Thursday was Thanksgiving, but Japan doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. That hasn’t stopped Japanese retailers from starting Black Friday sales.
While Japan isn’t the only country to hold onto the American Black Friday sales bonanza lately, the day started to become more noticeable.
Toys “R” Us Japan started Black Friday sales back in 2014 and The Gap followed a year later. By 2016, the Japanese national retail chain Aeon began promoting sales more widely with in-store displays and TV spots. At that time Ads explained that Black Friday was a “great selling tradition” that began in the United States
In 2021, Japanese news channels are still explaining what Black Friday is. In Japan, it’s not limited to Friday as sales go on for days. Some sales are pushing boundaries, but while Black Friday is getting a big boost in retail, it doesn’t quite match Japanese end-of-year shopping habits.
In English, “Black Friday” naturally refers to the fact that the retail sector makes an immediate profit – it is in the black. It’s the start of the Christmas shopping season. There is a similar expression in Japanese, Kuroji (黒 字); however, the country’s Christmas shopping season actually starts later.
Tomohiro Osaki at The Japan Times reports that annual polls show that 75 percent of responses in Japan now know what Black Friday is. That is a jump of only around 30 percent in 2017. However, only 15.5 percent of those questioned in this year’s survey plan to use the sale. [Full disclosure: I am a columnist at The Japan Times.]
Yutaro Suzuki, economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research, tells The Japan Times that while Japanese consumers are more familiar with Black Friday, sales are not fully carried over to Japan. “In many cases, the premiums are not paid out in November, so the willingness to spend is not too high,” said Suzuki. “Black Friday is still a developing culture in Japan.”
The country already has a great sales and shopping season in conjunction with the New Year holidays. There is an established tradition of selling large discounts and “lucky bag” packages. Retailers, it seems, are no doubt hoping Black Friday will give their sales a boost this fall. Some Japanese consumers seem annoyed by the arbitrariness of Black Friday – locking it on the day after a public holiday that doesn’t even exist in Japan.
As already mentioned, there is no Thanksgiving (Halloween, however, is celebrated), so Black Friday obviously doesn’t mark the official start of Christmas shopping, but it does mark the start of the some.
This article was originally published on 11/28/2016.
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