convenience stores=future mingei

Many surprising facts revealed in this class! First of all, I did not know that Seven Eleven and Lawsons were both born in the U.S. Seven Eleven sounded like a name that a Japanese would come up with. Although both Japanese Seven Eleven and Lawson can be traced back to the U.S., the qualities of them differ between the two countries… another surprising information. According to Gavin Whit

elaw, convenience stores in the U.S. are dangerous, dirty, dull, and depressing while ones in Japan are clean, comforting, cool, and courteous. He mentioned that in the U.S., land prices drop when convenience stores are around. In Japan, people probably deliberately choose to live near convenience stores for convenience’s sake! I thought that one reason that explains this discrepancy is the different motivation levels in marketing. The registers in Japanese konbinis have buttons for different age groups, and the clerk presses it to keep a data of what kind of customers come to the store. I do not know too much about U.S. convenience stores but I doubt that their registers have these buttons. This highly motivated attitude of the Japanese convenience store industry is what I think leads to the four C’s: clean, comforting, cool, and courteous. However, I do not often go to convenience stores because their products are more expensive than grocery stores, and even this subtle difference in price can amount to a lot when I buy products every day from there.

Overall, today’s LLA lecture was interesting. Gavin Whitelaw said that what we consider normal today may not be so 200 years from now, and that may be true since we stare at the vestige of the Edo convenience store in amazement and fascination. Especially in a world where technology is taking great leaps, our posterity may be staring at the signs and the cashier, thinking how old-fashioned humans beings used to be.  However, I did not really understand why he doesn’t include tradition or national culture as part of the definition of “culture”.