a blog by Peter Leonard
I think this is the post where I observe two points of connection between Japanese consumer culture and products with their origins outside Japan. The first struck me when I walked into the Apple Store in Ginza, the upscale shopping district:
That shot tells you all you need to know about the success of Apple in what had been a market suspicious of foreign gadgets. The Japanese (and it was mostly Japanese, not foreign tourists) clustered around the iPads and iPhones illustrate the turnaround since Wired’s February 2009 article “Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone.” Or, alternatively, why that article was dead wrong. For a better perspective, consider this recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Steve Jobs’ complicated relationship to Sony as a company. Short version: the apprentice has now become the master, at least when it comes to certain kinds of consumer technology.
I asked several people I met in Tokyo (all in the publishing industry) about whether Sony could pull off a comeback in at least the domestic market. And not just against Apple — Samsung is a powerful competitor in other domains outside personal computing and mobile tech. The best answer I got was that Sony had had certain success recently by carefully studying the Japanese middle-school-girl market, and coming out with a digital audio player that precisely targeted that group. I saw several of these colorful Walkman-sucessors in various stores (BIC Camera etc), and will be curious to see if their success is a flash in the pan or if it can extend beyond the domestic market.
On to the edible. I just wanted some place to put two pictures of the way that French macarons have taken Tokyo by storm — and how carefully they are produced and displayed in upscale desert stores:
