Big boys and girls: Japanese urban youth are the subject of sculptures by Mr., an artist in Murakami's entourage

Edward M. Gomez

Take, for example, Hello Kitty, the grand mistress and face of one of Japan's all-time, most successful brands. As they do with the characters or stories found in anime or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, consumers around the world can emotionally connect with the more than 20,000 items in the Hello Kitty product line: pencils, notebooks, hair clips, clocks, bed sheets, lamps, microwave ovens, and much more. (A quirky detail: Hello Kitty has no mouth, which makes her a kind of emotional tabula rasa, ready for consumers to inscribe with feelings of their own.)

In fact, notes New York Times reporter Ken Belson, who, with Brian Bremner of Business Week, wrote Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), "Sanrio founder Shintaro Tsuji sees Hello Kitty and other 'character goods' as a form of social communication and as entertainment. He sees himself as a purveyor of goodness through the image of these products that are rooted in Japan's gift-giving culture." (Most "fancy goods" or "character goods" are designed to be affordable enough for children to easily purchase for themselves or their friends.)

Such products embody another quality associated with some of the most popular J-pop: cuteness. Known as kawaiimono ("cute things") in Japanese, with their brightly colored, round forms, Hello Kitty and her confrëres--the penguin Badtz Maru, the puppy Purin, the baseball-playing frog Keroppi, and the bunny U*SA*HA*NA--are intended to be irresistibly adorable. Sanrio itself and a host of licensees have applied or adapted images of these characters to a profusion of products marketed around the world. All appear on school supplies, and all are conceived as collectibles. But Hello Kitty's mug has graced some more unusual offerings, too, including rice cookers, a Visa credit card, sexy underwear, a vibrator (Sanrio calls it a "personal massager"), and condoms.

"In Japan, there's a really wide range of what's considered kawaii," observes Christine Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii who, like Allison, specializes in Japanese popular culture. "Anything can be kawaii if it's embraceable; the relationship between the user and the object is one of taking care of something. Even something ugly can be kawaii."

Allison notes in her book that, in Japan, even airlines have decorated aircraft with Pokèmon's bright-yellow Pikachu character. She cites research conducted by Dentsu, the Japanese advertising company, that has shown that using kawaii characters in marketing and merchandising "glues society"--especially a group-oriented society like Japan's--"at its roots." For the Japanese, Dentsu reports, a likable cartoon character (sometimes also called a mascot) functions as a "device for self-realization." It "accompanies the development of a group and becomes part of, and a symbol for, that identity."

Kawaiimono are ubiquitous in Japan; every bank, railway line, or department store, as well as many cities and prefectures (provinces or states) have cute-character mascots that appear on posters, in TV commercials, or, in the form of plastic or plush toys, as promotional giveaways. (In turn, the collecting of character toys and figurines, whether they are associated with cartoon shows, films, or comic books--or not--has become a huge trend in Japan and abroad. In the U.S., magazines such as Giant Robot and Juxtapoz serve as clearinghouses for information about this field, whose showcases are the Kid Robot chain's retail stores in New York, San Francisco, and Santa Monica.)

Cute factor: anthropologist Allison examines how cartoons and cuddly mascots contribute to help define group identity in Japanese society

Jon Gardiner

For some close observers of Japanese society, though, the popular preoccupation with all things kawaii is uncomfortably echoed in the fetishization of pubescent and teenage girls in school uniforms (a standard theme in Japanese porn). They also see an unsettling strain of institutionalized cuteness in the mannerisms young woman are taught to affect in, for example, department-store greeter jobs. Dressed in conservative skirt suits, white gloves, and hats, these female store guides and elevator operators spend their days welcoming shoppers or chirping "Going up! Going down!" in high-pitched, unnatural, little-girl voices. (A darker side to the national fascination with kawaii: Some of the girls who pour out of Shibuya station after school routinely sell their sexual services to eager male customers. The considerable pocket money they earn presumably allows them to do their part for Japan's economy by buying designer handbags, manga, CDs, restaurant meals, and all those Hello Kitty tchotchkes.)

Perhaps inevitably, a backlash against what its detractors have called an unhealthy obsession with cuteness has emerged in Japan. One of its most prominent critics has been the artist Takashi Murakami, who, for sheer prolificness, is Japan's answer to Andy Warhol. With a legion of assistants at his studios in Tokyo and New York working on an ever-expanding array of fine-art and mass-market projects--paintings, sculptures, plastic-model kits, decorative designs for Louis Vuitton handbags--Murakami is Japan's most famous living artist and something of an international brand in his own right.

Murakami is known as one of the major artist-theorists of what the American art historian Alexandra Munroe has called the "post-Hirohito generation." (The term refers to the emperor who ruled during World War II.) Munroe, an expert on Japanese modern art, is the curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In her pioneering research in the field, she has observed that, after Hirohito's death in 1989, young Japanese artists began to openly criticize the hitherto off-limits, groupthink assumptions about national identity and history that had long prevailed in Japan.

Last year, Murakami curated an exhibition in which he put forth some of his own critical ideas about the popular attitudes that have characterized postwar Japan. Sponsored by Japan Society and the Public Art Fund in New York, "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" included site-specific works made by artists in Murakami's entourage and historical material from the decades after World War II. It traced the development of several aesthetic-emotional currents in Japanese popular culture since the war's end. Among them: a fascination among comic-book and animation creators with atomic destruction and the subservient position Japan has occupied in relation to the U.S. since it lost the war.

The exhibition's title, "Little Boy," referred to what Murakami has called "Japan's enduring, infantile status in its relationship with the country that won the war--its former occupier--the United States." He notes that Japan's postwar defense treaty with the U.S., which allows its foreign "master" to keep military bases on its soil, perpetuates its inferior status. The exhibition's title was symbolically significant, too: "Little Boy" was the name of the atomic bomb American forces dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Speaking about the exhibition a few months before it opened, Murakami said that "contemporary Japan represents a version of George Orwell's 1984: It's a culture that is infantilized and impotent, perhaps even stunted." Politically, modern Japan has not completely matured, he said. That is because, he explained, for all its economic and technological success, it is stuck in an "occupied" mode. (He also had in mind the country's postwar, U.S.-imposed constitution, which revoked the emperor's divine status and forbade Japan from maintaining an army or waging war.) Murakami observed: "Hello Kitty represents this infantilized country."

Murakami's art has taken direct aim at Japanese-style cuteness. Some versions of his own Mr. Dob character, a round-faced figure with Mickey Mouse-style ears, display a menacing, shark-toothed grin, a sinister antidote to Hello Kitty's saccharine sweetness. Meant to be equally charming and subversive at the same time are his sculptures of the manga-style figures Hiropon (1997), a buxom lass with exaggeratedly large breasts from which she squeezes out a jet-spray of milk, like water from a garden hose, and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), a strapping youth who wields a lasso of his own ejaculate.