theMediaman.com

Several years ago I took a trip to Japan and wrote almost daily on my web site. At the time, I wasn’t even using the word ‘blog’… it was an “online journal”. It was only after that when I decided to start writing a regular blog of my thoughts, frustrations and other innane topics.

While I was there, the only thing that astonished me more than the horrible colour schemes in the billboard ads, were that very few of them had imagery. Aside from logos and a telephone wingding, they were almost always just text. For many years I just chalked it up to cultural differences, until I read “The Death of a Copywriter?“.

As Copywriters are prone to do, the situation is initially illustrated as more dire than it truly is. However, the first half of the article does have a valid point in how Canada’s multiculturism and “new Canadians” require more visual cues in ads than are required in Japan.

In Japan, I remember seeing a lot of Japanese, and little else. In 2001 when my life in Toronto was measured in months, I could still remember living in Barrie, where my high school graduating class had less than a dozen people who were not white. However, even Barrie felt culturally diverse when compared to Osaka.

It would seem that Japanese language-only billboards exclude a very, very small percentage of the population, even less than performing the same action in a white-bred, redneck city like Barrie.