American singer Cyndi Lauper delighted fans and passersby with a mini-concert in the lobby of the Shin-Maru Building in Tokyo on Wednesday afternoon. Lauper, 54, is in Japan to promote the sale of her new album, “Bring Ya to the Brink,” her first album in seven years.

Lauper sang four songs, including “Set Your Heart,” which has received a lot of air play on radio stations in Japan, and which is the theme song used by Toyota for its new Mark X ZIO. 

NEW YORK — Can a Japanese retailer selling furniture, household items and stationery compete in the $4.2-trillion U.S. retail industry against the likes of corporate giants such as Target and Ikea?

The president of Muji USA Ltd, which will open its U.S. flagship store in Manhattan’s Times Square next month, believes that the company can succeed in such a market.

’’I want Muji products to become part of the lives of Americans of all backgrounds,’’ Hiroyoshi Azami, president of Muji USA, said.

The company, owned by Ryohin Keikaku Co, is committed to opening 30 to 40 stores across the United States in the next five years.

Most Americans are unlikely to have heard of Muji before, but the brand is quickly finding a niche among urbanites in New York City where the retailer opened its first U.S. store in SoHo last November.

New Yorkers are also encountering Muji at the MoMa Design Store, a store for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), which began carrying its products in 2004.

‘‘I love Muji,’’ Craig Broxton, an account executive for Design Within Reach, a modern furniture retailer, said. The 29-year-old recently bought a black bag and two food containers from the SoHo store. Having first seen the products at the MoMa store, Broxton was drawn to the company’s innovative use of plastics.

Muji, which translates as ‘‘no-brand,’’ is an established brand in Japan for basic everyday items sold at reasonable prices. None of Muji’s 7,000 products, including beds, dishes, jackets, underwear and notebooks, have a logo or are wrapped in fancy, distinctive packaging. In fact it is the lack of a name brand that many find enticing.

Muji’s philosophy is to offer ‘‘good products at low prices’’ by eliminating extra packaging costs that do not impact the quality of the product itself. The concept is to use inexpensive materials overlooked by other manufacturers, avoid over-processing materials and minimize packaging. ‘‘As a result, our products are simple,’’ Azami said.

The concept has driven the popularity of Muji products not only in Japan but also in other Asian countries and Europe since the company’s inception in 1981. Now Muji is aspiring to become the preferred brand for U.S. buyers.

So far in New York City, Muji has enjoyed a good start. The MoMa Design Store has lent prestige to Muji’s name by carrying its products alongside those of world-class artists and designers, such as Charles Eames and Isamu Noguchi. Thanks to the design-conscious consumers of New York, Muji’s SoHo store has quickly become profitable.

If Muji’s goal is to become a niche brand targeting trendy urbanites, it is well on its way.

Azami, however, emphasized that that was not the company’s aim. ‘‘I don’t want to just be accepted by design-conscious people or people who like Asian tastes...I want Muji to be accepted as a generic brand,’’ he said.

While most brands target a certain segment of consumers, the purpose of being ‘‘a no brand’’ is to appeal to all people by ‘‘simply providing products that are comfortable and convenient,’’ Azami explained.

Going beyond an appeal to trend-conscious New Yorkers and moving into the households of average American consumers will pose challenges for Muji as it competes with other big names, such as Crate and Barrel, and Ikea, which offer diverse products at low prices. Target is another formidable rival because it sells products made by popular designers at much lower prices than Muji.

‘‘If all they were doing is bringing in other products that are available at Target or Ikea or whoever, it would probably be a tough entry,’’ Doug Fleener, president of retail consulting company Dynamic Experience Group, explained, but added, ‘‘There’s always room in the U.S. for innovative retailers with fresh products.’’

Often hidden in the seemingly simple designs are functions that make Muji’s products stand out. Its toilet brush, for example, has a small cover to protect water from splashing during cleanups. Their summer sheets are made of special linen that absorbs moisture better than cotton.

Making functions that appeal to consumers

While good design and functionality may also be Muji’s biggest selling point, the trick is translating that into making those functions appealing to consumers.

With minimal advertising, Muji must rely on how its stores ‘‘communicate’’ with potential buyers and how they are enticed by visually appealing yet simple merchandise displays.

At the SoHo store, employees can be seen busily reorganizing shelves to make sure the products are presented as perfectly as possible while consumers are largely left alone to leisurely cruise through the aisles.

