McCreery's genuine affection for his subject.

The format of McCreery's book and the way he presents information is in itself a testament to The Lifestyle Times. He tells the read from the outset that presenting Hakuhodo in standard academic prose would "destroy interesting data" and "remove the unique flavor" of HILL's presentation. Thus the author allows the information to speak out for itself whenever possible. The bulk of the book is comprised of translated documents from HILL. In addition, McCreery translates the covers of the various newsletters and describes the artwork in detail as well as reproducing them for the reader to examine. Through the context of an ethnography, he thoroughly illustrates (the rather obvious) fact that Japanese consumers have wants, needs, and habits that are constantly in flux. He illustrates his points with nuggets of primary data. One particularly amusing tidbit was on how salarymen slacked off at work. HILL outlines six forms of "ninja breaks," which included "going on patrol"—walking around pestering others while pretending to have a purpose, and "hiding in the snow"—which is reading and napping in a bathroom stall. HILL went as far as noting that Japanese-style toilets are not conducive for this form of ninja break because it is easy for one's feet to fall asleep in the squatting position.

Unfortunately, McCreery's greatest strength is ultimately his undoing. By allowing his data to stand alone, he does not analyze the situation and we are left with a mound of raw, unprocessed information. The reader is left with the rather daunting task of separating trends from trivia. In addition, McCreery's methodology can be opaque to the non-anthropologist: it is not always clear, for example, why and how he chose certain themes and issues. In terms of Japanese consumer behavior itself, the book is at times like looking at the world through someone else's broken glasses—it is unclear if the ideas are McCreery's observing HILL, HILL's observing the Japanese consumer, or the Japanese consumers themselves. Such dislocations make the book unwieldy, and the information he provides, hard to use. In short, unless the reader is a student in comparative anthropology, the book says little directly about the Japanese consumer, except for the fact that timeframe, age, wealth and location are all factors in purchase decisions, but we could of guessed this much already.

McCreery has a number of ambitious goals which manage to obscure the real data and analysis that comprise the core of the book. Furthermore, McCreery does not make any sort of judgement of Hakuhodo. The reader wants to know: Was Hakuhodo any good? Is the future of the Japanese consumer set in stone? Or perhaps the most important question of all, Are the Japanese just like us after all? McCreery offers only lukewarm insights into this thorny and tantalizing subject—too bad, really.

Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers. A good effort. A complex subject. But in the end, the subject consumes McCreery: we are left wanting more.

Yuki Allyson Honjo. "A look at the folks who look at Japan's consumers." The Asahi Evening News. October 29, 2000. Pg. 4.