Professor, Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo
Outside of Shinjuku station in Tokyo, Ayase Haruka fills the skyline. A ten-meter-high giant balloon in the likeness of the popular actress has been erected as the centerpiece of a marketing event to promote the newly released Panasonic Lumix FX700 digital camera. Commanding the gaze of all those traversing the east exit of the station, this image-form of Ayase Haruka is a spectacle of modern consumer culture.[1] In 2010, Panasonic continued to trail behind Canon, the market leader, in sales of compact cameras.[2] The year 2010 notably was also the beginning of the decline of compact digital cameras.[3] With improvements in cell-phone cameras and the shift to smartphones, an entire category of consumer electronics was about to be displaced. Today, digital cameras are considered mostly a niche or enthusiast market. Perhaps sensing the decline in consumer demand, Panasonic named Ayase Haruka as the celebrity endorser (“CM character”) for Lumix that year, replacing J-pop diva Hamazaki Ayumi, who held the title for the previous nine years. In promoting this media event, centered around a rising new star, the spectacle aimed to distract from the changing realities of the consumer electronics market.
The giant balloon spectacle of Ayase Haruka outside Shinjuku station in 2010.
Ayase Haruka is a popular actress in Japan, who skyrocketed to fame with a series of popular television dramas in the late 2000s. While still a high school student in Hiroshima, Ayase submitted a letter to audition for the Horipro Talent Scout Caravan, a talent contest administered by the Horipro talent agency (jimusho).[4] With more than 40,000 applicants, Ayase was awarded the “special judge’s prize” and a contract with the agency. Like many female performers in Japan, the path to Ayase’s success in film and television began with risqué photo spreads (gurabia) in magazines and photobooks (shashinshū).[5] At the age of sixteen, she debuted wearing a bikini in a four-page photo spread in Weekly Playboy magazine in March 2001. Later that same year, her first photobook—aptly titled Birth (2001)—featured photos of Ayase wearing a bathing suit on the beaches of Bali.[6] In the year 2002 alone, she appeared in as many as ten photo spreads—mostly clad in revealing swimwear—for various weekly magazines targeted to male readers. Her first lead role as an actress in a television drama finally came in 2004.
In her early career as a gravure idol, Ayase was an erotic spectacle of male desire. She was produced to reflect the specularized image of woman as an object of the male gaze. As Laura Mulvey argues, “woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle” (1989, 19). In the still images adorning the pages of these magazines, appearing often between photos of nude women and advertisements for sexual services, Ayase expresses no desires but those of the male viewer. Lacking a voice of her own, she is not interviewed in the magazine but is described exclusively from the point of view of the magazine’s editor. One article describing Ayase’s “dynamite body” notes that “her charm comes from the gap between her refined facial features and her sexy figure.”[7] For the editors and their readers, Ayase is an object to be desired, specularized, and consumed. Indeed, this kind of sexual objectification denies female subjectivity. As the work of the feminist scholar Luce Irigaray contends, “the feminine has been colonised by a male fantasy of an inverted other through which he can project himself as subject, while woman functions only as object for and between men” (Russell 2013, 257). In a social order wherein women are commodities, Irigaray asks: “How can such objects of use and exchange claim the right to speak and to participate in exchange in general?” (1985, 84). In short, the erotic spectacle of the female body attracts the gaze of the male spectator but precludes active subjectivity or agency of women.
