Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [140]
The operative word in the above paragraph is «children.» Apart from the addiction to sound effects, the most remarkable aspect of Japan's public announcements is their sheer childishness. The level of nonsense in what Fukuda calls the Kindergarten State can strain credibility. Buses at Itami City urge riders to use soap. At Hayama, a beach south of Tokyo, a recorded voice tells bus passengers, «If you have come from a long way, please rest before entering the sea. If you are drowning, please shout for help.»
The long and the short of it is that Japan s postwar educational system is turning the Japanese into children. That the air everywhere rings with warnings of «Danger!» «Hazardous!» cries out for psychological study-it certainly gives insight into people's timidity in stepping out of line. Commentators in Japan have discussed the problem of this infantilization at length; the social critic Fukuda Kazuya wrote a book entitled Why Have the Japanese Become Such Infants? The effects of infantilization on Japan's modern culture are far-reaching. As we have seen, manga comics now account for nearly half of Japan's publishing business. The old words that defined Japanese culture – such as wabi (rough natural materials) or shibui (subdued elegance) – have been replaced by a new concept: kawaii (cute). Japan is awash in a sea of cute comic froggies, kitties, doggies, and bunnies with big, round, babyish eyes.
The big eyes are a favorite with young girls – the determining audience for modern Japanese design. One magazine editor claims that «the limit on eye size comes when they get so big the shape of the face is distorted.» You can hardly buy a household object – a bar of soap, a pencil, a blanket, a trash can, an electric fan, or a stereo set – without a big-eyed baby face printed somewhere on it. Gone are the days when the sleek Walkman defined Japanese industrial style. Today, while American and Taiwanese computer makers sweep the world with innovative and elegant designs, the main thrust in Japan is toasters in the shape of Hello Kitty.
The educational system has the effect, as Dr. Miyamoto has noted, of freezing children's emotional development at the level before they need to take adult responsibility for their lives; after decades of such a system, the end result is a massive national nostalgia for childhood. Comments Merry White, the author of The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America, «We in the US are said to be a youth society, but what we really are is an adolescent society. That's what everyone wants to go back to. In Japan, it's childhood, mother, home that is yearned for, not the wildness of youth.»
In this there is a sobering reminder for those who expect that the new Japanese youth are going to cast off the trammels and bring revolutionary change to their country. If wild hairdos and tattoos meant wild and liberated people, then perhaps there might be some hope. But wild is not what it's about; it's about becoming a baby again.
If one were to look for the chief influence of Japanese modern culture on the outside world, it would definitely be in toys, games, comics, and fashion for children. In the United States and Europe, Japanese products such as Hello Kitty and Pokemon have been huge hits, but they appeal abroad almost exclusively to boys younger than twelve and girls younger than fifteen. As they mature, adolescent boys turn from Pokemon to games created by Americans and British designers, such as Myst or Doom, girls set aside Hello Kitty and start reading Seventeen or Elle. The same is true of anime (animated films), very few of which appeal to adults as did Disney's The Prince of Egypt; most series, such as Dragonball Z, beloved of nine-year-old boys, and Sailor Moon, a favorite of ten-to-fourteen-year-old girls, appeal to preadolescents.
It's a very different story inside Japan. Cute creations like Pokemon are targeted largely at adults, and the manufacturers of cute are among the few Japanese companies whose domestic profits actually grew during