Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club by Ory Bartal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club by Ory Bartal Nobuko Kawashima (bio) Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club. By Ory Bartal. Dartmouth College Press, Lebanon, N.H., 2015. xii, 263 pages. $85.00, cloth; $45.00, paper; $44.99, E-book. It has been some decades since our economy has become culturized and our society media-saturated, and commercial culture in particular permeates our daily lives today. Research on Japanese culture available in English has advanced in recent decades by expanding its earlier focus on classical, high culture to include elements of commercial culture such as manga and anime. However, research on advertising has remained relatively scant until recently, despite the prominence of advertisements in contemporary media and their important role in financing the production of commercial culture. Thus, Postmodern Advertising in Japan, which discusses the visual culture of advertisements in Japan, is a very welcome, long-awaited addition to the literature. Ory Bartal specifically focuses on graphic art (posters) for advertising in Japan designed in the 1980s and the 1990s by members of the Tokyo Art Directors Club (Tokyo ADC), a prestigious and exclusive association to which only highly acclaimed art directors in the commercial advertising world are admitted. For Bartal, these advertisements are postmodernistic, of high artistic quality, and have gained a worldwide reputation. New styles, concepts, and visual strategies are employed in these posters, which, Bartal asserts, blur the distinction between art and commerce. With the ultimate purpose of untangling the “Japanese-ness” of Japanese advertising, Bartal distances himself from an orientalist direction and situates the commercial visual culture of Japan within the global context. He does this not only by undertaking aesthetic and cultural decoding of the advertising posters under investigation but also by emphasizing the exploration of the social, economic, and industrial contexts in which the commercial art works were created. Readers might wonder how the author combined these different approaches so successfully. Bartal holds an MBA and was a marketing expert in Israeli companies for more than ten years before pursuing a doctorate at the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Tel Aviv. Bartal’s mixed academic background straddling the social sciences and humanities is unusual—and valuable for content analysis in advertising. Marketing research (in which advertising research is normally included) is typically about business efficiency and effectiveness with little or no content analysis, whereas aesthetic research is about the textual analysis of [End Page 379] cultural expressions with little regard to how they are made in economic terms. The sociology of advertising may examine the context in which specific advertisements emerge at the macro-societal level but not really at the micro level, leaving aside questions of financing and business interactions that must have influenced the production of those advertisements. Cultural studies of advertising may pay attention to the business structure of the advertising industry that produces art works but are mostly concerned with the power relations between different classes and groups of employees and professionals in the industry. Bartal takes a tack different from any of these approaches and analyzes the structures, colors, and words of the posters; discusses why the posters took the forms they did within the Japanese economic and social contexts of the times; and investigates under what conditions and with what thoughts and intentions they were produced by individual art directors. A useful strategy undertaken by Bartal in exploring the conditions of production at the micro level is his interviews with selected art directors, all of whom are members of the Tokyo ADC, as he saw the club as a pivotal point around which visual expressions of advertising blossomed during the 1980s and the 1990s. The book is organized into four parts: the history of Japanese advertising and the place of the Tokyo ADC within it; the aesthetics of Japanese visual culture and its relevance to the postmodern, commercial posters that are the focus of the book; the marketing and business features of the Japanese advertising industry that are different from the global norm; and, finally, social forces. All these factors, Bartal argues, have contributed to postmodern advertising culture...