Tokyo: Land of the Quirky, Beautiful and Obscene
Japan is the land of the quirky, beautiful and obscene.
I’m a packaging fanatic. I can’t help it.
As a designer, I love well-made things wrapped in more well-made things, and there is no better place than Japan for packaging design. I’m also a snack maniac so one of my to-do's in any new city is to take a tour of the local supermarket. It's kind of like a quick guide to the local culture. My recent trip to Tokyo was no exception.
Go into any store and you will quickly notice three things:
Hello, thank you, thank you and goodbye
The Japanese take customer service to the extreme. Expect a serious sequence of polite greetings and customer inquires to be answered with the utmost care. Store clerks are just as gracious answering a question about a product as they are giving a pitifully lost traveler (like myself) directions and a hand drawn map. And your purchases? Rest assured that the toilet paper you just bought will be delicately bagged, taped shut and presented to you with many thanks.
2. Undersize it
In a compact metropolis packed full of people, everything is squished for space. The solution: make things mini. Doorways, grocery carts, aisles, portion sizes, you name it. My complaint: where are the American-sized chocolate bars to feed my American-sized sweet tooth?
3. Candy for the eyes and treats for the mouth
For the Japanese, dining is as much a culinary experience as it is visual. Food and drinks come in an explosive array of colors, textures and packaging. Case in point:
