Sakura - The Art of The Decoy

How cherry blossoms can turn your event into a success

Please be aware that these are only my personal thoughts and experiences. I still have a lot to learn and of course my background as a European woman (and a foreigner in Japan) both influences and limits my understanding. Writing down these ideas and concepts helps me to engage with my experiences intellectually. Thank you for reading!

As referenced in one of my previous articles here on LinkedIn, one of my biggest tasks in the past year involved organizing and hosting a global corporate event. Our organizing team had decided that a panel discussion and presentation should of course include a Q&A session. But this decision was not the end of the story. My risk-averse Japanese colleagues were not entirely comfortable with the idea of leaving a Q&A session with top management to pure chance, i.e., participants' willingness to ask questions. "How about we get some of the participants we are friendly with to act as "sakura"?" mused one of my team members. His idea struck a general chord of agreement, but left me a little puzzled.

Sakura? Just what do the famous Japanese cherry blossoms have to do with audience engagement and events?

The short answer to this question is in fact, a lot.

Now let us have a look at the long answer together.

What is the sakura technique?

The term sakura, 「さくら（おとり）」, when used outside the context of the famous cherry blossom season in March and April, is usually understood to mean "decoy," yet retains its cryptic and situation-dependent nature.

Most often, sakura refers to the practice of hiring people to mingle with the audience or queue to animate a particular scene or performance as a whole, or to create an atmosphere in which merchandise sells well. These decoys themselves may also be referred to as sakura ("Is she really a happy customer?" "No, I think she's a sakura hired by the store owner.").

Please note that the word sakura meaning cherry blossom is written with the following Kanji 「桜」, while the practice of engaging decoys is written with a combination of the Kanji for “fake” and “customers” 「偽客」.

So why would you decide to employ a sakura?

There are generally three purposes why you might decide to use this practice:

Firstly, you want to liven up a scene or event and make it look more exciting. Secondly, you want to make it look like the event is attracting many customers or a lot of interest when in fact it is not. Thirdly, you want to increase audience engagement or influence audience reactions.

As for the etymology of the term, it is fascinating and has a long history that is closely linked to Japanese culture ( for a longer discussion please find a succinct explanation in Japanese here: https://gogen-allguide.com/sa/sakura_kyaku.html). The exact origin of the term is a mystery, nonetheless we have several theories to choose from, with some being more, some less likely.

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Mysterious origins of sakura

Let us begin with the most widely accepted theory, which suggests that street vendors first used the term as a secret code among themselves during the Edo period (1603-1868). Thereafter, it is theorized, the use of the term seems to have spread to the public during the social upheavals that the Meiji era (1868-1912) brought upon Japanese society.

(Image shows the Prosperous Joruri District (Street Vendors and Customers in a Busy Market)

This was the age of merchants, and various businesses sprang up all over Japan. It became common practice, that at the request of shopkeepers, hired decoys would blend in with the customers and buy products that were hard to sell (of course, they would ask for their money back later), or they would talk about the good points of the products (pretending to have bought them in the past) at the store.

Another popular theory sees the origins of the term sakura in Kabuki theatre. In Kabuki, there is a custom called "O-mukou," in which the actors are shouted at during the performance of a play. Thus, starting in the Edo period, the term sakura seems to have been used to describe a person attending the playhouse who would call out to the actors to liven up the scene, or applaud at certain points of the play.

Additionally, there are explanations that link sakura, the practice, with sakura, the cherry blossoms: since viewing cherry blossoms, a popular springtime activity to this day, is free of charge; people who viewed performances for free in exchange for exaggerated reactions were called sakura in the Edo period. Another theory suggests that the fact that fake customers would disappear in a flash could be reminiscent of blooming cherry blossoms falling quickly, This association may have given the word its current meaning.

There is also a theory that sakura is a linguistic corruption of the Edo period word "sakuro" 「作労（さくろう）」, which means labor, but the exact semantic connections are quite unclear. Therefore, this attempt at explaining the etymological origins is considered to not be particularly convincing.

In a sense, sakura is a word that has been around for a long time yet its exact etymological origins remain a mystery.

How is sakura used in Japan today?

