This eel-farming video would make a (not-so-) great PETA ad

According to The Irish Times, this video was made to promote the Japanese city of Shibushi, to promote its local eel farmers.

The male narrator... describes how he had vowed to do all he could to nurture her. “I fed her delicious food until she was full, and allowed her to get plenty of sleep,” he says.
Seconds later viewers are treated to a close-up of eel being cooked on a barbecue grill. “We take great care when farming our eels,” says the narrator.

Indeed! The video has since been withdrawn by authorities, but not before it caused an uproar online.

Well-founded accusations of sexism aside, I find it ironic. The concept of anthropomorphizing animals we eat is a common tactic used by PETA:

Either way, the image of women as pieces of meat is pretty unpalatable.

Thanks to KP for the tip!

The most beautiful censorship you will ever see

Dorkly shared this made-for-viral video for BUYMA, a Japanese fashion brand.

According to Spoon & Tomago, it was created by Dentsu and creative director Takashi Sakuma. It was aired on Japanese television only once, on December 13, 2015.

The beauty of the human body in movement meets the choreography of drones. You've got to admit: It's pretty cool. Just watch out for those blades!

100 robotic humans vs. 100 humanoid robots

First off, I want to mention how ultimately icky this Flavorstone frying pan ad is. (By  Dentsu, Tokyo, via Ads of The World.)

I mean, the choreography is impressive, but 100 young women in short-skirted maid outfits, all working to satisfy some old guy's weird fetish? Not exactly progressive:

And then, coincidentally, Mashable just recently posted this:

So there you have it: 100 humans vs. 100 robots, battling for your viral attention. The humans have sexual objectification on their side. But then again, the robots do not.

Most unsexy condom ad ever?

We're seen some great condom ads lately. This is not one of them.

Created by Ogilvy & Mather, Japan, for e-tailer Condomania, this campaign features shrink-wrapped naked couples in very awkward-looking embraces:

Perhaps the humour is just foreign to me. But they look like dead, packaged meat. Ewww.

Via Ads Of The World

Canadian Cancer Society vs. Zentai

When we process so much cultural information at such breakneck speeds, weir coincidences pop up all the time.

Zentai enthusiasts, via BBC

It happened to me last week, when this February PSA by the Canadian Cancer Society showed up in my Facebook feed:



Then literally moments later, a BoingBoing post about a Japanese fad called Zentai caught my attention on Twitter:

Zentai (short for "zenshintaitsu," Japanese for "full body suit") is a largely obscure Japanese subculture whose adherents go out wearing full-body patterned spandex suits that cover their faces. In a relatively unsensational article in the Japan Times, Harumi Ozawa talks to a few zentais about their hobby, and learns that for some proponents, being completely covered is a liberating experience. The zentais in the article describe the suit as an anonymizer that frees them from the judging gaze of society, which is a fascinating study in contradictions, since the suits undoubtably attract lots of judgmental looks, but these seem to adhere to the suit without penetrating to the wearer within. 

Some zentais wear their suits in superhero fashion, and do good deeds in public, while others wear the suits for sexual kicks. They are often mocked in Japanese pop culture. One academic cited in the article believes that the wearers use the suits to hide their appearance in order to force others to deal with their "true" underlying identity.

I'm not going to pull the knee-jerk Western "bwahaha, Japanese culture is so weird" thing here. Rather, I'm interested to know if the Japanese fad directly influenced the low-budget Canadian PSA. After all, these memes shoot around the world in moments, and we're all soaking in a sort of cultural stone soup that attracts all kinds of random ingredients.

What happens when white people are the ones being stereotyped?

Japanese airline ANA (All Nippon Airways) recently ran an ad that features two Japanese pilots discussing how to make their brand more appealing to foreigners.

The answer, apparently, is to "westernize" the brand by adopting Euro-American displays of physical affection and donning "whiteface" — in the form of a blond wig and an elongated artificial nose:

 

According to the Japan Times, the ad caused a flurry of social media outrage among English-language viewers in Japan.

Here's one:

If you are a foreigner and have planned to come to #Japan do not chose an openly racist airline like #ANA ! Watch their Japanese commercial!
— Sibylle Ito (@sibylleito) January 20, 2014

The airline has apparently semi-apologized for the offence, and plans to re-edit the ad:

ANA spokesman Ryosei Nomura said the carrier wanted to express the importance of the upcoming international flights at Haneda and to urge Japanese to go out and see the world. 

