I translated and re-uploaded the article that was uploaded in 2006.
It's about recent TV commercials for tobacco products, but JT (Japan Tobacco) hardly promotes their tobacco products. Recently, it's almost non-existent. Most of the commercials seem to be filled with advertisements for tobacco manners, corporate image, and beverage commercials such as coffee, "roots" and "peach natural water," "drinking tea house," "green tea," and "senoby." Additionally, the company name is only listed as "JT" and not "Japan Tobacco." Is this also due to the times? Is it shameful to display their own company name? While it has long been said that smoking is bad for one's health, even opinion advertisements from the Japan Medical Association have begun airing on TV saying "smoking is also bad for the people around you." Smoking areas are getting smaller and moving to inconvenient places, and it's becoming a difficult situation for smokers. As someone who doesn't smoke at all, I don't know the struggles that smokers are going through. By the way, my father, who has been smoking for 40 years, has quit smoking at home. He quit perfectly. According to him, he's not quitting smoking, he's just taking a break from it. He said that if he didn't stop smoking with a relaxed attitude, he would feel pressured.
Returning to the topic of TV commercials, in the 1980s, when TV commercials for tobacco products were still aired, most of them featured foreigners (mostly white people with blond hair) smoking comfortably, as if in a scene from a foreign movie. Among them, the most impressive one for me is the TV commercial for "LARK."
(Cigarette)JT Mild coded. Lark Speak LARK 1988
In the commercial, a man appears in a suspicious trading place. Another man, identical to him, appears and they both show their photos to the trade partner, who is at a loss as to which one is the real person. Then, an idea for confirmation appears. The trade partner offers a cigar to one of them, and one of the men immediately tries to light it with a lighter. However, the other man takes out a "LARK" and says, "Speak LARK!" The man with the lighter is exposed as a fake and taken away. The actor played two roles in the commercial, but back then, it was impossible to process it with computer graphics (CG), so it was obvious that one of them was wearing a mask.
I translated and re-uploaded the article that was uploaded in 2006.
Looking back, it was probably the end of the year in 1998 when I was organizing my room. I was thinking of disposing of some old VHS videotapes and decided to check their contents before doing so. It was when I played the tape that I was hit by a nostalgic shock from the footage from around 1989, especially the TV commercial part that moved me. I thought I had to somehow save this footage, so I bought a video capture board at the beginning of 1999 and started capturing it from dozens of VHS tapes I had at home. The work was quite hard due to the performance of the computer at the time (Pentium II 400MHz) and the HDD capacity was only about 10GB. Sometimes frames dropped during capture, and it took time to edit and compress the footage for saving. I continued to stare at the hourglass and my computer screen night after night.
The first TV commercial that captured my heart was this one:
"Fuji Color SUPER HR Minamino Yoko ♪ Hideaki Tokunaga, 1987"
Minamino Yoko is wearing a light purple cardigan and staring intently while Hideaki Tokunaga sings "Shining~♪" (Minamino was really cute back then).
"Lion Page One Nishimura Tomomi ♪ Alfee, around 1987"
Although she is now labeled as the originator of natural stupidity, at the time, I feel like she was still a legitimate idol. I think it was around the time of her debut (the dates may be inaccurate since they rely on my memory).
Then, my friend D got hooked on this one:
"JT Libera Mild"
It features a line of blonde women on stage who turn into the screen and the letters LIBERA are highlighted by spotlights. The hands and feet are also shaped like LIBERA. Does anyone remember this?
And then I thought of something at that time. "Won't the TV commercials we're watching now become nostalgic footage someday?" It's actually true. Looking back, what happened at that time has already become nostalgic. In the end, I decided to proceed with capturing old VHS tapes and TV commercials from that time in parallel. And now, I have collected 20,000 TV commercials (as of 2006).