Having explored the history of the term, we shall now turn to its contemporary meaning and practice. Today we encounter sakura mainly in the field of market and opinion research, where it refers to people who are mobilized or sent in advance by an organizer to observe or interview subjects in order to obtain good or otherwise desired results. Closely related to this, the term is also used in marketing, especially stealth-marketing, which the Cambridge English Dictionary defines as “encouraging people to buy a product or service in such a way that people are not aware that you are trying to persuade them to buy it”.

Specifically when it comes to stealth marketing in consumer-generated media, the use of sakura is common and takes the form fake customer reviews or positive product-ratings on websites. Another very common example of sakura is dating site providers using fake customer profiles on their platforms. In order to fool (most often) male users into believing that there are many potential female users, dating site providers hire sakura who create fake profiles and engage for a while with the real customers to keep them using and thus paying for the service. Recently, the use of dating-app bots, coded software to simulate a "chat" with users utilizing natural language processing, has also become a common technique in the world of online dating (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/07/10/dating-app-bots-learn-how-spot-them-before-swiping/5406539002/)

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Real-life examples of sakura

Nevertheless, sakura can be found not only in the virtual world. The practice still exists and thrives in its traditional incarnation, where real people are hired as decoys for a specific purpose. One such practice is the familiar technique called demonstration selling which operates based on the notion of social proof.?If you observe a demonstration, you will notice that when one person stands in front and starts to watch the demonstration, passersby may stop and wonder what is being shown.

In support of this notion, the street corner experiment based on a study done in the 1960s by psychologists Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz is often cited as scientific evidence.

The key takeaway of this experiment, which revolved around a group of people staring at a single spot in the sky and more and more passersby joining them, is that people are highly influenced by what other people are doing. This phenomenon is also known as the concept of "social proof" - we have a tendency to do the same things we observe other people doing. (For an in-depth discussion of the experiment I recommend this podcast episode: https://www.anecdote.com/2018/02/005-the-street-corner-experiment/)

Even McDonald's famously used the sakura method to generate excitement and ensure that visibly long lines formed outside their stores in Osaka and a number of branches in Tokyo when "Quarter Pounder" sales began in 2008.

The strategy paid off: News reports told of more than 3,000 people who didn't want to miss the launch of the new burger and were interviewed in the queues in front of the Shinsaibashi branch in Osaka City (as shown in the image below). Similar scenes played out in the Tokyo stores. At the Omotesando branch, for example, there were about 500 people in line even before the opening.?(https://japantoday.com/category/business/hundreds-line-up-for-an-hour-at-osaka-mcdonalds-for-quarter-pounder-debut)

Of course, this also caused a stir on social media and more attention for the campaign. As a result, rumors circulated that most of the patient people waiting for their burgers were not real customers, but merely hired by McDonald`s. These rumors were picked up and investigated by several newspapers, with Asahi Shimbun finding that McDonald`s had hired two marketing agencies in advance to line up enthusiastic fans as the product went on sale for the first time in Japan. Then, the event companies hired by the marketing agencies gathered part-time workers as "event staff," and when the product went on sale on November 1, 2008, the part-time workers lined up, bought the products as customers, and McDonald`s paid the hourly wage and the purchase price (https://japantoday.com/category/business/mcdonalds-admits-1000-people-paid-to-join-queue-for-quarter-pounder-debut-in-osaka).

Confronted with these findings, McDonald's Japan communications department admitted their sakura utilization and explained that they wanted to make the launch day more exciting: "Making people stand in line was one of our marketing methods. We'll figure out how to avoid misunderstandings in the future." (https://web.archive.org/web/20081227090937/https://www.asahi.com/national/update/1226/OSK200812260107.html)

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Sakura in politics: The Koizumi Town-Meeting Scandal

Not even politics is exempt from sakura, as the next example shows: At a series of citizens' meetings called “Town Meetings: The Koizumi Cabinet's National Dialogue” held by the cabinet under then-Prime Minister Koizumi (Koizumi Cabinet, 2001-2006), cabinet ministers, experts and members of the public were supposed to hold a dialogue. The purpose was to provide a platform for citizens to participate in the formation of policy through direct dialogue with their political representatives.

It was announced that attendance of these meetings would be decided by lottery. However, as it later turned out, a number of citizen activists, civic groups, and other so-called “inconvenient” individuals were picked out and excluded from the lottery. Meanwhile, prefectural and municipal officials were mobilized in large numbers or paid to get supporters to attend as decoys in all 71 meetings.

