York on ads: Going Japanese for a slice of the Western market: No 46: Diesel Jeans

A TOKYO street. The usual everyday surreal scene with a huge video wall, a train crossing the street at low level in the background while a row of identical black-hatted businessmen cross in the opposite direction in mid-field. Beautifully composed. You're caught already if you're a certain kind of person with an eye for rich, meaningless detail.

In the foreground are two Japanese girls, city-life stereotypes, one a junior 'office-lady' type, the other a teenage 'sweetheart girl'. And what we're into is a pastiche of a Japanese detergent ad. This is a curious enterprise because - savour it, art directors everywhere - Japanese advertising of this kind is itself an extraordinary East-West mish-mash of language and imagery, full of nave borrowings from American formula ads of the Sixties and Seventies. Diesel Jeans, creators of their own new young world in American print advertising, are associating themselves with a hip sensibility that's interested in Japanese popular culture. There's nothing about the benefits of the jeans and nothing directly implied about their Western users. But it works because it's funny and because it uses the lessons we've all learnt about Japanese TV and ads from Clive James - that combination of sweetness and savagery - and renders it all in layer upon layer of cleverness for the observer. Thus the girls' T-shirts read 'Diesel Industry Limited: female'; an on-screen caption recommends Diesel 'for successful living' (something faintly Mercury there, I feel); and the final shot shows teenage sweethearts in a pink, heart-shaped frame. The detergent packet itself is a masterpiece of cod cargo-cult English: 'DSL makes sense, Magic 55, Formula One Power Powder'. Peter York

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(Photograph omitted)