Before selecting Ayase to represent their brand, Panasonic had refreshed its line of Lumix compact cameras every year since 2001, partly to allow for gradual improvements in the technology, but mostly for marketing. In Japan, where novelty drives consumer demand, the introduction of new products is important in raising product awareness. “Japanese companies are constantly launching new products each year (shin-hatsubai). While the brands, and often the products themselves, remain mostly the same, they are launched with great fanfare and spectacle” (Karlin 2012, 76). The release of new products allows for short campaigns featuring different celebrities or for campaigns featuring celebrities in different seasonal commercials. The seasonality of marketing, including holidays, are part of what Guy Debord calls “the pseudo-cyclical time [. . .] of the spectacle” ([1967] 1995, 112). These variations generate not only audience attention but media discourse about celebrities. Tabloid news shows and magazines will report on a new product or new CM character because it provides an opportunity to talk about the happenings of a particular celebrity. A new product might not itself be inherently newsworthy, but if that product is tied to a media celebrity through branding, then it becomes interesting and newsworthy. This system of branding in the Japanese media links desire for the image of individual idols or celebrities to products through the technologies of advertising. It achieves the goal of raising awareness by producing greater media discourse and celebrity spectacle.
Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles.
—Guy Debord
The concept of the “society of the spectacle” was developed by the French theorist Guy Debord and employed by the members of the Situationalist International during the 1960s to disrupt the logic of the capitalist system. The Situationalist project, like forms of cultural jamming during the 1980s or the Occupy movements more recently, sought to disrupt the passive viewers of the images of consumer culture and to awaken them to a greater engagement with politics. The term “situationalist” referred to the construction of situations, free of spectacle and false needs, for the awakening of creative expression and political practice. With the publication of The Society of the Spectacle ([1967] 1995), Debord articulated how the spectacles of modern media culture are distractions aimed at passivity and submission to capitalist society. “For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization” (Kellner 2003, 2–3). The society of spectacle is one in which existence is continually mediated by images, commodities, and staged events designed to encourage consumption. This world of commodities comes to dominate the lived world to the extent that it colonizes social life, producing a passive citizenry and the depoliticization of culture. For Debord, the whole of social life in modern capitalism has been rendered into an “immense accumulation of spectacles” ([1967] 1995, 11). “In all its specific manifestations—news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment—the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life” (ibid., 13).
The spectacle of the giant balloon of Ayase Haruka occupied Shinjuku Station Square, an event space just outside the east exit of JR Shinjuku station, for three days. The space mainly is used for commercial promotional events, including stage performances. The area itself is only thirty square meters and is little more than dead space next to the underground entrance to the Lumine EST shopping complex. Though essentially public space, this area has been appropriated for commercial activities in the heavy trafficked pedestrian entranceway to the station. With advertisements covering the surrounding buildings and the lights of digital billboards flashing the names of commodities, even this small corner of the east entrance to Shinjuku station cannot escape the capitalist system’s imperative to cultivate attention for the marketing of goods. In describing the saturation of city spaces by advertising, Debord lamented that urbanism is merely the “mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism” ([1967] 1995, 121).
Despite the allure of the giant balloon of Ayase Haruka, this promotional event is neither exceptional nor significant. Indeed, it is the banality of spectacle that is important to this discussion. Spectacle marshals the modalities of celebrity, excess, and scarcity to distract from the triteness of its own image and thereby produce the effect of appearing extraordinary. In other words, spectacle seeks to disrupt the mundane routine of everyday life by presenting that which is seemingly extraordinary or unusual but is actually quite banal. First, the celebrity image of Ayase Haruka is essential to the production of spectacle. “Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles” (ibid., 38). Second, in terms of the process of signification, spectacle is marked by excess. Like the excessive size of banner headlines that amplify the perceived importance of news, spectacles project importance through the amplification of size. Owing to the specularized image of Ayase’s body as an erotic spectacle, the giantess of the balloon connoted a macrophilic fantasy of domination (both to the image of the female body and the spectacle of capitalism). Finally, in addition to celebrity and excess, spectacle is expressed through scarcity. The “limited” quantities by which the capitalist system markets goods and services encodes consumption as an “experience” or “event.” Beginning on September 23, 2010, the Panasonic “event”—including the display of the giant balloon—was limited to only three days. The limited time of the event, like live broadcasts or exclusive content, creates controlled scarcity that drives audience attention and desire to the spectacle.
