Japan’s Commercials Are Trying to Tell Us Something

Every culture’s advertising is a direct readout of its collective anxieties and desires, but Japan’s operates in a register that seems specifically designed to break Western pattern recognition. The basic format conventions are all there—problem, product, solution, jingle—but the execution involves sumo wrestlers singing at high volume, creatures that have no business existing, and physical comedy that reads like slapstick with all the shame systematically removed.

I go through compilation videos of these sometimes in the morning when I need to shock my brain into basic functioning. Three minutes of a man in a frog suit weeping into a bowl of instant noodles while a chorus sings the brand name, and suddenly my own problems seem remarkably well-defined by comparison.

Part of what makes them work—if "work" is the right word—is that they don’t try to be cool. Western advertising has been infected for decades by the compulsion to be aspirational, to make you feel the product belongs to people living better than you. Japanese commercials often seem genuinely indifferent to this. Tommy Lee Jones ran a long-running series of canned coffee ads in Japan as a visiting alien who finds human behavior baffling. This was considered effective marketing. He won awards.

There’s real craft underneath the chaos too. The timing is precise. The absurdism follows internal logic, even when that logic is completely illegible from the outside. A pair of laughing breasts in a Japanese ad doesn’t follow the same rules as a pair of laughing breasts in a British one, and the difference is structural, not just cultural. Whatever is happening on screen is happening exactly as intended.

Which might be the whole point. Advertising strange enough to remember is still advertising. And I remember all of it.