He Shall Return?

I opened this morning's copy of the Nikkei Shimbun (Japan's equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) to come face to face with this ad. It says: "We'll Build a Great Country, No Matter How Many Times it Takes." Which is a great sentiment in the face of the recent disaster, save for one thing: the savior isn't Japanese. It's none other than Gen. Douglas MacArthur, stepping off his aircraft to begin the occupation of Japan.

Is Takarajimasha, the magazine publisher who footed the bill for this ad, saying that this is what Japan needs? That the sovereign nation of Japan can't fix itself without being occupied by another, more powerful nation? Or is it a cynical jab at the uselessness of Japanese politicians, who are too busy arguing in their sandbox to help the Tohoku victims, let alone make the country stronger? 

Pop-cultural critic Machiyama Tomohiro had this to say about the ad, which is trending on Twitter: "I don't think they put much thought into it. They're a company of idiots."

People are talking about it, so it's serving its purpose. But forgive me for wondering if the small fortune spent on designing and running these ads in six major papers might have been used to better effect elsewhere?

Comments

[Durf]

Takarajima's website has a page on this ad:

http://tkj.jp/company/ad/2011/index.html

It very clearly positions the defeat and occupation as a hardship that the Japanese overcame magnificently, just like they have done following natural disasters any number of times in the past.

Foreign observers are of course likely to see the general stepping off of the plane to fix a broken Japan, but I think to a lot of Japanese newspaper readers this image says something more like "Remember the other times when we faced a tough situation?" and not "Man, we sure need foreigners to come bail us out of a bad spot again."

In any case, it's a visually striking ad and it's got people talking, which makes it successful in at least that regard.

[MattAlt]

Absolutely. The only real issue I have with it is the vagueness of the intent; it's easy to interpret either as cluelessness or a cynical political cartoon, depending on how much credit one gives Takarajimasha.

Note that Machiyama calls them idiots, while another local, the NYT's Hiroko Tabuchi, calls it "an interesting ad, a real snub at Japan's postwar political leadership. Provocative, cynical, in some ways brilliant."

[Steve Harrison]

And maybe it's also saying something about how Japan can get so stuck in thinking one way that it NEEDS the external driven shake-up to change things.

Just a thought.

[Anymouse]

It actually seems to me that it was intended to be Ironic, with a capital I.