Murakami T by Haruki Murakami

Author:Haruki Murakami [Murakami, Haruki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Back when I was a boy, there were people whose job was to be the “Sandwich Man,” and wear large boards over their front and back, and walk the streets. They were like a walking billboard. This was back in the 1950s. TV wasn’t so common back then, and of course social networking was still far in the future. The media’s coverage was sparse. There was a popular song, too, titled “The Town’s Sandwich Man,” that went “Us guys are the Sandwich Men…” By the 1960s, TV was everywhere and the job of Sandwich Men vanished from the world. Kind of sad, really…

Nowadays you might say that the spirit of the Sandwich Man lives on in promotional T-shirts. Companies slap their logos on T-shirts and distribute them. And people wear them and walk around town. For the companies, it’s free advertising. It’s pretty inexpensive if you produce a lot of them, and an easy way to have your advertising expenses pay off.

Which is why, when you walk around town, you see “volunteer sandwich men” all over the place.

The gray shirt in the large photo is a promotional T-shirt made by ESPN, the sports channel. The design shows the four pillars of sports—football, baseball, soccer, and basketball. Direct and nicely done. Of the four, my favorite’s baseball. Go Yakult Swallows! Oh—am I wandering a bit?

The red shirt is from the British economics magazine The Economist, with the message think responsibly. A very stylish message, as you might expect of something British, but it’s still a T-shirt and it makes me wonder about how to react to such a sudden, challenging dictum. The message, of course, also reminds you of the “Drink Responsibly” slogan you see in alcohol ads.

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