The Black Suits of Japan's Hot Summers

Japanese streets on the weekdays can be extremely colorless.  Salarymen in their millions walk about in almost identical black suits, quickly rushing toward their office buildings and clients.  But the black suits, for all their ubiquity, is not exactly designed for the hot summers that engulf the island country.  As humidity soars and temperatures rise above 40 degrees Celsius in some parts, keeping to the business norm, fashion-wise, can become tortuous.  Salarymen constantly wiping off their sweats can attest to the difficulty.

Corporate Japan has tried its best to make the grueling summers more tolerable for the millions of black suits.  Businesses enact so-called "Cool Biz" that allow male employees to show up to work without neckties during the summer.  And fashion houses designed suits with cooling materials to make the suit more climatic ally suitable for the Japanese summer.  All are valiantly efforts, but cannot change the fact that the basic style of the suit, with thick jacket over dress shirt, remain the same throughout the changing seasons. 

The general populations acceptance that the full-on suit is still necessary during peak heat of the summers speak volumes about the rigidity of corporate norms in the country.  As a Western import rapidly adopted in the country's rush to modernization during the Meiji Restoration, the suit has become the symbol of Japan's modernity and the strong worth ethic that sustain its economic wealth.  To preserve it, in some ways, can be considered a preservation of what makes the country an economic developed land worthy of emulation and admiration.

Yet the recent years have had plenty of stories that show corporate Japan that support the suit going downhill, and no longer worthy of the emulation and admiration it acquired in the decades past.  Major Conglomerates such as Toshiba and Fujitsu, which carried Japan to its post-WWII glory, has seen their corporate value reduced as their products no longer command the same level of market demand as before.  Even Japan media outlets have questioned whether their strict work hierarchy has stifled their innovative power in recent years.

Millions of black suits on the streets of Japan's major cities, then, also face a crisis of sorts.  The wide acceptance of suits as a corporate norm stems from the rigid work structures of these major conglomerates.  If those conglomerate no longer shines, can the suit still be an unquestionable part of Japanese work culture?  The failure of the Japanese corporate structure of the past, perhaps, will also induce a rethink on not only how Japanese businessmen think, but also how they dress.  The suit, logically, lies at the heart of the problem.

It is rather poetic then, to see fashion sense of the world's (and Japan's) most innovative companies moving in the polar opposite direction of the Black suit.  T-shirts and jeans are in in tech startups that drive corporate growth and stock market valuations in the world's biggest economies.  Their abandonment of the rigidity of the suit is a reflection of their values, a strategy to think nimbly and flexibility while abandoning set rules and norms that govern the corporate past.  Cutting out the suit is just symbolic of an act to pass up.

The salaryman's identity would crumble when the Black suit is stripped away.  And when the identity is stripped away, an anchor to the very mentality of how they and their superiors have worked for decades disappears.  t would be an existential crisis that many people with built-up careers certainly would like to delay as much as possible.  Hence so many companies continue to push their employees to don the suit, even when the hot weather makes it completely unsuitable.  Even when the body struggles, the mind is comforted by the status quo.

Maybe one day the suits and the t-shirts crowds can strike some sort of compromise.  A new, more summer-friendly work fashion can emerge that combine the comforting standardization and rigidity of the suit with the flexibility of casual wear.  Maybe it will be an even more casual version of the existing "business casual."  But then again, if any fashion that used to be flexible is made into the uniforms of corporate rigidity, then can it retain that sense of flexibility?  Wouldn't it just become another rigid uniform for millions, like the black suit is today?