“But we have received opinions different from the message that we wished to convey. We will modify part of the advertisement and will release the second version soon,” he said.

While stereotyping is stereotyping, no matter who does it,  this is an opportunity for people like me to feel some of the emotions that are felt by other groups of people (including the Japanese) who are constantly caricatured in western media. I qualify this with "some of" because of course we are not a group that suffers from historical or institutionalized racism. In other words, no white people were actually harmed by this ad.

This isn't the first time that Japanese advertising stereotypes of westerners have made the news, and it probably won't be the last. Here are some other examples:

This week, Japanese restaurant chain Gusto started running a new series of commercials. It features the above woman, a "handsome foreign man" as the chain's website says, and two comedians. So, what's the problem? 

The two Japanese comedians in the commercial, Ungirls, can be funny—at times. For this spot, they are "disguised". This is a Japanese pun: "Ungirls" is written as "Angaaruzu" (アンガールズ) in Japanese, and they are disguised as "Italiangirls", or "Itariangaaruzu" (イタリアンガールズ) in the original Japanese. 

In the commercial, the foreign woman sings a little jingle, asking with whom she is going to eat some Caponata. She picks the handsome foreign dude, instead of either member of the comedy group Ungirls. Part of the comedic schtick of Ungirls is that they are creepy and not popular with the ladies. That's the gag. Apparently.

- kotaku.com, 2013

Screenshot (Video has been removed)

The ad for “SuiDanPa”, [Toshiba]’s newest rice maker that can also make bread, shows two business women talking about their love for bread and/or rice. They are the two featured characters in a series of spots for Toshiba, but this time around, one of the women dons a blond wig, wears a fake big nose and speaks in a heavy Japanese accent and with her words subtitled in katakana. This is the normal stereotype in Japan of what Westerners, particularly white people, look and talk like. And while some have said that the ad is trying to be ironic, maybe they should look up what the word actually means, because it seems to perpetuate and even exploit that particular stereotype.
- Japan Daily Press, 2013

Racism by peakfloods

A commercial for Choya umeshu mocks the physical appearance of non-Japanese. 

- Japan Probe, 2011

The white guy in the photo above is Mr. James, the mascot for 4 new burgers of McDonald’s “Nippon All-Stars” series. Residents of Japan who have been riding JR trains or passing by McDonald’s restaurants have probably already seen his face on advertisements. In his TV commercials, Mr. James speaks annoying foreigner Japanese (not unlike the wacky foreigner who spoke NIPPONGO in a recent Sony Commercial). Print advertisements convey his goofy gaijin Japanese by rendering everything he says in katakana [a syllabary is primarily used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words].

- Japan Probe, 2009 

This Japanese McDonald's recruitment video is actually kind of neat

Two young guys go into a McDonald's, and are transformed into dancin', burger flippin', uniformed party machines:



You watched it all, didn't you? There's something kind of mesmerizing about it. The handwashing sequence is oddly drawn out, but I hear hygiene is a really big deal over there.

This isn't exactly honest advertising, when it comes to the realities of fast food work. Especially under Mcdonald's Japan's high-pressure 60-second service guarantee. But this one is obviously more about instilling pride in the job.

Tip via Rocketnews24

Branding women's thighs for fun and profit

I first heard of this trend when Copyranter posted about it yesterday.

Absolute Territory PR is a Japanese company that is renting and selling ad space on young women's thighs.

You heard that right. According to Oddity Central, more than 1,300 women (all over 18) have applied for the agency’s service.

Clients include a number of Japanese domestic brands, but what got the West's attention was their promotion for Green Day's latest album release.

Why the thigh? A 2009 survey of Japanese men on their favourite fetishes ranked "Skin between knee socks and skirt" as the most attractive part of women's bodies. This stretch of upper thigh is known as "absolute territory" — explaining the name of the media buyer.

The idea is that creepy older men are transfixed by these women's thighs anyway, so you might as well put an ad there. As you can see by the screencap above, some of the ads have really small copy, which would require really close inspection. 

If anyone who speaks Japanese cares to wade through the Absolute Territory PR site to see if there are any details on the ad placement contract, please let me know. I wonder if this company is asking women to sign away their rights to not getting eye-groped everywhere they go.

