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Nagoyankee (Offline)
中庸を得るのだ~
 
Posts: 2,119
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Tokyo, Japan
02-02-2009, 10:11 AM

I want to focus on the psychology of the Japanese female consumer. I say this because if we start talking about ethnic demography, Japan is 99% Japanese and the majority of the remaining 1% are Korean and Chinese. If equal opportunity should be practiced in the modeling industry, then there should be almost no Caucasian models at all. But no one demands equal opportunity in everything.

The way I analyze the phenomenon of models in Japan often being Caucasian is that women often dispise other women who look prettier than themselves. I'm not saying that Caucasian women aren't pretty. But if a Japanese consumer finds a jacket worn by a beautiful Japanese model in a magazine,
it wouldn't arouse as much customer interest as it would when that same jacket was worn by a very pretty but very different-looking woman. If the model was clearly non-Japanese, the reader wouldn't feel as much rivalry or the need to even compare. Besides, we are so used to seeing foreign models in Japan since childhood that we seem to somehow subconciously think that modeling is more "their" profession than ours, just like what we tend to expect in the Eikaiwa teachers.
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