Oh, so clever. But to label Nintendo’s new television (and, from the unedited length, presumably theatrical) ad as simply smart and entertaining is to miss a larger shift in Nintendo’s branding, perhaps even in the practice of Japanese-American marketing as a whole.
Nintendo, representative of much Japanese pop culture that has flourished in the States, has long imagined Westward. From the beginning, sending an Italian plumber to save a princess, one imprisoned in castles of European inspiration as opposed to ones following domestic style cues, it becomes apparent Shigeru Miyamoto and his creative associates long ago calculated the greater international potential of Westernized, or at least Westernesque franchises.
From Now you’re playing with power onward, Nintendo marketing has turned an almost consummately Westernized face to the US market, depicting Americans playing games in American settings. Yet, it’s a cultural choice I’ve become familiar with more recently in my own work: One of the clients my office works with is a Japanese-American furniture manufacturer and distributor with a number of Japanese businessmen in the US offices. When we’ve pitched publicity materials that play up their Japanese origins, they’ve been uneasy with the idea, preferring to look at home in the Western market, just as giants like Honda have.
Of course, American popular conceptions of Japan have been in motion for years. Mainstream American appeal of Anime, a medium in which some of the greatest commercial and critical successes have, contrary to patterns of the gaming industry, been distinctly Japanese, has paved the way for an American appreciation of, and, among Generation Y, obsession over, Japanese culture.
And now, enter the Wii.
For the first time in a major Nintendo ad, we actually see people unquestionably identified as Japanese. The music is obliquely Japanese. The new product is not displayed merely sitting atop the faux-cedar entertainment centers of kids or twentysomething hipsters. It’s introduced by formal Japanese ambassadors who arrive in a car designed for Tokyo parking. At the end of the ad, the Wii logotype itself even politely bows.
Nintendo has taken a new cultural step in marketing, fusing tradition and coolness in a way that I think could almost be termed “reverently postmodern.” It celebrates Japanese heritage and American diversity together.
For the sole purpose, lest we forget, of selling you a product.
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