Eastern Exploration

“It’s fur time, it’s fun time!!”

One of Fukuoka’ distinctive features is an underground shopping mall, block upon block of shops connected to the subway station and also to several above-ground high-rise shopping complexes. The consumer experience is truly overwhelming. More overwhelming than the shops themselves—and the challenge of navigating the labyrinth between them—is the amount of fur being sold. Coming from San Francisco, I was already a bit shocked to see how many women sported fur on their collars, but it wasn’t until we hit Fukuoka that we could see how popular it is. At least three out of four shops had a decent stock of fur items: neck warmers, purses, coats, hats, you name it. Rabbit was the most popular, with a smattering of sheep and some that looked like it was from a deer. I’m not much a fan of fur, but I’ve never really taken up the war cry against it. That changed when Anja gave me the background: while sheep pelts come from animals who are farmed in fairly humane conditions and whose bodies are used fairly efficiently, rabbits are skinned alive after being caught in the wild using inhumane traps that keep them in pain for days. Not a pretty thought. But the last straw came when we came across a shop window with a full-length fur coat on display. It had no sheep’s wool, and no rabbit. This coat was made entirely of big cats. Leopard, tiger, cougar, cheetah… patches of every endangered feline on the planet had been stitched together to form a patchwork rainbow of spots and stripes. Behind it was a photo of a Western model wearing a similar coat, with the slogan: “It’s fur time, it’s fun time!” It was all Anja could do to keep herself from throttling the salesman. We found out later, at another shop where Anja got a faux fur scarf, that Japan simply doesn’t enforce the UN laws governing fur. They speculated that much of it came from Germany, and seemed about as disturbed about the immorality of the act as a college student might be disturbed by the pirating of MP3s. It was just unbelievable.

posted by Noah Flower @ 1:43 PM