Miranda Kerr's Japanese ad moment #FdAdFriday

Okay, so she's a lemon Mrs. Claus and she appears to have been dubbed with a Japanese accent.



My favourite part is what seems to be a drunken Santa in the background.

Keep them coming, Japanese ad industry. They never fail to perplex us over here.

Via The Gloss (where you can see another of her ads in the campaign).

Toyota embraces transgender sexuality

This is a Japanese Toyota ad for the 2013 Auris (Corolla) starring 19-year-old Ukrainian-born model Stav Strashko.



Whoa. I doubt we'll see it in the United States anytime soon.

Via BuzzFeed

This is how they sell video games in Japan now

Ummmm....

I don't think you need to speak Japanese to get the overal message of this Sega promotional video, starring bikini model Yukie Kawamura. She plays the popular video game Super Monkey Ball on the new PS Vita platform. (Apparently this is a big deal.) During the play, she balances a bubble in her cleavage, is visited by a giant monkey mascot, and does contortions for the amusement of the all-male crew.



There is also a shorter vid, which shows new "adult" features of the game.

Gamma Squad's Nathan Birch describes it thusly:

"Sega’s Super Monkey Ball series is about cute cartoon moneys rolling around in hamster balls collecting bananas. It’s about as kid-friendly as a series can get, so of course Sega, master of understanding what makes its own franchises work, has added “adult” levels to the upcoming PS Vita version of Monkey Ball. 

Yup, in these levels the normal floor textures have been replaced by pictures of Japanese bikini model Yukie Kawamura, whose protruding breasts act as obstacles for your adorable hamster ball monkeys. So yeah, basically some burnt out developer at Sega, depressed at being forced to work on yet another Monkey Ball game, just decided to dump the contents of his softcore porn file into the game instead of designing textures."

"Adult"? ...right. It's all about attracting more adolescent boys and turning them into men who fantasize about weird shit like this:

Wait... what?

Coincidentally, "sega" is Italian slang for male masturbation (from the verb "segare", "to saw")...

Hello Hooters #vday

Remember when Burger King and CP+B got in trouble for sexualizing Spongebob Squarepants in a kiddie promotion? Apparently that would have been fine in Japan, where Hooters is Using Hello Kitty in a "sexy" Valentine's Day dessert promotion.

Via Eater

Oh well, I guess that poor cartoon cat has been through worse humiliations.

F'd Ad Fridays: What what? In the dog's butt...

Now that's an unpleasant campaign. Ogilvy & Mather, Japan, would like you to know that Sneaker Freaker Magazine is doing something about the urban dog shit issue.

Really:



Tip via Ads of The World

F'd Ad Fridays: She's shitting

I have no idea wat they're actually saying, but this vintage Japanese Star Wars ripoff has so much else wrong with it, I might as well think it's about the laxative qualities of canned tuna.



Via illegal advertising

F'd Ad Fridays: Effin' SALE

This Japanese in-store advertising is actually kind of awesome.

Via Copyranter

I think Japan has a new slang term for "big ass"

At least, it will when people eat enough "Grand Canyon Burgers" — which tops the patty with cooked egg, mozzarella, Cheddar cheese and steak sauce made with soy and liquid smoke.

In case you're interested, the "Las Vegas" is topped with cheese sauce and more beef (looks like Steak-umms — shouldn't that be the Philadelphia Burger then?) The Broadway has a cream cheese and mustard sauce, and the Beverly Hills is another egg one.

Via Burger Business

Japanese Triple Whopper ad is weird

Creative sessions in Japanese ad agencies must be truly surreal experiences.

"That burger is ridiculously huge. How the hell are you supposed to get it in your mouth."

"If only you could expand your jaw, like a snake."

"Brilliant! Get the storyboard artist in here!"

Tip via Buzzfeed

F'd Ad Fridays: Calorie-burning underpants from Japan

Loyal Reader Martha W sent this link my way:



Apparently, the honeycomb construction of these undergarments burns extra calories, both in workouts and in everyday life, by adding resistance to every movement.

Yeah, sounds totally legit.

F'd Ad Fridays: Babymetal

Japanese schoolgirl pop death metal. Why not?

Thanks to Kerry for the link.

F'd Ad Fridays: Is it a warning or a "how to" ad?

Via imgur