Japanese advertising tends to consist of merely hiring some ubiquitous celebrity and having them hold the product in question. This lazy and mind-numbing approach has become the default for almost all major campaigns.
However, occasionally a rare spark appears on the radar that suggests that not all the nation’s advertising planners are as inept as most billboards indicate.
This quite extraordinarily choreographed commercial depicts the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, tackling a range of people before they meet fatal or dangerous encounters in their daily lives in Tokyo.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a Japanese schoolgirl tackled to the ground in Shinjuku or a rugby player dive head-first into a moving car, then here is what you have been waiting for!
It is actually a commercial for an insurance company, AIG Japan.
While we certainly would not recommend trying this kind of behavior yourself in Tokyo, the results on screen are quite brilliant.
Japan is gearing up for hosting the Rugby World Cup in 2019, which will be held at venues throughout the country, though the delays to the construction of the controversial National Stadium mean that central Tokyo will now not host any matches. After the Japanese team did surprisingly well at the previous World Cup, the sport has seen increased prominence in the mass media and the forthcoming tournament should rise the level even further.
However, given the ample presence of tattoos in Maori culture, we wonder if the star rugby players would suffer the usual fate of being barred from Japanese hot springs and public baths? 2019 may prove another test in that regard.
