Analysis

 

The Seat Monopolizer

 

As mentioned above, manner posters in Japan officially became public in Tokyo railways in September of 1974.  By 1988, manner posters were disseminated throughout other Japanese cities.  Before identifying the art of Hideya Kawakita, it is important to understand how the material excess of the bubble economy was assumed to have created arrogance and “forgetful” manners (Kawakita, 2008).  Subsequently, The Tokyo Transit Authority decided to combat potential bad behavior with the radical graphic designer, Hideya Kawakita.  In 1976, he created the title and concept of the manner poster, The Seat Monopolizer, for the busy Tokyo public.  The social advice embedded in The Seat Monopolizer, displayed in Figure 1.1 (see Appendix), shows a “bad way” for passengers to behave on trains.  The signified meaning behind this poster is for passengers to be mindful about the amount of physical space one’s body and belongings take up while riding public transportation.  The readerly text (Barthes, 1974) of The Seat Monopolizer is linked with a cultural value of simply being aware of how your body could disturb or affect other people’s proxemic zones of comfort.

 

Furthermore, the positioning of iconic characters in The Seat Monopolizer are additional layers of text that can be peeled away by a quickly moving public.  As displayed in Figure 1.2 (see Appendix), the appropriation of The Seat Monopolizer (1976) is intentionally taken from the internationally recognized movie, The Great Dictator (1940).  As communication theorist Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz (1993) argues, appropriation occurs “when a sign is used by one culture for use in another culture, thus giving it new meaning in the process” (p. 168).  Importantly, Kawakita’s choice in appropriating material culture from the movie poster, The Great Dictator, is not done spitefully or with negative intentions towards a non-Japanese culture.  This kind of popular culture appropriation that Kawakita engages is for the sake of creatively gaining attention to etiquette and manners in an urban Japanese context.

 

In addition to the direct popular culture appropriation from a movie poster to train poster, there are several signifiers that enable the intertextuality of The Seat Monopolizer.  One signifying element in this poster is the degree of face work involved between the characters in this poster.  Communication researchers John Oetzel and Stella Ting-Toomey (2003) discuss how negotiations of the face occur when there is a perceived incompatibility of values between two parties.  In The Seat Monopolizer, train passengers are reminded how the simplicity of claiming space is an everyday source of public conflict.  The facial expressions passed between Adenoid Hynkel (an Adolf Hitler-looking character), and the Jewish Barber (a Charlie Chaplain-looking character), suggest the confrontational feelings of annoyance, dominance, and rudeness.

 

The rhetorical decision by Kawakita to incorporate iconicity strengthens the opportunity for a Japanese audience to make historical connections and relationships while riding a train.  The Great Dictator was an important film seen in movie theatres across the world; Kawakita makes the judgment that the average Japanese person saw the film and understands the historical relationships.  Since the decoding of this poster depends on whether or not the commuting audience has a specific knowledge of what kind of person Adolf Hitler was, it functions as a closed text (Eco, 1981).

 

As Hebdige (1979) discusses in his studies of British punk culture, a polysemeous text has the capacity to achieve a range of meanings.  The polysemeous nature of the image in The Seat Monopolizer must not be overlooked because it is possible that a non-Japanese audience as well as Japanese audience used the Tokyo public transportation system in 1976.  Put a different way, Japanese people are not the only ones who use Japanese public transportation.  In the 1970s and 1980s, it is possible that tourists and business people from German, Jewish, African American, or Italian heritage had also encountered The Seat Monopolizer.  Therefore, audience members who had family that suffered under Adolf Hitler will be reminded of disturbing memories.  For non-Japanese audience members that had such familial connections and negative associations with The Seat Monopolizer, the poster takes on a new meaning that might differ from the meaning held by Japanese passengers.  The seemingly simple message of minding manners on a train may be overlooked due to an overwhelming appeal of pathos.  Polysemy in The Seat Monopolizer functions in nearly inappropriate ways as different emotional meanings depend heavily on the demographics of the viewer/passenger.