One of the further aims of this marketing campaign was to fabricate a spectacle for consumers to take more photos. At the event’s unveiling, Ayase told the assembled crowd to “please return with a Lumix camera and a take a photo of [this giant balloon of] me.”[8] With digital cameras, spectacle has become an integral part of the consumer experience, and marketers have responded to this demand by devising spectacles to be shared on social media. Indeed, media events and spectacles today exist for the express purpose of being shared. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1999) argue for the continuing relevance of Debord’s ideas for understanding postindustrial consumer capitalism. In particular, as the “society of the spectacle” enters cyberspace, it generates new forms of “interactive spectacles” (Best and Kellner 1999, 129). Unlike earlier forms of spectacle, the interactive spectacle invites audience participation by adding the “illusion of agency” (O’Neill 2009, 157). Media, information, and technology, including the internet, are joined to consumerism, resulting in new forms of domination and distraction. As Jean Baudrillard notes, “we are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance” (1996, 27).
Initially, the unveiling of the giant balloon was promised as the reward for fans’ participation in an online contest hosted on the Panasonic Lumix website. In a web game, designed as part of the promotional content for the product on the website, players were required to “touch” (click) on images of Ayase as she pops up and hides, as if you are taking pictures of her with the camera.[9] During the one-month period leading up to the spectacle in Shinjuku, fans had clicked on Ayase’s image nearly 9 million times. Gamification or game-based marketing has been proliferating in recent years as marketers seek to create a more sustained relationship by offering rewards or other incentives. By making consumer-oriented technology more engaging through games, advertisers are exploring new ways to invite active audiences to participate in the interactive spectacle. “In such fashion, the interactive spectacle attempts to seduce viewers into playing its game and equates virtual participation with empowerment and destiny” (Best and Kellner 1999, 146).
Although the internet was developed as a technology of communication, it is now a circuit of commerce, and social media, which arose to create new forms of community and publicness, has become a means of mobilizing audiences to participate in the spectacle. The interactive spectacle in the media today is a response to a new way of being that has emerged in the age of social media. For those passing through Shinjuku station, the spectacle of the giant balloon holds an astounding power to compel networked publics to want to “share” their experience with others on social media. Sherry Turkle (2015, 115) describes a culture of continual sharing that seeks validation through external recognition. The narcissistic need to support our sense of self demands connection to others that can only be sustained by sharing. However, sharing requires expressive content that will garner the attention and recognition of others. As Hogan (2010) reminds us, the presentation of the self on social media is less a performance and more an exhibition. Rather than the continual observation and self-monitoring associated with a performance, the exhibition of the self is subject to selective contributions and processes of curation. In other words, we exhibit ourselves by choosing to present things that others will find interesting and unique. As the curators of our own lives online, we do not want to bore our online audiences. Instead, we seek to elevate the mundane to the level of spectacle to generate likes and garner attention.
Sharing the image-forms of the spectacle, like the photos of the giant balloon of Ayase Haruka on social media, is an act of social reproduction. Unlike classical Marxism, which emphasized the eventual stagnation of capitalism due to internal contradictions, Debord highlights the importance of social reproduction in the persistence of the capitalist system. By social reproduction, he sought to understand how the capitalist system was maintained over time. Social reproduction seeks to understand the necessary conditions for the reproduction of capitalism and attempts to elaborate on the various structures and social practices that aid its perpetuation (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2003, 419). Like the Frankfurt School, Debord was concerned with understanding how the working class had been pacified into accepting their own oppression. Rather than organizing for radical democratic politics, he sought to better understand how monopoly capitalism had bred conformity and acceptance of the status quo. How had false needs, which deny or suppress true or real needs, come to dominate society? Whereas other Marxist scholars emphasized the reproduction of the conditions of production (i.e., Louis Althusser) or the reproduction of social inequalities (i.e., Pierre Bourdieu), Debord argued that capitalism had successfully employed an image industry for the reproduction of commodities into appearances and history into staged events.
