Japan as a Consumer Culture

Consumer culture has long been a major index when scholars discuss Japan. From electrical appliances to computer games and their character-related merchandise to luxury designer-brand fashions, a variety of commodities produced and circulated by Japanese companies have a strong presence across the globe. Also, Japanese shoppers enthusiastically hitting the high street are a part of everyday scenes in major cities in rich as well as developing countries. Today, the great maturity of Japanese consumer culture—namely, its pervasiveness and strong weight in the national economy as well as individuals' lives based on large-scale, well-developed production systems and information technologies—is, perhaps, the element of Japanese society most frequently exposed to non-Japanese audiences (cf. Clammer 1997; Alison 2006).

A variety of scholars have studied consumer culture in Japan from ...