Asian Perceptions of Nature

A Critical Approach

Ole Bruun, Arne Kalland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700702909
• eBook ISBN: 9781136777769
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This highly acclaimed, 'bold and refreshing' collection of essays takes a critical look at Asians' perception of their natural environments as well as at Western views of Asia in this respect.

Brian Moeran and Lise Skov

Japanese Advertising Nature

Ecology, Fashion, Women and Art

In this paper, we will deconstruct the idea of a special connection between women and nature by examining the use of natural imagery in what constitutes a vast market for advertising in Japan: women’s magazines.¹ Our aim, in particular, is to look at the way in which the two themes of ecology and nature have been taken up in Japanese women’s magazine reportage and advertisements, and to explore these as elements in a cultural discourse of femininity and consumption.

Why women’s magazines? Because, firstly, it is generally recognized that in most contemporary societies women are the main consumers of most kinds of commodities (with certain prominent exceptions). In this respect, one might even argue that the study of advertising and media as such is simply a branch of women’s studies in general. A second, and more ambivalent, reason for focussing on women’s magazines is that there has been a line of cultural thought, including anthropological argument, which assigns women a natural function connected to their biological child-bearing abilities. This has, in passing, been used to suggest that certain social rules are a result of the incest taboo which, as the ‘supreme rule of the gift’, obliges men to exchange their women so that, further, the whole of civilization is made to rest on women’s biology. In its shorthand version, this argument equates men with culture, and women with nature (e.g. Beauvoir 1989; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). It is with this line of thought that we wish to take issue here. Rather than seeing the relationship between women and nature as part of a set of fixed dichotomies, we suggest that it is an open-ended image cluster which includes occasionally contradictory and surprising elements, inviting endless variations and combinations.

This is not to suggest that it is impossible or even difficult, in Japan as elsewhere, to find advertisements in women’s magazines which make use of the idea of ‘woman as nature’. For example, in both reportage and advertising, we find that women are often equated with flowers both visually and linguistically. This can be seen in a split-frame advertisement for Attwood jewellery (Fig. 1). On the left is a heavily contrasted colour photograph of a woman whose black-gloved hands and arms are held across her low-cut bright red dress. Her oiled, raven-black hair is combed back from her high forehead and held in a bun. We see only half her face – one eye, one side of her nose, just over one half of her brightly painted red lips. From her ears hang two large glittering ear-rings, while just above her décolleté bosom she wears a matching necklace, with a brooch on what must be a fur coat draped over her right shoulder. There is something about the light on her face and the dappled background which makes it seem as if she is sitting in the shade of a tree in the late afternoon sunlight. To the side of the picture, the headline reads in English: Petal Power by Attwood.

This advertisement illustrates two points. Firstly, whereas the anthropological ‘woman as nature’ argument links women’s bodies to childbirth, menstruation, blood and pain, advertising’s ‘woman as nature’ associations tend rather to highlight elegance, beauty and eroticism. Few advertisements present female bodies marked by childbirth or women nurturing children (except in specialist magazines). Even those for panty-liners, tampons and painkillers in Japan are dominated by cosiness, order and cleanliness.² This is not to argue that biological functions of the female body constitute an underlying condition which false and glossy advertising prevents women from facing (on the contrary, we often find that women’s magazines go very well with periods³). Rather, we simply wish to point out that the association of ‘woman as nature’ is not fixed once and for all, and that we may find supplementary meanings of what it means to be natural in the pages of women’s monthly periodicals.

This notion of supplementary meanings brings us to our second point. To the determined semiotician or hard-headed feminist, it might sometimes seem as though there is no specific rhyme or reason to the way in which natural images are used in women’s magazine advertising. Certainly, this is the line of thought adopted by Williamson who, in her discussion of nature and culture, the raw and the cooked, in English advertisements, argues that ‘the precise meaning of nature as a symbol, i.e. of “the natural”, is less important than the significance of its being used as a symbol at all’ (1978:123). But is this really true? It may seem at times as if the relation between a product and ‘the natural’ conveyed in advertising, and hence the symbolic meaning of that relation, is not so important, but our argument is that this approach is simplistic.

In the Attwood advertisement described above, for example, nature is located in the product and in the woman who wears the product. This in itself is not so remarkable, but the point about any advertisement is that it cannot be fully explained ‘in itself’ as some discrete entity in the way that Williamson and others (e.g. Barthes 1977) have done. Even if we leave out the various ways in which an advertisement can be interpreted by potential consumers, it is still necessary to see it, on the one hand, as part of a campaign (in other words, as one of a series of related advertisements put out by a particular advertiser) and, on the other, as competing with other advertising campaigns for rival products or brands. Every advertisement thus draws on a wide range of images and selling points that exist elsewhere than in the ad itself, so that one of the features of the Attwood advertisement that needs to be taken into account in any explanation of the image of ‘woman as nature’ used therein, is the way in which a large number of jewellery and accessory advertisers in Japan make use of visuals which place their products in direct relation to ‘the natural’ by photographing them hanging from a tropical flower, encircling a pyramid of sand, or – as we shall later have occasion to see – draped around a cactus.

In other words, nature appears in a number of different ways in advertising – ways which may reflect upon the product itself (its name, its aim, its perceived characteristics), and upon other products with which it may or may not be in competition, or which may be incidental to both product and advertiser. Benetton, for example, makes use of the natural in an advertisement whose visual consists of a close up of a zebra’s black and brownish white striped head and, perched on its back just behind the spiky mane, a brightly coloured, red, yellow, blue and green cockatoo. The headline, white letters against a bold green background, reads: United Colors of Benetton. Another advertisement in this series also makes use of an image from nature – scattered maple leaves floating on the surface of some water – but the campaign as a whole reveals that Benetton is concerned with something other than nature as such, for we come across other visuals of a black baby at a white breast, the faces of children of different races, and a priest and nun kissing. In other words, the natural is used only when it contributes to the advertiser’s corporate image and can be made part of the campaign’s overall theme of Benetton’s united colours.