‘‘It made me feel like I was escaping from commodity culture,’’ said Jon Beller, a 42-year-old professor who stepped out of the SoHo store on a recent Friday night with his family after shopping there for the first time.

Azami expects the flagship store near the densely populated Times Square area to draw professionals who work in the area and tourists as well. Located in the lobby of The New York Times Building, the store is slightly larger than the SoHo store—and will carry about 2,500 products.

In addition to that new store, Azami is planning to open small outlets in New York airports beginning this year. He hopes to raise brand recognition nationally by exposing the brand to travelers from across the country.

The biggest challenge that lies ahead for Muji is lowering its prices—which is particularly crucial amid the recent economic downturn that has hit the United States. Currently the prices at the SoHo store are about 30% higher than in Japan, which is not consistent with the company’s aim to ‘‘offer good things at low prices.’’

The higher SoHo store prices are due to the extra cost of custom duties as well as the added price of importing products from China to Japanese warehouses and then sending them to the United States.

As the operation expands, Azami said, the company is considering outsourcing some of its manufacturing to plants in Latin America.

Even with low prices, some questions remain as to whether Muji will be accepted widely by Americans from all segments of society.

‘‘I think they are better off staying in major metro-markets,’’ said Vivian Ma, a retail analyst at Oppenheimer & Co Inc, an investment firm in New York. Although Ma counts Muji as her favorite brand, she does not think an average ‘‘55-year-old traditional taste person’’ from small-town America would shift his or her brand preference.

The difficulty of expanding into American suburbs can be learned by the experience of Uniqlo. The Japanese clothing retailer opened a store in the New Jersey suburbs in 2005 and two more later on. Eventually all three closed down.

‘’There’s no brand recognition so people didn’t understand our brand,’’ says Keiko Yamamoto, a spokeswoman at Fast Retailing Co, the brand’s parent company. In contrast to its business outside of the city, she pointed to the success of Uniqlo’s flagship store in Manhattan that is located just a few blocks from Muji SoHo.

Muji may do well in ‘‘New York, Chicago, San Francisco,’’ said Fleener of Dynamic Experience Group. ‘‘But as you get into the mid-level cities, is there enough of a population base who will be wanting that design? I’m sure that’s something they’re out to learn.’’ 

http://www.muji.com/ 

http://www.muji.net/

SHIMONOSEKI, Japan — Poison has been as integral to fugu, the funny-looking, potentially deadly puffer fish prized by Japanese gourmands, as the savor of its pricey meat. So consider fugu, but poison-free.

Thanks to advances in fugu research and farming, Japanese fish farmers are now mass-producing fugu as harmless as goldfish. Most important, they have taken the poison out of fugu’s liver, considered both its most delicious and potentially most lethal part, one whose consumption has left countless Japanese dead over the centuries and whose sale remains illegal in the country.

But what could be seen as potential good news for gourmands has instead been grounds for controversy: powerful interests in the fugu industry, playing on lingering safety fears, are fighting to keep the ban on fugu livers even from poison-free fish.

“We won’t approve it,” Hisashi Matsumura, the president of the Shimonoseki Fugu Association and vice president of the National Fugu Association, said of the legalization of fugu liver. He added, “We’re not engaging in this irrelevant discussion.”

Acting as a giant clearinghouse, this port city in southwestern Japan buys fugu from all over Japan and China, guts it and expertly removes its poison before shipping it throughout Japan and as far as New York. Though Shimonoseki’s share has fallen in recent years, it still controls about half of Japan’s fugu market.

But the city’s business, predicated on the fact that fugu is poisonous, now faces a threat with poison-free, farmed fugu liver.

Already, a prefecture in Kyushu, south of here, defiantly serves it. A town in another prefecture applied to be designated a special farmed fugu liver-eating zone.

And a group of scientists served it in March at a Tokyo tasting event for some 40 chefs and restaurant-related businessmen. All ate. All survived.

Mr. Matsumura spoke recently in his office at the fugu market here just after the daily 3:20 a.m. auction. At times he sounded like a man trying to stamp out unrest in the provinces, daring the rebellious to “go ahead” and waving them away as “a minority.”

He insisted that fugu liver, whether farmed or wild, was simply too dangerous.

But researchers and fish farmers said Shimonoseki opposed the legalization of farmed fugu liver simply because it feared losing its grip on the fugu market. Shimonoseki now processes even nonpoisonous farmed fugu, because health authorities have yet to recognize officially that fugu can be made poison-free.

