Selling surveillance: The discursive legitimation of AI control in Japanese convenience stores

AI-driven surveillance technologies are marketed to Japanese convenience stores as solutions to rising crime. This article analyses the marketing materials of one technology company, Vaak, to examine how its system VaakEye is discursively constructed and how it legitimizes AI surveillance. The study is situated within a broader policy context in which the Japanese state promotes AI adoption through initiatives such as Society 5.0, while offering limited regulatory scrutiny. The analysis finds that AI is framed as an autonomous, ‘objective’, and common-sense solution, while customers and staff are represented as unreliable and suspicious, and therefore in need of technological oversight and behavioural managing. These representations draw on and reproduce ideologies of technological solutionism and safety and convenience, while obscuring the social and structural causes of crime. In so doing, they naturalize surveillance as necessary and desirable, and shift authority from human judgement to opaque algorithmic systems. This normalizes the expansion of data-driven monitoring in everyday life, contributing to a redistribution of power toward corporate actors and the infrastructures of surveillance capitalism. By framing these developments as inevitable and beneficial, opportunities for critical debate are foreclosed. This allows systems of behavioural control to become embedded in routine, everyday social practices like shopping.