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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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