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'Dressing down' meets resistance in Japan

September 22, 1999

By Edward Neilan
Special to World Tribune.com

T OKYO -- Coming back to Japan after spending the summer in San Francisco and Washington D.C. is, in some ways, like returning to the 1950s.

Oh sure, the Japanese are great imitators, adapters and importers of foreign trends and inventions. Look at baseball, McDonald's hamburgers and the automobile industry.

Look at 7-11 convenience stores. The Japanese liked the idea as a replacement to independent "Mom and Pop" shops so much that they began to franchise them from then-U.S. owner Southland Corp. Then the Japanese bought Southland, refined the convenience store concept through inventory computerizaton, and expanded.

The result is that the world's most efficient and profitable convenience stores today are located in population-dense places like Yokohama and Sapporo rather than Falls Church, Virginia, or Modesto, California.

But not every trend, fad or fashion imported from the U.S. is a winner here.

Take "dressing down " generally and its specific application in the workplace, "casual Fridays."

The former is an across-the-board relaxation of dress codes and styles in everytihng from "coat and tie required" in upscale restaurants to the spectacle of seniors attending church services in sports shirts.

In the U.S., such scenes are rampant. In Japan, they are rare.

One social critic in the U.S. said "In ths era of air travel as cattle drive, it is hard to believe we used to dress up just to get on an airplane."

Where and when did Americans start to look so untidy? Some analysts trace the syndrome to the unwashed hippies or "flower children" of the 1960s.

Others blame the spread of Casual Fridays, which ignited in the late 1980s, on Silicon Valley, where twentysomething multimillionaires are proud to pose for national magazine covers in bare feet.

According to the latest surveys, nine out of 10 office workers in America are allowed to dress casually to work at least occasionally.

Casual Friday has become Casual Every Day for more than half of Ameica's officeworkers (that's up 22 percent since 1995), accordin to a suvey commissined by Levi Stauss & Co.

In Japan , a similar survey by a magazine which monitors trends, the figure showed that nationally only one in 10 Japanese office workers was allowed to dress casually sometimes. Even in more sophisticated population centers like Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka, the figure was barely three in 10.

"What do you expect," a Japanese journalist commented, "in a country where campaigning politicians all wear dark suits and white gloves? Al Gore cowboy hats and George W. Bush informality don't play here."

As Japan's population grows older, more television advertising aims at affluent "nice middies"--women who are no longer "young" but not quitemiddle-aged. In one such series, three "nice-middies" discuss what stylish outfits they will be wearing in their weekly "Bullet Train" trips from Osaka to Tokyo and back.

My Tokyo neighbor, matronly Mrs. Takeuchi, says she always buys a new outfit at Mitsukoshi Department Store for her quarterly plane trips to Sapporo to visit her daughter.

"Casual Friday" works fine and is appreciated at Kikkoman Corp., the soy sauce folks, says Executive Communications Consultant Patrick J. .Killen. The firm approved "abandoning neckties" on Fridays about five years ago, he said.

At the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, whose main dining room is one of the city's most cosmopolitan, another type of problem has surfaced. Forward-looking managemnet has allowed club staff, including waiters, to wear informal polo shirts on Fridays.

But some longtime patrons of the dining room, where to be tieless is to be deemed tasteless, object on the grounds that waiters' service standards have declined along with the staff dress code.

Edward Neilan (eneilan@crisscross.com) is a veteran journalist, based in Tokyo, who covers East Asia and writes weekly for World Tribune.com.

September 22, 1999


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