With the rise of social media, the spectacle has evolved to a new stage of social reproduction that integrates communication technology, perceived autonomy, and the desire to “share.”[10] In the photo above, we see numerous people taking photos, mostly with their internet-connected devices, of the spectacle of the giant balloon. Many posted these photos on social networking services (SNS), like Twitter, Facebook, or blogs. What appears to be an innocent or playful way of “sharing” photos online is actually a form of social reproduction—these ordinary netizens are in fact engaged in reproducing publicity for Panasonic. Without receiving any compensation for their work, they are contributing to the social reproduction of the society of the spectacle through the surplus value afforded by the technologies of consumer culture. Indeed, images of the giant Ayase Haruka circulated widely during the three days of the promotional event. Often with little public import, but always with an image, these postings on social media are the empty artifacts of a media culture that knows nothing but to reproduce itself. Nonetheless, these mostly phatic expressions of sociality are testimony to the effectiveness of the media spectacle to raise awareness of the commercial product. As Debord cautions, the society of the spectacle—like much of our social media today—is one where social relations between people are increasingly mediated by images ([1967] 1995, 11).
Notes
- From the “bread and circuses” of Roman times to the propaganda of the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany, the productive use of spectacle has been essential to governance and power. Guy Debord ([1967] 1995) distinguishes between two “rival and successive forms of power”: the concentrated and the diffuse. The former is associated with mobilization of spectacle for the concentration of state power in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, while the latter is the spectacle of the commodity form that flourishes under bourgeois democracy. ↑
- Compact cameras constituted 84.1% of all digital cameras in 2010, making it the most competitive category for digital camera sales in Japan. See Garbagenews, “Deji-kame no ichiban ninki burando wa Canon IXY shirīzu,” November 5, 2010, http://www.garbagenews.net/archives/1579410.html. ↑
- Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA), “Dejitaru kamera sō-shukka,” March 5, 2017, http://www.cipa.jp/stats/documents/common/cr300.pdf. ↑
- First established in 1960, Horipro is one of Japan’s largest talent agency, representing more than 400 performers, ranging from actors and comedians to sports stars and idols. ↑
- Beginning in the mid-1960s, men’s magazines—such as Heibon Punch (1964–88) and Weekly Playboy (1966–present)—first appeared that featured nude photography of mostly unknown models. With the publication of Goro (1974–92), nude photography became a means for aspiring young actresses and idols to attract notoriety. As more mainstream print media began to follow this sensationalist trend, full-color photos featuring female “gravure idols” (gurabia aidoru) became a mainstay of sports newspapers, men’s magazines, and weekly manga anthologies. Nearly all aspiring actresses, idols, and fashion models launch their careers as gravure idols, or are compelled to produce sexy swimsuit photo spreads or photobooks as a means of sustaining their careers in the Japanese entertainment industry. ↑
- Ayase has published fifteen photobooks, most recently in 2017. ↑
- “Ayase Haruka no sugao wa ‘B88 kyonyū & kubire bijo,’” Shūkan gendai 47, no. 32 (August 20, 2005): 206. ↑
- Asahi Shimbunsha, “Kyodai Ayase Haruka ga Shinjuku higashi-guchi ni tōjō, honnin to taimen,” YouTube, September 23, 2010, https://youtu.be/G-PEvirsNx4. ↑
- “The Project to Make Ayase Haruka Giant” promotional webpage, like much of the ephemera of consumer culture, is no longer accessible since it was a limited-time promotional event. See Panasonic Corporation, “Haruka ni Tacchi,” accessed May 12, 2010, http://letsblog.panasonic.jp/touch/top.go. ↑
- Unlike the traditional notion of the spectacle that commands the passive gaze of the consumer, Briziarelli and Armano (2017) describe “Spectacle 2.0” as the subsuming of productive practices of digital labor into the social reproduction of the spectacle. ↑
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