In my city there’s a bridal shop that sells the most beautiful wedding kimonos for happy Japanese brides to wear, and on the outside of their shop they’ve got a large sign showing models wearing the kimonos that they sell. The funny thing is that the models are all foreigners, something that always surprises me when I drive past — if the company is selling products to Japanese women, why use gaijin models? The answer is that the Japanese have a rather deep complex about Westerners and seem to perceive them as being superior to Japanese on some unconscious level, just as Europe and America are considered more advanced politically and socially than Japan, despite our many faults. As a result it’s effective to sell certain products by associating them with foreigners in some way. While beauty may be difficult for you or me to define, the Japanese seem to have no problem in this area: for a woman to be considered really beautiful she needs to be very tall (at least 175 cm), have an 8:1 ratio of head to body, and have a “high nose” (meaning a nose that juts out at a bold angle rather than being flat against the face).
