Healing Boom in Japan

Below is the summary of "The Social Construction of Consumer Needs: A Content Analysis of the Healing Boom in Japan". This research was published in two Japanese academic journals in 2004. I am now revising the original version and translating it into English. If you are interested, please give me your advice to improve my research.

This paper analyzes the developing process of the healing boom in Japan at the end of 1990s. This boom is very different from other booms in two ways. First, many firms belonging to different industries have launched a large number of healing products/services since mid-1990s. Second, as a consequence of this massive market entry, the meaning of healing accepted by consumers changed drastically.

According to Kohjien, the most famous Japanese dictionary, the verb Iyasu (heal) means to cure somebody’s disease or injury; satisfy hunger, or remove emotional pain. But the explanation of Iyashi Sijoh (the market of healing) in Gendai yogo no Kiso Chisiki (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Words) 2003 Edition, published by Jiyukokumin-sha, is fundamentally different from the traditional explanation. The encyclopedia explains that Iyashi Sijoh is the market of goods and services useful to create psychological security, and nowadays various kinds of consumer goods such as books, music, paintings, movies, massage, drink, food, and clothing to make us feel relaxed fall under this rubric. This change of definitions seems to show that the word healing has moved from spiritual dimension to material dimension, and the practice of satisfying one’s need for healing by consuming goods and services sold in market has been firmly established. It is reasonable to suppose that needs for healing are socially constructed.

This paper focuses on the process of the social construction of healing needs and explains the process as a consequence of firms’ continuous mimetic behavior caused by “theorization” about the boom (Strang and Mayer 1993). In consumer goods/service industries, a boom is not unusual in one industry. But the phenomenon of firms in various industries participating in one boom, such as the healing boom is very unique. Nikkei Marketing Journal explained that the healing boom was triggered by the consumers who suffered serious stress caused by bothersome human relations and economic pressures in the long depression of the Lost Decade (the 1990s) and needed to be healed, and many firms supplied various goods/services to respond to this perceived need. Although this explanation is dominant in marketing discourse, we think that consumers’ needs are one of the reasons for the rapid emergence of numerous healing products/services but not the only one, and the firms’ continuous mimetic behavior and the discourse featuring the boom are more important reason.

To verify this assumption, we investigated both the collective behavior of firms and the discourse prevailed in mass media. On the one hand, we investigated all the healing products/services launched from 1988 to 2001. Using NIKKEI TELECON 21, the database of leading Japanese economic newspapers such as Nihonkeizaishinbun and Nikkei Marketing Journal, we collected 1,162 newspaper articles containing the keyword Iyashi (healing in Japanese) and Hiiring (healing as a loan word).

On the other hand, we investigated two kinds of discourse about healing boom. To understand how this boom was explained by marketing experts, we analyzed the contents of 1,162 newspaper articles qualitatively. In addition, to find the difference among discourses revealed to various market segments (e.g. men vs. women), we conducted a content analysis of 1,984 article titles containing both Iyashi and Hiiring from 441 types of magazines issued from 1985 to 2001. These titles are collected from the Oya Soichi Bunko Magazine Article Index CD-ROM database, which covers popular magazines such as hobbies, entertainment, and true-life stories.

From these data sets, I found that 542 healing products/services were launched during this period and the number of healing products/services launched increased rapidly in 1999 and 2000. Besides the rapid increase in products/services launched in 1999, massive publicity campaigns by prestigious mass media companies started. In this year, calm piano music Energy Flow composed and performed by world the famous musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and used as the background music in a TV commercial for a vitamin drink became a hit song. At the same time, the dog robot AIBO manufactured by Sony became popular. Although Mr. Sakamoto and Sony did not intend to appeal to the healing function of their products, mass media such as Nikkei Marketing Journal diffused this interpretation and they were both welcomed by consumers a fitting their needs for healing. Nikkei Marketing Journal gave AIBO their Hittoshohin Banzuke (Annual Award for Hit Products) at the end of this year. Furthermore, Jiyukokumin-sha awarded the word Iyashi as the new word representing the atmosphere of the year in Ryukogo Taisho (Annual Award for New/Trendy Word). After this massive publicity campaign, many firms rushed into healing market. These developments show that the rapid development of the healing market cannot be explained only by the consumers’ needs. The massive publicity campaign by the mass media and the firms’ trying to grasp the new financial opportunity contributed significantly to the rapid growth of the healing boom.

This boom can be understood by applying the framework of institutional theory (Powell and DiMaggio 1991), which is useful for analyzing the socio-historic patterning of consumption, an important research program in Consumer Culture Theory (Arnold and Thompson 2005). We think the Japanese firms’ mimetic behavior is both the cause and consequence of cognitive institutionalization of healing. Cognitive institution means shared conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and frames through which meaning is made (Scott 2001). The shared conceptions of the healing boom is the belief that consumers are fatigued due to stressful urban life and seriously hope to be relaxed, resulting in many business opportunities in the healing market. This cognitive institution triggered by massive media campaign was established around 1999, and since then both the consumers and firms shared conceptions of their life worlds and soon took it for granted (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Establishment of the shared conceptions has been enhanced by firms’ mimetic behaviors and mass media’s agenda setting. Consumers’ needs for healing were not created by the socio-economic environment, but were socially constructed through the interaction among firms, mass media, and consumers.

In marketing discourse, the explanation that consumer needs create market phenomena is dominant, supposedly because of the strong influence of the “marketing concept” which emphasizes customer orientation and consumer sovereignty. But the healing boom is instead explained by firms’ mimetic behaviors and the mass media’s publicity campaign. Although consumers are not the cultural dupes of an affluent society (Galbraith 1958), they are not sovereign, and their preferences are not private, free and rational (Slater 1997). This case of Japanese healing boom gives us an opportunity to reconsider the dynamics of market phenomena and consumer needs.

Energy Flow - Ryuichi Sakamoto (1999)