brand name

consumerism

Japan

Japanese culture

, in Japan, is used like fetishes. Comforting as a child's security blanket, high-status brands like Gucci and Vuitton serve as soporifics to ease and calm a vacant national psyche.

Masao Miyamoto. When I visited him one day about six months before his death to talk about the Japanese obsession with brands, he explained that his countrymen used them like fetishes. Comforting as a child's security blanket, high-status brands like Gucci and Vuitton serve as soporifics to ease and calm a vacant national psyche. 'The [Japanese] system has encouraged people not to think for themselves,' Miyamoto told me. To the Japanese people who have lost confidence in their government and in themselves after a dismal no-growth decade, a label like Gucci or Prada offers an implicit guarantee of safety and security anywhere in the world. And the more insecure the Japanese people feel in their volatile and unstable world, he told me, the more they'll seek such fetish-like goods to make themselves feel better.

Masao MiyatoThinkers

Masao Miyato