TOKYO, June 6 (UPI) -- Appearing like a model in a recent full-page ad on major newspapers, Japan's Minister of Environment, Yuriko Koike, advises public servants as well as private businessmen to wear 'Cool Biz' clothing, a variation of men's working style essentially without neckties or jackets during the coming summer.
This is her ministry's latest earth-friendly campaign to meet Japan's obligations for the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. With the Cool Biz fashion, Minister Koike reasons, office temperature can be kept at 82 degrees Fahrenheit, thus reducing electricity use and help reduce carbon dioxide emission.
She also argues that until now in most offices their room temperature is kept rather low in summer to suit men's clothing conditions, causing female colleagues to shiver in their summer costumes.
Her ministry, now almost entirely Cool-Biz, offers a science, claiming that raising the cooling temperature by one degree could reduce 900,000-1,600,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
However, businessmen without their jackets or ties have been quite unthinkable, if not outrageous. Aware of the prevailing corporate culture, Koike even staged a Cool Biz fashion show Sunday in the ecology-oriented Expo in Nagoya. It featured celebrities putting on specifically-designed shirts with higher collars or even jackets made of hemp or bamboo textiles.
Assuming the majority of businessmen and bureaucrats nationwide follow the suit,a bank's survey assesses the campaign's economic effect to the tune of one billion dollars for this summer.
A necktie manufacturer in Kyoto, concerned about their business drop, introduced alternative, cooler ties. Also men's suits retail chain is promoting suits with cooling textiles and designs.
But real challenge may not be the design variation or cooling technology, but the fashion culture of conformity dominating in Japan's offices. In many public offices including Tokyo's ministries, there have been some confusion on this newly-advised, if not imposed, dress code. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had to stress to his cabinet ministers that "the code is not mandatory".
So far an exemplary advocate of the campaign, Prime Minister Koizumi had to change to his jackets twice Friday when he received foreign guests including presidents of Rumania and Indonesia, then back again to the lightly-colored dress shirts for the Diet session.
Mindful of the country's international commitment to "reduce the greenhouse gas emission in five years after 2008 by six percents compared with the level of the year 1990", members of the Diet are quite cooperative in following the dress code, a rare scene in the tension-ridden parliament.
But for the time being, thanks to their casual looks, their debates also look less solemn than the state business should appear. At the plenary sessions, the Diet members will abide by the normal dress code, according to the parliament office.
You Ikeda, president of Japan Mens Fashion Association, was quoted by the Yomiuri Shimbun on Friday as commenting that, for Japan's corporate warriors, neckties are akin to their swords and jackets to armors. He suggests a gradual transfiguration, lest men would feel psychologically insecure when being disarmed immediately. More radical critics argue to design entirely-Japanese style for summer, including Kimono-like costume.
Government-led energy-saving fashions, one in 1979 amid the Oil Shock and another in 1994 by then-premier Tsutomu Hata, could not produce many converts. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether the Cool Biz fashion will survive the summer.
