Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [141]
The conquest of cute happened slowly, taking about thirty years to sweep all before it. The first step was when cute toys of the 1970s became cult objects for adult women in the 1980s; the next step was when, as Japan sank into recession in the 1990s, young male wage earners developed a taste for big-eyed cuddly creatures, and by the end of the century the conquest was near-complete. In 1999, a stuffed doll called Tare Panda with a round face, droopy eyes, and a soft body swept Japan, selling $250 million worth that year alone; most of the buyers were adult men. Takemono Katsunori, a thirty-four-year-old company worker in Tokyo, enthused, «A mere glance at it makes me melt.»
Mary Roach powerfully evokes the extent to which cute has conquered:
To anyone who knows Japan... the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force. The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up to save money with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), to have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey, a condom stretched over his body, entreating, «Would you protect me?»). They see backhoes painted to look like giraffes and police kiosks fixed up like gingerbread houses... Teenage boys tattoo themselves with Badtz-Maru, the Sanrio company's mischievous lumpy-headed penguin. Salarymen otherwise indistinguishable in their gray suits and cigarettes buy novelty cell phone straps adorned with plastic charms of their favorite cute characters: Thunder Bunny, Cookie Monster, Doraemon the robot cat. Cute is everywhere. They're soaking in it.
Japan is indeed soaked in cute, to the extent that it is no longer merely an amusing sidelight – one could fairly call it the cultural mainstream, and its influence reaches everywhere, from cinema to traditional arts.
Ikebana flower arranging provides a good opportunity to see how Japan's new environment and educational system are influencing the traditional arts. At the March 1997 official ikebana showing of the Tokyo Branch of Ikenobo School, Japan's oldest and most prestigious, with a lineage that dates to the sixteenth century, it could be seen that about half of each arrangement consisted of plastic. Flower arrangers wrapped petals around glitter hearts; they stapled stems to wires and rods; they draped branches with fiberglass mist and hung them with cutouts made from sheets of blue and orange vinyl; they painted thorns with acrylics, and encrusted leaves with Christmas-tree icicles. A lifetime spent in an ugly city surrounded by a degraded countryside will have its effect. Nature, for Japan's new flower masters, is half vinyl, wire, rubber, and paint. The one thing one might say in defense of this is that it honestly reflects the environment.
Even more thought-provoking in this Ikenobo show was the technical level of the arrangements. Those stapled and cutout leaves, glitter hearts, and the rest were put together with the amateurish zest one might find in a fourth-grade classroom. Flowers glued with epoxy mingled with bits of metallic foil and tubes of pink jelly – these are the work of children, not of adults.
While we are on the subject of flowers, there is no better field than this to study Japan's new «manual approach» to the arts, an outgrowth of the educational mode of telling students exactly what to think and do about everything. Flower schools such as Ikenobo and Hara have taken to diagramming their arrangements. Branch A stands at an 87-degree angle to the ground; Branch В turns away at a 32-degree angle to the right; and Branch С leans at precisely 55 degrees to