Lady Gaga, mop in hand, revives the Hollywood tradition of Japanese commercials

A commercial starring Lady Gaga for FamilyMart — in which the pop diva is shown mopping the floor before inviting viewers to follow her example and apply to work for the convenience-store chain (among other products) — has revived an advertising practice that flourished before the internet made it commonplace to see Hollywood stars outside of Japan in non-celluloid situations. Dressed in a garment with pronounced shoulder pads and a short platinum-blond bob, the music star performs a choreography in which she also restocks shelves, offers fried chicken, scrubs the floor and, during her break, contemplates the view through a surreal skylight. The video, shot in a monochrome aesthetic with flashes of neon green and blue, ends when Gaga looks at the camera and asks in Japanese, using the chain’s colloquial name: “FamiMa de hataraku?” (Will you come work at FamiMa?).

According to a company spokesperson, the ad featuring the singer and actress aims to increase the number of job applications for its stores. FamilyMart is short-staffed: about 30% of its 16,455 outlets lack sufficient personnel. With this campaign, Lady Gaga has joined a long list of Hollywood celebrities who have played farmers, taxi drivers, construction laborers, cooks, and even bodyguards to promote Japanese cellphone, automobile, beverage, and food brands.

During the late-1980s economic bubble, generous Japanese advertising budgets convinced actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger to, in his case, punch a mound of flour into noodles for Nissin Foods’ instant ramen. Bruce Willis’s face was distorted with special effects to enlarge his smile, eyes and ears for the 1991 launch of NTT’s Mova cellphones. Something similar happened with the face of Homer Simpson for an ad for the fictional detergent brand Mr. Sparkle in an episode from the animated series’ eighth season, in 1997.

Although actors’ fees were never public, a 1989 article in The Washington Post about the “Japanese love affair with Hollywood” estimated payments of between $500,000 and $1 million per commercial, provided the ads were not shown outside Japan.

The outlandish nature of the scripts often extended to the shoots and produced hilarious situations such as the one depicted in the film Lost in Translation (2003), where the elaborate directions of a Japanese director to Bob Harris, a fading actor played by Bill Murray, are reduced by the interpreter to the instruction “look at the camera and say the line.” The Suntory Whisky commercial that appears in Sofia Coppola’s film was inspired by one her father, Francis Ford Coppola, shot for the same brand with director Akira Kurosawa in 1979. Between cavalry charge scenes from Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, the two filmmakers toast with Suntory and a male voice proclaims there is no stronger friendship than the one that binds the two men. This marketing trend also appeared in an episode of Friends, in which the character Joey Tribbiani, after much hesitation, shows his friends the ad he filmed in Japan for a men’s lipstick in a bright blue shade, for which he claims to have been paid a large sum.

With the bursting of the bubble, advertising spending fell and Japanese companies did not return to Hollywood until the economic recovery at the start of this century. In 2006, Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz began appearing in separate TV campaigns for telecommunications company SoftBank. Fees had risen by then, and in 2007 The Washington Post described Japanese commercials as Hollywood’s “guilty financial pleasures.” The paper referred to the more than $1.7 million each actor reportedly earned from SoftBank and quoted industry analysts who said the amount set a record for a Japanese ad.

The arrival of the internet made it easier for the videos — now circulating on social networks in low-quality versions — to spread, despite threats of lawsuits from agents and lawyers of some participants who believed those commercials would not travel beyond the Japanese market. According to the Canadian public broadcaster CBC, a DirecTV ad in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays several characters from American society was removed from a Victoria website in 2000 after warning letters from the sponsor and the actor’s lawyers.

In the United States, where appearing in product commercials on television was typically a job for supporting actors, a long roster of stars who did ads in Japan came to be labeled “japanders” (sold out to Japan). That list included Matt Dillon, Sean Connery, Woody Allen, Stevie Wonder, Jodie Foster, and Tommy Lee Jones. The latter has spent 20 years portraying “Alien Jones,” a stoic extraterrestrial fond of canned Boss coffee who infiltrates Japanese society in roles such as police officer, taxi driver, or teacher, and makes sly remarks about his uniqueness and work ethic. The series, launched in 2006, has run to 95 commercials and, the company confirms, continues to be produced — making it a rarity in a market whose currency hovers near historic lows against the dollar.

Lady Gaga’s pop-tinged job offer also highlights a social problem that affects Japan’s economy across the board: finding labor. Executives from the three major 24-hour convenience-store chains — Seven-Eleven Japan, Lawson, and FamilyMart — have commented on the tightening of immigration policies under the current government of conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. In 2025, the three companies reached a combined total of 110,000 foreign employees for the first time, many of them students with a special permit allowing them to work 28 hours a week, the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported.

FamilyMart’s website encourages applicants “of any age or nationality” and explains that employees may adapt their uniform to personal preference. Since its launch on September 25, the Lady Gaga commercial had received 69,000 views on YouTube. Among the many comments, one stands out: “If they have to spend that kind of money to hire cashiers, Japan’s labor shortage is really serious.” FamilyMart, for its part, declined to disclose the singer’s fee.

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