The news in Japan is dominated by headlines of economic malaise and political incompetence. Spending money frivolously is definitely not in fashion. SAVVY SPENDING is in. As such, the other two key elements in The Hunting! concept are “young women empowering themselves” and, less high-minded, “tracking down those must-have items at TGC!”  Must-haves this season will feature masculine images such as armor to promote “strong women”, according to a press release.

The event is organized by mobile fashion site GIRLSWALKER.COM and, as in previous years, the clothes worn by models in the show will be available for purchase immediately via the site. TGC released data from its own research that says Japanese in their late teens and early 20s it surveyed currently spend almost 100 minutes a day using the mobile Internet, 10 minutes more than a year ago. About 65% shopped online using their mobiles over the last year.

New this season is TOKYO GIRLS PARADE, a website where users can pull a fashion slot machine to create Nintendo Mii-like avatars dressed in random fashion looks from Tokyo. (The website is currently avaialable only in Japanese.)

Here’s a clip from last season’s TGC:

MAGASTORE will launch first on the iPhone

One of Japan’s most powerful companies, Dentsu, is trying to extend its control of traditional media to the mobile arena with a new application that will force users to pay for online magazines and maintain its dominance over their ad space.

For years the advertising behemoth has been sitting pretty, thanks to its near-monoploy over media buying and the commissions that go with it. Last week, Dentsu announced the launch of MAGASTORE, a downloadable app that will sell access to magazines on mobile phones.

In fiscal 2008, the digital publishing market was estimated at ¥46.4 billion (US$500 million), up ¥10.9 billion from the previous year. Of that, mobile publishing accounted for more than ¥40 billion, according to research by Impress Holdings. Digital comic books are selling especially well, thanks to improvements in cell phones, with larger screens, faster Web access and simpler billing systems.

MAGASTORE, a collaboration with mobile software provider YAPPA Corp., will begin as an application for the iPhone on the Softbank network this summer, and later be made available to other handsets and carriers. After downloading the application, users can purchase magazines and store them to read anytime. Users will pay ¥115 to for the application and then ¥115 to ¥600 per magazine.

YAPPA has made one-off solutions for magazines in the past, such as Shufuntomo’s éf magazine. But Dentsu’s bundled app will be cost-effective for publishers. They will get access to viewer data as well as an online settlement system and, according to the company, “a new advertising solution combining the characteristics of magazine contents and the technology of mobile advertising.”

Among the publishing houses that have signed up for MAGASTORE are Asahi Shimbun, Fusosha (Numero, Spa!), Condé Nast Japan (Vogue, GQ) and a host of niche publishers of titles about everything from skateboarding and kimono to salt-water fishing.

The control of content by powerful corporations remains solid in Japan, even in mobile, where providers like DoCoMo and KDDI strictly control who gets access to users’ menus. (The App Store model developed by Apple for the iPhone fits nicely with this strategy.) When it comes to the question of whether online content should be free or paid, Japan clearly veers toward the latter. Consumers don’t expect mobile content to be free, and by the same token are more willing to pay for it.

Although the list of participating publishers in MAGASTORE is by no means comprehensive at this stage, Dentsu’s intention seems clear: to control the mobile publishing market by controling the delivery system, its model in print and television for decades, and one that has served the company well, if not the consumer.

Models Momo Eri and Tsubasa Masuwaka at the campaign launch

During the Nihon Bara-Iro Keikaku, or Japan Rose-Color Project, customers who buy a Quarter or Double Quarter Pounder Cheese get a pink badge and scratch-card, with the opportunity to win one of 50 free T-shirts. Early in the campaign, the T-shirts were also on sale at the McDonald’s on Center Gai, the upper floor of which was turned into a store reminiscent of a pink Graniph or UT. Some of the Ts were emblazened with tongue-in-cheek messages, such as “I Have Not Been Trading Stocks.”

In this way, behind the rosey color, the campaign makes a deeper pitch at consumers’ sensitivities. Members of the fan club can submit “Big Mouth” comments about the state of Japan today, including hopes, worries and messages of encouragement, such as from ‘Kenta’ in Oita Prefecture to people looking for jobs: “To change the current Japan, it does not take a person with good education, but with the spirit to challenge everything.” Or from ‘Chibisuke’ in Chiba to people who hate their overcrowded commutes: “Leave it to me! I’ll make the trains bigger. I already finished the designs.”

Singer Amuro Namie was chosen as the campaign model, reflecting the personal struggles she has overcome with the death of her mother, divorce and personal reinvention as an artist. The television commercial shows her fighting with herself in a video game, and tells viewers to “Keep Winning for Yourself” and “Laugh at Everything.”

