brand name

Nike

Adidas

is paying more for something so others know you're paying more for something.

, in Japan, serves as an opportunity to deny one's personality and take on someone else's; it's an opportunity to reflect not your own personality, but that of the brand.

People think that by buying up designer purses they are somehow asserting their own style, he said, laughing. 'But if you slavishly buy a brand product, you can deny your personality and take on someone else's. Eventually it's not any reflection of your own personality, but of the brand's.

brand

consumerism

Japan

Japanese culture

is so popular in Japan because there is no religion, so the Japanese exist in appearances.

According to Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist, materialism matters so much to the modern Japanese because their society long ago discarded most of the nation's spiritual character to make room for Western values and lifestyles, part of the nation's grab-bag strategy of foreign acquisition. To accommodate its desire for modernity, for instance, Japan even moved its New Year's celebration from the period indicated on the Chinese lunar calendar to the West's January 1. 'We don't have religion in Japan, so what exist are appearances,' Yamada explained. 'If you look good, you must be having a good life.' Owning a Vuitton clutch offers that assurance and forestalls serious self-reflection. Indeed, many brand-name shoppers seem to agree with Yamada's analysis. 'Wearing any kind of brand makes you feel more self-confident,' said Mayumi, a twenty-one-year-old dental assistant, who was sporting one of those must-have Vuitton purses, a Bulgari necklace, and a Gucci watch. 'It just makes you feel good.'4

appearance

fashion

religion

brand awareness

Japanese fashion

, 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.

brand name, n.All

brand name