TOKYO (dpa) – Japanese retailers have been finding that women who buy Barbie dolls are often not shopping on behalf of daughters: the elongated doll is coveted by adults who secretly wish they had the same impossible body shape.
“Unlike in the United States, where only little girls love Barbie dolls, many young Japanese women in their twenties and even older buy the dolls here, because they wish they were shaped like Barbie, or like her trendy fashions,” said a spokesman at Bandai, the importer.The discovery has prompted Bandai, itself a major toymaker, to shift its customer focus from children to women in their late teens and twenties who dream of being sexy and western,Most Japanese buyers have never heard of the controversy in the United States about whether Barbie causes anorexia and self-hatred.Not even American girls really look like Barbie, and critics say children are at risk of psychological problems if they get the notion that their real body shape somehow falls short of the Barbie ideal: thin as a rake with an enormous bosom.“I grew up on Barbie dolls, as did all of my friends and neighborhood children,” said Christine Korling, a 34-year-old Californian from her U.S. home. “I loved playing with Barbie dolls.The toys are made by Mattel Inc. of the United States.“Some people think her figure is not appropriate for children to play with and that it makes girls feel that their bodies have to be shaped that way when they grow up,” agrees Korling.Toy historians say her shape goes back to a 1950s German cartoon character called Lili who was drawn to titillate male newspaper readers.Elliot Handler, the founder of Mattel, had been visiting Germany with his family on vacation and saw a doll called Bild Lili, which was a mascot for the German tabloid newspaper Bild-Zeitung.The Handlers made their own doll in the same style, named her Barbie after their daughter Barbara and introduced her in 1959 at a toy show in New York. Since then they have never looked back.Bandai says Barbie was formerly sold exclusively at toyshops in Japan alongside her Japanese equivalent, the Licca-Chan doll made by Japan’s Takara Co. Licca has no adult fans because she looks more or less like a child.Now 30 per cent of Barbie products are retailed through general merchandise stores, including the popular Japanese clothing-focussed department store Marui.The toymaker has also moved to strengthen ties with designer brands that are popular in Japan among women in their late teens and early twenties such as Cecil/McBee, Egoist and Cocolulu.The company sponsored a fashion show in February with 11 brands showing designs specially executed for Barbie.Current women’s fashion trends in Japan are to dye hair brown or blond and wear clothes that emphasize body shape. Experts say that fits in well with Barbie’s own dress sense.“Since we changed our marketing strategy, the sale of Barbie dolls has doubled,” said the Bandai official.Yoshiko Matsuba, a 50-year-old Tokyo restaurateur admits to a mania for the dolls. Matsuba operates an eatery called Bar-B which displays about 400 Barbie dolls. “I have spent all my savings, which were supposed to be used after retirement,” said Matsuba.“I spent 30 million yen (250,000 dollars) to open my restaurant, and I spent more than that for the Barbies,” she admitted.