For women, the only color worse on a man than pink is yellow

What color is it going to be today? More men are making colorful clothes choices at work and at play, but their choices may be misguided, according to the opposite sex.

Black remains the top-selling color for men across all categories, but colors previously seen as feminine, such as pink and violet, have gained popularity since 2004 as color becomes genderless, says the R25 freepaper.

For decades, men’s fashion in Japan changed little beyond some sort of combination of black, white and brown. In the 1960s, a decade characterized by national pride, the Olympics and an economic upturn, the preference was for the bold contrast of black and white. During the unease of the ’70s and the oil shock, a more muted brown was the go-to color. In the Bubbly ’80s, it was back to black and white. It wasn’t until the new millenium that men embraced color.

The color of the moment for men is… pink. A color long loved by women, pink is also the color of choice for guys. An R25 survey found men think women like them to wear pink. However, when women were asked what color they dislike on a man, pink came second, only just beaten out by yellow by the slimest of margins.

Colors men think women like them to wear: 1) pink 31.8%, 2) black 20.2%, 3) blue 18.6%, 4) gray 9.1%, 5) green 7%.

Colors women dislike men to wear: 1) yellow 31.3%, 2) pink 30.3%, 3) red 18.9%, 4) brown 7%, 5) green 6%.

Inside Angel Farm Fukui (photos via Nikkei)

Imagine going to the latest Ginza flagship store of an up-and-coming brand flagged as the “new Uniqlo”. You have to wait, as there’s a line of consumers around the block, hungry to get a piece of the latest trend. Inside, it’s a minimalist space, with light techno music. Produce is stacked up to the ceilings in cool white units. Literally cool, that is – these units are refrigerated. And what they’re chilling isn’t clothes but the latest must-have item: designer lettuce.

A taste of what may be the future already exists in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, at an award-winning produce store called Green Flavor. It sells vegetables grown in a “plant factory” located upstairs in the same nondescript apartment building. The plant factory is operated by Mirai Co. Ltd. and its 37-year-old founder, Shigeharu Shimamura. He calls his firm an “agricultural software company”.

Plant factories are slowly spreading in Japan, with support from the government. Vegetables are produced indoors and under controlled conditions. Lighting, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide and water are all measured constantly to ensure stable production. For example, lettuce can be cropped twenty times a year.

Because the produce is grown in a clean room, it can be eaten without washing. That’s potentially attractive to consumers who want safe foods and restaurants that need to guarantee quality. The factories eliminate the need for physical labor in the countryside, so may create new jobs for young people in cities, according to the government.

Ozu Corp., a maker of traditional Japanese paper known as washi, turned its unused Tokyo warehouses into plant factories in 2008 in response to consumer concerns about unsafe food. The brand is called Nihonbashi Vegetables, after the central-Tokyo location of the company’s headquarters, where it plans to open another plant factory.

Another manufacturer, Fairy Angel Inc., has its main plant factory in Fukui Prefecture and others in Kyoto and Chiba. The Fukui factory’s temperature is controlled to +25°C by day and +18°C by night and is capable of producing three million plants a year, according to the Nikkei. Many factories are starting to use LEDs instead of fluorescent lighting to lower costs.

"Green room" veggies can go direct to the shelves

Mirai, which consulted on the Ozu project, says it receives 100 inquiries a month about the “green room” concept, including many from the Middle East and Africa. The government provided financial support for plant factories as part of its New Economic Growth Strategy in September 2008, and has pledged more as part of the so-called “Green New Deal”. However, concerns remain.

Plant factories consumer high levels of artificial energy compared with natural farming methods, raising the price of the produce, as well as questions about the net cost to the environment. When grown naturally, vegetables are a vital element of the food chain. The implications of their widespread removal from the natural environment are also yet to be measured.

This article was compiled using information supplied by the Japan Foreign Press Center.

For more of Five by Fifty’s consumer insights on “Part Time Greens”, contact us.

Suntory has been giving away a series of eight mini-goods by product designer Amadana with its Boss Silky Black coffee. Targeting design-smart businessmen in their 30s, the all-black and metal products include a USB memory drive cover, a tape measure, a “multi case” the size of an iPhone, a pen holder, a money clip, a bookmark, a “cord reel” for keeping headphone cords neatly in a suit pocket and a memo stand.

Amadana is a brand of luxury household appliances that have a modernist design aesthetic that has grown from niche to mainstream in a short time. Its product lineup includes everything from coffee makers and music systems to paper shredders and mobile phone handsets.

