A great book on the hottest segment of consumers in Japan, women. This collection of writings covers the history of female consumerism in Japan, the kawaii (cute) obsession, popular women's magazines, Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen, and other distinctly Japanese phenomenon. Like 'A Japanese Advertising Agency' (co-edited by Moeran), this book is dry, but an important read.

I initially bought this book for a class, only intending to read the assigned sections. After reading the introduction, however, I knew I was going to be reading it all. This book was very illuminating, showing me an aspect of Japan I knew very little about: its women. The contributors to this book explore all ages and classes of women in Japan and their relationship with the media, from the "cute" phenomenon to the representations of upperclass women in magazines. This book is not only a view of women in Japan, but also subtly reveals how our own society influences and is influenced by Japanese media.

Brian Moeran and his family spent four years in a rural Japanese community, watching as pots are made, attending school award ceremonies, community festivals and funerals, but mostly listening (and drinking, a great deal of drinking) as their neighbors talked about their lives, their families and their communities.

Moeran is an anthropologist, and was doing his field work in a neighboring community at the time, and he brings an anthropologist's observant eye to his diary of daily life in rural Japan.

This book compares quite favorably to Alan Booth's classic _The roads to Sata_, and John Morley's _Pictures from the water trade_ in the ``a gaijin looks at Japan'' genre. If anything, it improves on those works by telling the tale of one community through sixteen seasons, and being peopled by individuals with whom the author formed lasting relationships. Further, Moeran's Japanese wife provides us with an occasional peek into the Japanese woman's world that is missing from most other books of this type.

The community Moeran describes is small and isolated. It is not representative of Japan as a whole (Moeran, in his introduction, tells how urban Japanese friends found his tales of rural Japan almost as exotic as a westerner does). Some may consider this to be a drawback, but I did not. The book still introduces us to some of the aspects of ``Japanese-ness''.

This book provides excellent material for anyone interested in the Japanese Mingei (folk craft) movement or the field of "folk art" in general. The author deals with the philosophical underpinnings of the movement as a whole, the affect that the movement had on potters from the village of Sarayama, the details of Sarayama's social organization and day-to-day life and the changes that have occurred as Sarayama potters developed a national and even international reputation.

Moeran knows both the Mingei movement and Sarayama well. He himself is a potter; he has done in depth field work over a lengthy period of time enabling him to present the roles of the intellectuals, the critics, the potters, the dealers and the client with clarity.

Moeran's book is a fly-on-the-wall telling of 12 months in the life of a large Japanese advertising agency. Written in the style of an academic research project, this book is nonetheless a revealing account of the machinations inside Japan's unique advertising industry. Dry, but a must-read for anyone involved in Japanese marketing or advertising.