What Japan’s Street Ads Made Me Think About: Flyers, Trust, and How Society Works

On the streets of Japan, you almost never see those messy sticker ads or spray-painted phone numbers that appear in many places elsewhere. I still do not fully understand why the difference is so large.

What made me wonder about this is that Japan is not short of paper advertising at all. Flyers and small ads are everywhere. They can fill up your mailbox very quickly.

At the same time, even though there are relatively few surveillance cameras in Japan, I rarely see people posting or spraying ads and illegal messages on utility poles, electrical boxes, toilets, underpasses, walls, fences, corridors, or doorframes. As far as I know, areas around Akihabara in Tokyo have more graffiti and stickers. That is slightly different from what I am discussing here, but I mention it for accuracy.

When I first moved here, every time paper recycling day came around, I would see stacks of advertising flyers tied up neatly. At first I wondered how there could be so many. Now it feels normal. You can pick up all kinds of brochures, flyers, newspapers, and pamphlets in many places. Shops and organizations also regularly deliver ads to homes. I have received a lot of them myself.

My First Flyer-Distribution Part-Time Job

Flyer distributors in Japan are surprisingly serious. One flyer per household really means one flyer. One copy means one copy. If the interval is supposed to be a certain number of days, they usually follow that interval.

That reminds me of the first time I did a flyer-distribution part-time job. Back then, small and large businesses would distribute huge amounts of direct mail every weekend. The pay for a day was around 40 to 50 yuan, and they usually provided water and a boxed lunch.

I worked for two days that weekend. I had to distribute 4,000 flyers a day: 2,000 in the morning and 2,000 in the afternoon. Before doing it, I thought the job would be easy. But after those two days, I not only failed to finish the task, my voice also became hoarse.

The reason was that when I handed out flyers, I gave each person only one. I also said a few words each time and kept walking around. If someone threw the flyer away, I picked it up. And of course, some people simply refused to take one.

Later I learned that people who could keep doing this job usually worked like this:

They stood in one place. When people passed by, they casually handed out several copies at once. They did not say much, and whether people accepted the flyers did not matter. If a flyer fell on the ground, they pretended not to see it, because the street cleaner would pick it up later anyway.

When time was almost up and flyers were still left, they put some in bicycle and electric scooter baskets along the road, placed some inside nearby shops, and threw the rest into a trash bin, or simply handed them to the garbage collector.

After understanding this, I felt the job was not very meaningful, so I did not continue doing that kind of work.

An Outsourcing Job That Came From Handing Out Flyers

But on that Sunday, I unexpectedly received an outsourcing job.

A car-shop owner may have been watching me for those two days. He thought I was reliable, so he came over and told me that his shop was about to run a promotion. He asked whether I could take the job.

He was young and straightforward, so I accepted. That same day, I contacted a group of friends to do it together.

The job was to lead a small team. We would ride different small electric scooters along a designated route around the city.

It only took half a day. I paid my friends 10 to 20 yuan more than the flyer-distribution job. Although the job was contracted to me, I personally only earned 80 yuan in the end.

Later, the owner said he wanted to work with me long term, but I declined.

Why? I personally thought riding small electric scooters around the city was much easier than handing out flyers. But my friends did not think so. They felt distributing flyers was easier and safer.

Why am I writing so much about this small flyer story?

Because there are two important pieces of information inside it.

1. The flyer-distribution job came from a large company. Because I thought carefully about that work, I learned a few things quite early.

   For example, large companies often have an advertising budget. If the person in charge or the marketing department does not spend the money, it can actually become hard for them to explain internally.

   Another example: I worked honestly and seriously, and when I could not finish distributing the flyers, I brought the rest back to the company. But the manager was actually unhappy with me. He knew how everyone else distributed flyers, yet my “honest effort” made him more annoyed.

2. The small car-shop owner did not know me. So why did he trust me the very first time we worked together? Why did he pay me directly, not hold any ID documents, and still let us ride away on several electric scooters?

I hope this small story about handing out flyers can encourage younger friends, after leaving school, to observe more carefully how society actually works.

Think more about why things happen the way they do. Keep what is good, remove what is rough or harmful, and keep learning from the real world. After all, the world will always belong to the young.