A quick look online shows the collaboration has spawned more than 70,000 blog posts so far this month, with comments suggesting that consumers actively bought BOSS Silky Black in order to collect the Amadana products.

To find out how Five by Fifty helps its clients innovate in the beverage sector, contact us.

The beverage concept is an import from Spain, where Limon & Nada was made a permanent Minute Maid offering by popular demand after its original limited-time debut in summer 2007. The word “limonada” (lemonade in Spanish) is also a play on words, broken down into “limon” (lemon) and “nada” (nothing) — suggesting, at least, that the beverage contains nothing but lemons. (It does claim to be preservatives-free.)

The marketing campaign in Japan is similar to the Spanish original, using a lemon animated with a black pen, although the Japanese version plays up the beverage’s “Spanish” origins. Online marketing includes a “radio station from Spain” promoting its “pressure-free way of life”, and the label features a cartoon of a bikini-clad girl sun-bathing against a lemon.
It’s all very reminiscent of Kirin’s World Kitchen lineup of drinks “inspired by” countries including Spain, Italy and France, and is clearly part of the “Armchair Explorers” trend of importing exotic influences to spice-up consumers’ daily routines.

The original Limon & Nada, from Spain

Other fruity flavors in new summer beverages include a sparkling lemon version of Healthya, the wellness beverage brand from Kao; a passion fruit flavor Lipton ice tea from Unilever Japan; and Muscat & Apple Juice from Ohayo Milk.

To find out how Five by Fifty helps its clients innovate in the beverage sector, contact us.

UCC has introduced a limited edition Milk&Coffee collaboration with the latest Evangelion anime film, including six cans featuring six characters from the film.

Evangelion is one of the most popular manga series in Japan, with fans in a wide range of ages. UCC released tie-ups based on Evangelion manga back in 1997 and again in 2007, which were instant hits with fans in their 20s. This is the first collaboration with an Evangelion film.

This time, a new dimension has been added, with a sticker on each can containing a code which fans can enter into a campaign website for the chance to win a rare figurine of a figure from the series.

To find out how Five by Fifty helps its clients innovate in the beverage sector, contact us.

The new bottle holds 520ml of water, but weights just 12 grams when empty, or 40% less than other Coca-Cola PET bottles. The bottle, cap and even label weigh less. Over a year, that would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide produced in the manufacturing process by 3,000 tons, equivalent to the offset of a 950 hectare forest, according to the company.

For Japanese consumers, used to measuring their environmental impact in terms of the volume of waste they produce (always carefully separated into burnables, non-burnables and recyclables), the bottle creates a new disposal ritual to reinforce the “green” brand proposition (see video below). It can easily be twisted by hand to make it thin and easy to throw away, a “1-2-3″  action Coca-Cola Japan encourages consumer to follow in its marketing campaign:  1. buy (!), 2. drink, 3. remove-label-twist-and-discard.

Of course, the ritual still ends with discarding (a non-biodegradable object). However, the manufacturer has undeniable tapped into consumers willingness to take small steps toward “greening” their daily lives, but without making major sacrifices (Part Time Greens).

Not only that, Coca-Cola Japan is betting consumers are willing to pay a premium to be (or be seen as) green: ILOHAS retails in vending machines for 130 yen for a 520ml bottle, an 18% premium to other brands like Crystal Geyser. (As a launch campaign, the water retailed in convenience stores for 105 yen.)

To find out how Five by Fifty helps its clients innovate in the beverage sector, contact us.

“What’s different this time is that consumers aren’t simply looking only for low prices, they’re being more selective and hunting for higher quality and more fashionable products,” according to economist Teruhiko Mano. And analysis of Internet search data bears this out.

A review of keywords that experienced a surge on Yahoo! Japan in May leads to several sites that allow people to save on normally high-price items. (Of course, flu fears and the usual celebrity and sports news also featured heavily.)

Searches soared for “5.5 million yen house,” a keyword used by real estate agency Aqura Home for a new service offering made-to-order houses for 5.5 million yen, around US$55,000.

In mid-May, there was a huge volume of searches for sisyokukai.jp a new service that promotes new restaurants. Users receive discounts of 50-80% for meals in exchange for providing feedback to the restaurants, who are trying to perfect their service.

This week, there has been a large number of searches for “kane no tamago service,” which introduces consumers to apprentice nail artists and hairdressers, who provide manicures and cuts for large discounts or even free.

One luxury item that did enjoy increased search interest was the Segway, as the transport device is rumored to soon become legal on the streets of Yokohama.