Shimonoseki’s opposition, researchers and fish farmers said, is squelching the opening of new markets and depriving gourmands of the chance to sample fugu foie gras, which connoisseurs regard as more exquisite than the goose’s (and which entails none of the ethical quandaries of force-feeding and is full of healthful omega-3 fatty acids).

“They want to protect their vested interests,” said Tamao Noguchi, a marine toxin specialist at Tokyo Healthcare University and a leading fugu expert. “They won’t accept this for a long, long time.”

It was Mr. Noguchi who, over eight years, conducted a study underpinning what two decades of fish farming in Japan had already shown: that fugu could be made poison-free by strictly controlling its feed.

Decades earlier, another Japanese scientist had identified fugu’s poison as tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin that leaves victims mentally aware while they suffer paralysis and, in the worst cases, die of heart failure or suffocation. There is no known antidote.

Researchers surmised that fugu probably got the toxin by eating other animals that carried tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria, developing immunity over time — though scientists then did not rule out the possibility that fugu produced the toxin on its own.

By this year, Mr. Noguchi had tested more than 7,000 fugu in seven prefectures in Japan that had been given only feed free of the tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria. Not one was poisonous.

“When it wasn’t known where fugu’s poison came from, the mystery made for better conversation,” Mr. Noguchi said. “So, in effect, we took the romance out of fugu.”

Indeed, fugu has appeared in the haiku of Basho, Japan’s greatest poet, and in “The Simpsons,” in an episode in which Homer accidentally eats poisonous fugu.  

For centuries, Japanese were drawn to fugu despite, or perhaps because of, its poison. Expert chefs were able to separate the liver and other poisonous parts from the rest of the fish; only one-third of all wild fugu have enough poison to kill.

So chefs served liver after cleansing it of its poison through a traditional method; sometimes a trace of poison remained, not enough to kill, but enough to thrill by slightly numbing the lips.

Despite the precautions, Japanese kept dying. After accidentally losing a number of soldiers to fugu, Hideyoshi, the 16th-century warlord who unified Japan, banned it outright.

But Japanese kept eating it surreptitiously, despite periodic bans. And fugu kept killing Japanese, including, in 1975, a kabuki actor, Bando Mitsugoro VIII, recognized as a “living national treasure.”

Partly in response, the Ministry of Health made fugu liver illegal across the land. The number of deaths dropped, so that nowadays only a few Japanese die every year, not from eating it in restaurants but from fugu they have caught themselves.

The death rate also remains low because Japanese are increasingly eating the nonpoisonous farmed variety, which, thanks to advances in fish farming, has become almost as tasty as the wild kind. Because of overfishing, wild fugu accounts for only 10 percent of the total sold in Japan.

In Yobuko, a port town south of here, Yoshihisa Ohta has raised nonpoisonous fugu for eight years and serves its liver at a restaurant he owns — though only if the customer asks for it.

Yukio Kidera, who was having lunch, including fugu liver, at the restaurant recently, said, “It’d be such a waste to throw away something this delicious.”

Mr. Ohta and researchers like Mr. Noguchi contend that the real reason for keeping fugu livers illegal is to protect the jobs of licensed fugu chefs and businesses in Shimonoseki. The Shimonoseki Fugu Association has strong links with politicians, they say.

Makoto Tanaka, the official responsible for fugu at the Ministry of Health, denied any political or economic reasoning, saying, “People’s lives are at stake.”

Still, undermining arguments that farmed fugu liver is unsafe is the fact that one prefecture south of here, Oita, is famous for serving it in its fugu restaurants. No one has ever been poisoned from eating it. The health authorities in Tokyo and Oita are widely believed to turn a blind eye to the fugu lawbreakers there.

Mr. Tanaka professed to know nothing about the sale of liver in Oita. “That’s outrageous!” he said with a hearty laugh.

The reality, as shown by lunch and dinner at two restaurants in Usuki, the Oita town most famous for fugu, is that fugu liver may not be listed on menus but it is served openly. All the liver served in Usuki comes from nonpoisonous farmed fugu, some of which is shipped from none other than Shimonoseki.

Masataka Kinashi, the head of the tourism association in Usuki and a fugu dealer himself, suddenly stared down at his desk when asked about the widespread sale of fugu liver.

“Officially, you can never eat it here,” Mr. Kinashi said. “Well, it’s not that you can’t eat it, but, no, you can’t eat it. That’s the only answer I can give you.”