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Rising sun puts fashion-conscious Japanese in shade

Summer's here and it's time to cover up. With their sun hats, ultra-violet (UV) filtering parasols, sun creams and skin-whitening lotions, Japanese women are keener than ever to adhere to the traditional Asian concept of white-skinned beauty.

The sun has set on the short-lived era of the ganguro (literally "black faces") -- young women with deeply tanned complexions and heavy make-up -- often seen in the capital's trendy Shibuya district. Instead the fashion among most women is to be as pale-skinned as possible.

After office hours on a recent evening, the umbrella section of the Mitsukoshi department store in the heart of the glitzy Ginza district was packed with young women.

"Over the last three years, we've noticed a marked increase in purchases [of parasols] by young women aged between 20 and 30," section manager Tomoyasu Muto said.

The Japanese umbrella market is now worth ?20 billion (US$169 million) a year, according to industry figures.

While all the parasols sold by Mitsukoshi are billed as able to provide UV protection and television weather forecasts include UV levels, "our customers are actually more worried about the beauty of their skin than concerned about their health and the risks associated with too much exposure to the sun," Muto said.

With her diamond jewellery, fashionably elegant clothes and her beautifully manicured hands, Makiko Yamamoto is a typical, affluent urban housewife.

"When I go to the beach, I use total sunblock, and when the sun is too strong, I cover up completely to go out. I haven't had a tan for seven years, I'm too old for that," said the fair-skinned, slender woman who does not look her 39 years.

Like Yamamoto, other women shoppers professed themselves terrified of the risk of dark patches appearing on their skin which signifies aging to them, quoting the old saying: "a white face hides seven defects."

Outside Mitsukoshi, talking on her mobile phone, 51-year-old Kyoko Fukumura's red lips and kimono worn so as to expose the white nape of her neck are the telltale signs of her profession as a geisha in the hotspring resort town of Hakone, near Mount Fuji.

"I forgot my parasol which was a big mistake because the sun is strong today. Naturally, as a geisha, I've always tried to keep my skin white," Fukumura said.

French fashion and beauty consultant Francoise Morechand, who first came to Japan in the 1960s, agreed there is a tendency among women to have as pale a complexion as possible.

"The cosmetics companies became interested in whitening products about seven years ago -- first the Japanese companies that grabbed the wider Asian market for them, then the foreign companies like Lancome, Estee Lauder, and Helena Rubenstein.

"Today, there isn't a single company which does not have skin whitening products aimed at the Asian markets," she said.

"White skin has always had an important connotation [in Japan] because it shows that you are not a laborer or a peasant. On top of that, just as elsewhere in Asia, the best compliment you can pay a woman is to tell her that her face is like the moon."

According to Morechand, in the collective Japanese imagination, the moon's characteristics of roundness and paleness symbolize a particular kind of fragility, "a touching and alluring weakness," which Japanese women know will appeal to their boss or husband.

In the 1960s, leading Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido became the first to launch a vitamin C-based product to lighten the complexion, but it was only toward the end of the 1990s that it began to expand its range.

"Even the youngest customers dream of having skin the color of [the outside of] a hardboiled egg -- shining white," said Masami Kumaki, who is in charge of training saleswomen for Shiseido.

Sales of skin-whitening products in Asia grew by 20 percent between 1997 and last year and accounted for 23 percent of the company's total sales in the region, said Shiseido official Toshiaki Igeta. Sales of sunscreen creams jumped by 52 percent.

"Women in Singapore or Taiwan, where I've worked, want to have skin as beautiful as the Japanese. They don't just want white skin, but translucent, almost transparent skin," Igeta said. "In East Asia the sun's rays are very strong, that's why they want Japanese products."
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