city branding in japan, a case of nara

its been already 2 years since i wrote my thesis. at that time i often felt weird seeing differences in city branding strategies between japan and other nations mainly in the West. i dont remember clearly anymore how i define city branding actually, but if i remember correctly, it is supposed to be "monolithic consumer oriented representation" (thats what i remember for sure) to create cool images by overlapping built cities by narative cities and to attract the flux of external capitals, or something like that.

for instance, I love NY and I amsterdam are two of most famous city branding campaigns around the world. each of them has its own origins but they both have the common result; overlapping built cities by narative and attracting various capitals from all over the world.

on the other hand, the case of city branding in japan is apparently taking a totally different vector from the global trend. cities in this country are often promoting themselves by creating some weird characters which are often far from cool in my opinion. city branding in japan often doesnt have any "monolithic consumer-oriented representation" but has only names of characters, often neither its objectives, messages, or targets are clear and these aspects make me doubt if what i believe city branding in japan is actually city branding. i leave this doubt aside for now and assume what i believe city branding in japan as city branding. there are hundreds of city branding characters in japan but the most famous (or notorious) example can be seen in nara.

nara is an old city of japan which has been the capital of this country and therefore is having many valuable cultural heritages, mainly buddhism temples, such as houryuuji and toudaiji. because of its importance in japanese history, it is one of the most popular student-trip destinations. and i really dont know why but there are millions of deer around here and all tourists feed them rice crackers (yet they are said to be "wild animals"). thanks to those aspects, you can learn not only about japanese history but also trend of japanese junior-high-students, tour guides, and nature of deer around nara.

nara hosted national capital several times in ancient times and heijoukyou is the most famous one, which was capital between 710 and the end of the 8th century. in order to celebrate 1300th anniversary of heijoukyou, nara decided to promote itself by city branding campaign and started using this guy.

his name is sentokun, designed by satoshi yabuuchi, a professor at tokyo university of the art. he visualizes two major characteristics of nara successfully; deer and buddhism. i think this guy looks rather better than other branding characters. in fact, i wanted to see him when i visited nara last month. when this guy was first introduced to the media, japanese public criticized him as he was not cute enough or rather creepy. yet eventually hes become popular and successfully attracted tourists including me......

is this a happy ending or at least satisfactory outcome of the branding campaign?

im not sure about it. the data i found shows that the number of tourists is rather increasing after this dude appeared on the media. yet city's population and tax income is decreasing. from this aspect, although sentokun is famous enough to be recognized by most of japanese citizens and attract some additional tourists, hes not necessarily a successful branding figure for nara to attract the flux of external capitals to boost its status quo that what city branding is supposed to contribute to.

yet if sentokun is recognized as a successful branding character in this country, i really have to study about city branding of this country.