It was later also revealed that the Cabinet Office instructed participants, who were paid 5,000 yen as an honorarium, before the meeting to ask specific questions, prepared drafts of the questions, and gave detailed instructions on how to ask the questions so that the other participants would not realize that the meeting was a "fake meeting”.

Subsequent to this, it was discovered that there were even a number of crimes being committed in the course of the "fake meetings", including a meeting in Beppu City, Oita Prefecture, on November 27, 2004. In the Beppu town meeting, four employees of the Oita Prefectural Board of Education were found to have impersonated ordinary prefectural residents (in town meetings, it is necessary to state one's occupation before asking questions) to express their opinions in favor of specific policies..

So what was the ultimate fallout of the political sakura?

As soon as the use of sakura participants as well as questions became known, a storm of outrage broke over the Koizumi government. In particular, the cost of each meeting, about 22 million yen, was criticized as a waste of taxpayers' money. A lawsuit was even filed against the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the city of Kyoto by citizens whose applications had been deliberately excluded from the outset by the participation lottery. The plaintiffs sought a total of 8 million yen, claiming that their "freedom of expression" had been violated.

After a lengthy trial, the Osaka High Court eventually ruled that "the credibility of the lottery and the expectation to participate in the municipal assembly are worth protecting," and ordered the government and the city of Kyoto to pay a total of 150,000 yen to three of the plaintiffs.

In addition to a public apology from the Cabinet Office, a Commission of Inquiry was established, which led to the final abolition of the "Office in charge of Town Meetings" in the Cabinet Office. Beyond that, pay cuts were enforced as punishment against a number of government members, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who returned three months' salary, as did Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki. According to media reports, Shinzo Abe responded that he hoped this would help to make amends.

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Sakura vs Yarase

Now that we have seen the sakura method in action through some prominent examples, we need to discuss an important differentiation.

When people talk about sakura in Japan today, the term yarase is often brought up as well, sometimes even synonymously. However, I would like to emphasize that despite apparent similarities, these two terms describe quite different concepts.

Let us examine the meaning of the word yarase, which refers to showing something as fact even though it is fabricated or staged to be different from the fact. Originating in the Japanese television industry, it became well-known because of a series of scandals involving popular TV programs proclaiming to be documentaries despite being staged to attract viewers' interest and increase ratings.

For instance, the popular 1985 production of TV Asahi`s "Afternoon Show” was found to be entirely scripted despite telling its audience otherwise. A similar famous incident is the controversy surrounding the documentary program "Mustang, the Forbidden Kingdom of the Inner Himalayas," which was broadcast on NHK's "NHK Special" in 1992. In this incident, which became a major social issue due to a scoop by the Asahi Shimbun, the main problems were the excessive representation of the harshness of the Himalayan climate, having the staff act as if they had altitude sickness, pretending that a monk's horse had died, and artificially causing quicksand and falling rocks. Ironically, the program received high ratings and was well received. It was a scandal that severely damaged the credibility of NHK, which had a strong reputation for its objective reporting.

The Fake Cauliflower Festival

A recent case of yarase in the entertainment industry occurred in 2018, when it was revealed that the popular travel program ItteQ! had organized as many as 11 fake festivals and events that they presented to viewers as authentic and traditional customs.

Among these events was the so-called Cauliflower Festival, a competition in which two people harvest cauliflower in a tripod, which quickly rose to fame after the fake became known. Titled "Cauliflower Festival in Thailand," a two-hour special aired on February 12, 2018, in which Daisuke Miyagawa and Yuya Tegoshi had to carry 20 kg of cauliflower on their backs as a team and complete a course that included a bog along the way.

(Image shows Daisuke Miyagawa and Yuya Tegoshi partaking in the fake festival)

The program introduced the festival as a celebration of the harvest called "Petchaboon" and interviewed locals about the festival. However, these locals had been instructed to make up stories about the fake festival in exchange for payment.

Not only did Nippon Television Holdings suffer a massive drop in ratings and was hit by a wave of criticism that led to President Yoshio Okubo having to publicly apologize to the Japanese public, the incident also caused international tensions. Both the Thai and Laotian governments reacted with ire to the invented festivals being falsely attributed to their respective cultures, and some even felt it was a direct insult to their genuine cultural heritage (https://netgeek.biz/archives/131292).