An advertisement for Kanebo’s La Crème uses nature in another way. Its visual consists of a horizontal triptych with the product name and manufacturer written boldly in white against a black background at the top, and at the bottom, on a white diagonal surface, an open jar, its lid unscrewed to reveal a rich pink-tinted cream. The central section of the advertisement itself forms a vertical triptych of three black and white shōji paper screens, one of which has been slid open to reveal a shock of red maple leaves. Thus, the central and deepest focal point of the visual in this advertisement consists of a depiction of ‘nature’ – a depiction whose content changes according to the season of the year (in summer there is a clump of green bamboo). The fact that the ‘natural’ image itself is framed by an obviously ‘Japanese’ paper screen, and that the advertisement as a whole has been placed in European (especially French) women’s magazines, suggests that the Japanese company Kanebo is more concerned with an image of Japaneseness than with nature as such. In other words, maple leaves and a bamboo grove are made out to be specifically Japanese aspects of nature, itself characterized by strict adherence to what the Japanese proudly call ‘the four seasons’ (see Moeran and Skov, forthcoming).

Frequently, it is the naming of a product which establishes a relationship between it and some aspect of nature – hence a herb-cum-shampoo called Timotei, and a woman lying on sand for a perfume called Dune by Dior.⁴ Tissot uses a picture of the Matterhorn to advertise its Rockwatch, while a Kentucky Four Roses visual of glass, ice cube and a bottle of its whiskey, is accompanied in the background by a vase with four red roses in it. Jaeger plays on its meaning of ‘hunter’ in German by using the motif of a wild animal on the sweater worn by its model (and thereby plays, too, on the phonetic similarity between Jaeger and jaguar).

The product-nature relationship may also lie elsewhere, in a perceived (or advertiser’s wish-to-be-perceived) characteristic of the product in question. For example, a girl, half naked with a shiny blue-green, scale-like skirt around her hips, stands with her back towards the camera, staring at a blue-green sea. This mermaid-like figure places both hands at the top of her buttocks, turning her body slightly so that the sun catches her tanned back and the viewer has a glimpse of one rounded breast. The headline reads: Manatsu da yo, haru (Spring – It’s mid summer). Both the visual’s emphasis on the girl’s naked body, sun and sea, and the name of the advertiser (the Tokyo Beauty Center), reinforce the association of nature with health, and the underlying argument that all of us can be ‘naturally’ beautiful if we treat our bodies well. Other advertisements are similarly designed to emphasize, by reference to the natural, a product’s ‘healthy’ attributes, even when they are not immediately obvious. Carlton cigarettes, for example, has as a visual a (superimposed) stretch of green grass in the midst of an arid valley surrounded by cactus-covered rocky hills. From the centre of the green rises a giant cigarette, while the caption reads: 6 Under.⁵ By claiming to be below a certain tar measurement (6 mg), Carlton uses the natural image of a golf course to comment metonymically (six below par) on the quality of its cigarettes. Similarly, though again differently, with an ad for Japan Tobacco’s Frontier Lights, where a dolphin is shown balancing on its nose on one of a series of famous buildings round the world (the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Leaning Tower of Pisa) (Fig. 2). The headline, karui (light), clearly refers to the mildness of the cigarette (and one of its presumed healthy attributes). But why a dolphin upside down? Because the Japanese word for dolphin is iruka – karui spelt backwards in the kana syllabary.

Yet other ads show the range of meanings which may be attributed to the natural. Hunting World, for example, makes use of a visual of travel bags on the sand nearby camels in an oasis, and is accompanied by the caption Urban Adventure. Nature here (sand, palm trees, camels) is thus romanticized and placed in the context of a contemporary (sub)urban lifestyle, but the advertisement also echoes, in both its use of the visual and romanticism, a global campaign put out by another manufacturer of travelling equipment, Louis Vuitton (where one visual is of sand, desert, rocks and elephants). Such romanticism can also embrace the ethnic – as in an Emile Pequignet advertisement whose headline, Natural elegance, refers to what the body copy describes as a watch with a ‘Maasai’ ornament designed bracelet.

In all these examples, therefore, we find a combination of textual and visual imagery which is used to express aspects of nature. In some respects, we are faced with a form of totemic classification, in which products of various classes (eg. clothing, cosmetics, alcohol, tobacco and cars) are differentiated from one another through different marketing styles. Furthermore, within each class of things brands are differentiated from one anothe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Images of Nature: An Introduction to the Study of Man-Environment Relations in Asia
• Socio-Political Structures and the Southeast Asian Ecosystem: An Historical Perspective up to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• Sacred Trees and Haunted Forests in Indonesia – Particularly Java, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• Taming Nature – Controlling Fertility: Concepts of Nature and Gender among the Isan of Northeast Thailand
• Thinking through Nature in Highland Nepal
• State Intervention and Community Protest: Nature Conservation in Hunza, North Pakistan
• Nature in the Kalasha Perception of Life
• Nature as the Virgin Forest: Farmers’ Perspectives on Nature and Sustainability in Low-Resource Agriculture in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka
• Fengshui and the Chinese Perception of Nature
• The Japanese Attitude to Nature: A Framework of Basic Ontological Conceptions
• Japanese Advertising Nature: Ecology, Women, Fashion and Art
• Culture in Japanese Nature
• Nature, Religion and Cultural Identity: The Religious Environmentalist Paradigm
• List of Contributors