A common Japanese expression asserts, ko wa takara, (children are treasures). Japan's earliest poetry anthology, the Manyoshu, compiled in A.D. 753, expresses the sentiment as, treasure which excels everything else, could there be anything equal to (Kojima 1986:123-24). In present day Japan, the perception of children as treasures often implies indulging them with unprecedented consumer offerings. A spokesperson for a company that designs child-oriented shopping theme parks told me in a 1991 interview that the children's market was the predicted pre-eminent arena of Japanese consumerism for the decade of the 1990s. What was perhaps most significant about this statement is that in 1990 Japan marked a new all-time record low birthrate for the eleventh year in a row (Shibaguchi 1991).(2) Far from foretelling the doom of children's sales, Japan's declining birthrate has propelled goods and services directed at children to new extremes. Takayama Hideo, director of the Children's Research Institute, explains, Fewer children are surrounded by more rich adults and that means that the money spent on each child increases (quoted in Blustein 1991). Children themselves also have more money to spend. As the actual birthrate declined, Japan witnessed the birth of the five pocket child, meaning that with so few children, each child now receives larger gifts of money, such as otoshidama (New Year's Money) from several indulging sources, and hence metaphorically needs one pocket each for money received from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighboring households, and others. This article reports on the construction of shopping worlds for parents and children in Japan. Like Seiter (1992:233), it presumes that not only consumer goods, but promotional catalogues and even the physical space of store layouts constitute cultural objects. These establish a physical reality heavily imbued with symbolic meaning and thus, in Mukerji's (1983:15) terms, create a setting for behavior that compels people toward certain forms of action. Despite Japan's burgeoning economy and its characterization as a consumer society, there is very little research on how children are socialized for culture- and gender-appropriate shopping behavior. To address these issues, I utilize the concept of edutainment (Creighton 1992). Edutainment is the fusion of education and entertainment offerings, particularly popular or mass culture entertainments that take on educating functions or invoke a pretense of having such functions. What Graburn (1983) calls the Pray, Pay, and Play philosophy of Japanese tourism reveals that pleasure travel is often socially validated in the guise of pilgrimage. I suggest that in a similar vein, invoking education in Japan serves to legitimize many hobbies or leisure activities that might otherwise be construed as overly indulgent fun. Of course, this is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. The genesis of consumer cultures elsewhere generated amusements frequently proffered in the guise of education (see Williams 1982; Bowlby 1985; Benson 1986). Heininger (1984:30) contends that educational toys promising self-improvement and self-education were an important part of the American children's market by the early nineteenth century. However, in order to understand how edutainment operates within a cultural setting, it is essential to explore its relationship to that culture's ideologies of education. A great deal of work has been done on early childhood education and socialization through formal educational institutions in Japan (e.g., White 1987; Lewis 1984, 1989; Hendry 1986; Ben-Ari 1987; Boocock 1989; Peak 1989, 1991). Tobin, Wu, and Davidson (1989:2) point out that preschools are embedded in cultures; they reflect and affect social change. Stores, too, are embedded in cultures, also reflecting and shaping social trends, and Japanese stores operate in Beauchamp's (1991) framework as institutions of informal schooling. …