Over the last century, the mermaid—a figure that represents aspects of what has been termed the ‘aquapelagic imaginary’ of maritime and waterside societies—has become increasingly widespread in international popular culture. Along with its appearance in cinema and television, it has been used to promote various products, including, most notably, Starbucks coffee. This has also been the case in Japan, where Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Little Mermaid” is well known and where the mermaid has been significantly localised through being featured in manga and anime productions. This article profiles one of the most persistent uses of the mermaid in Japanese popular culture to date: the logo used to symbolise and promote the Little Mermaid bakery chain. The logo is discussed with reference to the Danish association of the chain’s bakery products and its use is contrasted to aspects of the Starbucks coffeehouse symbol. The particular socio-cultural and industrial nexus that the logo emerged from is explored through discussion of the history of the Andersen group of companies. This aspect, in turn, has deeper roots in the particular attention paid to Denmark as a model for Japanese modernisation in two periods (the 1910s-20s and the late 1940s-50s), and this aspect serves to contextualise the nature and life of the logo. The recontextualisation of the Little Mermaid in Japan is also notable for minimising its aquapelagic aspect and, instead, packaging it in very precise manners for domestic consumption. In this context, the mermaid is effectively the “tip of the iceberg” of a greater, more far-reaching, imaginative, and transformative engagement with a European exotic “other.” The article contributes to an expansion of Island Studies by documenting the manner in which the symbol of one archipelagic/aquapelagic culture is transformed into a more terrestrialised commercial brand in a different island nation.
Hayward et al. (Fri,) studied this question.