Museum of advertising

The Advertising Museum Tokyo is hidden away in a shopping centre under the Dentsu Building at Shiodome, but it's a bit of a gem. There's a dramatic entrance through a staggered room, then a permanent exhibition tracing ads in Japan from the flyers, banners and noren of the 18th century to today's TV ads (they have a huge archive of them on computers in a lounge at the end of the show, but not, alas, on their website). I was fascinated by the 1960s jingles of Toriro Miki, and the decade-by-decade product displays, which managed to select a spooky number of the actual gadgets I owned in the 70s, 80s and 90s, giving me a Proustian rush (and a Bladerunneresque sense that my memories, my precious individuality, my desires had been implanted, programmed into me by Japanese product designers and advertisers).



Perhaps to counter this feeling of helplessly generic conditioning, I mused about how, if advertising in the present is part of what Certeau would call the Strategy, advertising that's distanced by being in the past, or coming from another culture, is more Tactical. It somehow loses its authoritative claim on you, and becomes grist to some other mill, raw material you can co-opt, recycle and re-use. Exactly what Marxy wouldn't call hacking, in fact.



Since Tokyo is full of warm feelings towards distanced, hackable commercial material, it wasn't long before I came across some equally fascinating stuff -- perfectly preserved copies of an early 70s New York underground magazine called Avant Garde, on display in a shop in Daikanyama. Later, appropriately enough, I dined in Chanoma with Digiki and Shane Lester, a "commercial creative" working at Wieden and Kennedy's Tokyo Lab. Tokyo as a giant laboratory of the future is the theme of my next Wired piece, though it's mostly about the city's spectral, rapidly-changing architecture.