（Image shows President Yoshio Okubo bowing at his apology press conference)

In short, the common denominator of all theses instances of yarase is the alteration of facts while concealing it from readers, viewers, and other recipients. There are many ways to do this, but the most common is to prepare people (amateurs, program staff, and entertainers who have had prior instructions) to act out the story in order to produce the results the producers want.

While a variety of news programs, documentaries, and other fields where the subject of coverage is assumed to be factual, use background music, insertion of ticker tape, and other staging, yarase specifically describes excessive staging to the point of distorting the facts. In other words, yasase is no different in nature from "fabrication", or “fake news”, where the subject of the report does not exist, and is a very serious ethical problem.

Differences between Yarase and Sakura

At this point I would like to summarize the differences between Yarase and Sakura:

1. The underlying motivations and goals are different. While yarase aims to distort facts to essentially create an alternate reality for a target audience, sakura is about influencing human behavior, commonly in the context of business, such as consumer behavior when deciding to purchase a new product.
2. Sakura usually requires the engagement of a person or a third party to act in a coordinated manner. In comparison, yarase can even take the form of newspaper articles and does not require a third party actor.
3. Yarase has a much more negative connotation than the romantic-sounding sakura. Moreover, yarase is often associated with committing crimes, legal penalties and losing trust in organizations or institutions. While sakura arguably raises ethical concerns in some circumstances, it is considered far less objectionable by society than yarase and can be said to be an established practice in many areas of business.

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Back to the beginnings: Sakura and Q&As

To conclude my thoughts on the practice of sakura, I would like to point out the advantages of this method once again. One last time, let us go back to the beginning of this article and take the example of our team considering whether to work together with select participants to raise questions in the Q&A session to animate and encourage the rest of the audience.

How can the sakura method help us to make an event a success?

The first benefit seems obvious, namely avoiding awkward or even embarrassing silences if none of the participants present were to speak up with a question. This would be uncomfortable for everyone involved, but especially for the moderator and the panelists. However, if you have your sakura helpers well prepared and in place, this risk will be cleverly circumvented and the event will appear to run smoothly and without interruptions.

In addition, the event organization team can focus on other important or high-risk aspects of the event. Of course, it has to be acknowledged that this practice allows a certain degree of control over the content of the questions and allows avoiding insensitive topics.

Moreover, sakura questioners can have an encouraging effect on the attendees present: Many a participant would like to ask a question, but may be too shy to speak up first. It is often the case that once someone has made the first move and the initial ice has been broken, more and more people are willing to speak up. Especially in Japan, a culture where group dynamics and high-context communication are of utmost importance, I personally think the use of such sakura helpers can be extremely beneficial. It often only takes one or two people leading by example to overcome the shyness and initial reluctance of workshop participants or event attendees.

However, it must be said that the use of a sakura-only style Q&As would come across as very unnatural, maybe even awkward, to probably to everyone in attendance. It would quickly become obvious that the questions were being recited like lines in a bad play, and the event and its organizers would lose all credibility and trust.

For my part, I thought the middle ground that the team finally decided on was just right: we asked one of the participants, who we knew to be enthusiastic and communicative, if they would be open to being the first to speak when the moderator opened the Q&A session.

Excitedly, they agreed, and of course, we left the selection of the question and the manner of asking it entirely up to that participant. And indeed - as soon as our "cherry blossom" asked the first question, more and more participants began to take the floor.

Thanks to a little help from our very own sakura, the Q&A session proved a success, with many participants citing this as one of the highlights of the event in their subsequent feedback.

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Further references:

https://meaning.jp/posts/2017

https://kotobanogimon.life/?p=2340

https://www.excite.co.jp/news/article/Real_Live_42251/

https://gimon-sukkiri.jp/sakura/

https://zokugo-dict.com/36ya/yarase.htm

https://www.event-partners.net/faq/technical_term/easy/sakura

https://web.archive.org/web/20081212215125/https://www.asahi.com/food/news/TKY200811150217.html

https://ppnetwork.seesaa.net/article/439884163.html

https://msdiaryjp.blogspot.com/2018/10/it-was-scripted.html

https://zokugo-dict.com/36ya/yarase.htm