In Praise of “Kawaii” Culture by Taras. A Sak
After penning an extremely churlish entry on “Buzzwords” last time around, I decided to take a step back and write something more positive about life in Japan for this latest column. After all, if people want to read or hear about the difficulties of living in Japan, they can easily find other sources – including the nearest expat bar, where one can always find people grumbling over a glass of beer.
To be honest, I never wanted to become one of those people – let’s call them the “grumblers” – and I always vowed to simply move somewhere else if I ended up spending most of my time picking apart all the things “wrong” with “Japan.” But neither did I ever want to become a sort of latter-day Lafcadio Hearn, a “Japanophile” who gazes upon the country and people around him with decidedly rose-tinted lenses. It is said that Hearn, who lived for a while in rural Shimane prefecture, ran around his house, dressed in traditional Hakama (men’s kimono), while waving a Rising Sun flag and cheering “Banzai!” at the news that Japan had attacked Russia at Port Arthur, thereby formally beginning what would later come to be known as the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).
I always found that image a bit comical, and dangerously naïve (to put it mildly), not to mention callous – after all, there is nothing to cheer about when war breaks out, and the Russo-Japanese War was a particularly bloody and pointless one at that. This image always diminished Hearn in my eyes, though I still greatly value his writing.
At any rate, as an expat in Japan, I think it is always important to maintain a balance between the extremes of “Japan-bashing,” which ends up being an all-too-easy and warped way of looking at life in this society (while idealizing life “back home,” in our native countries), and becoming “more Japanese than the Japanese,” a la Hearn.
One way of doing this, at least for me, is to turn off the television, which always depresses me, and try to return to and dwell upon the reasons why I came to this country in the first place. In other words, to accentuate the positive, and try to regain those jet-lagged, “Lost in Translation” – like eyes that many of us arrived with – by which I mean not a rose-colored view but, rather, a way of looking at the world around us with a sense of openness, curiosity and wonder, which I think Sofia Coppola captures very beautifully in her (admittedly problematic) film, in those lovely scenes wherein the main character first sees “Japan” while neon lights, rain and fuzzed-out guitar washes over her taxi. Whatever you may think of that film, I would guess that many of us have felt this same mixture of pleasant dislocation and utter strangeness when first arriving in Japan.
This brings me to a consideration of “Kawaii,” or “cute-ness” in contemporary Japanese popular culture – a much vilified and misunderstood concept, which in many ways embodies that love-hate tension many expats feel about life in Japan. Now, I have been asked about this aspect of Japanese society by many friends back in the US (most recently in the form of “What’s the deal with all that ‘Hello Kitty’ – stuff over there, anyway?”), and for many years I did not really know what to tell them. In my darker, more “grumbling” moods, I imagine that I attributed the prevalence of “cute” culture to a sort of arrested development or perpetual childishness (as an aside, I suspect that this is the source of my disappointment and sadness at the end of the film “the Mamiya Brothers,” which I wrote about previously). A sense of not wanting to grow up and face the harshness of the surrounding world, or even a kind of enforced infantilization, which acts as a means of social control. It’s easy to see where that gloomy chain of thought leads – straight to the nearest expat bar and an evening of complaining, over a few pints of beer, to anyone who will listen. But that’s too easy – and too stale a routine.
Instead, lately, I have been re-considering the concept of “Kawaii” and I think I have made my peace with it. How else to explain the cell phone-strap mascots, the complete set of Snoopy and Peanuts gang flatware, or the Crayon Shinchan pencil case…? Surely these are not the possessions of the aforementioned “been too long in Japan”-type, grumbling, burnt-out case!
In the winter of 1933-34, the novelist Tanizaki Junichiro published an essay entitled “In’ei raison” (translated into English as “In Praise of Shadows”), in which he (perhaps ironically) defended what he saw as the defining, yet rapidly disappearing, characteristic of Japanese aesthetics – namely, the beauty of shadows, age and wear, or what has also been called “Wabi-Sabi” (an appreciation of the imperfection and transcience of things). He was writing, at least in one reading of this deliciously ambiguous text, in an attempt to restore a sense of dignity and worth to what was being disparaged as old-fashioned, obsolete, or backward, in the face of rapid industrialization (or “Westernization”). Whether he was completely serious in this endeavor is not clear and perhaps never will be – after all, when an architect he had hired to build a new house mentioned to him, years later, how he planned on designing it in the traditional style so highly praised in the essay, the author reportedly told him, “But no, I could never live in a house like that!”
In any case, I want to come to the defense of the culture of “cuteness” in contemporary Japan. Yes, it can be overdone and, at times, it seems downright silly and dis-empowering, especially for women and young people – or foreigners who go overboard in their efforts to “blend in” by collecting character goods – since there is a very clear hierarchy in this society. After all, it is hard to take someone with a Crayon Shinchan pencil case too seriously.
But, at the same time, I tend to see this cuteness much in the way that Tanizaki conceived of shadow and darkness: as something disparaged, yet valuable, in our current situation. In other words, as a means of resistance to an otherwise hostile world – a world in which it is all-too-easy to fall into cynicism and despair.
Seen in this light, perhaps (if my reader is generous) we can look at “Kawaii” culture as an assertion of purity and innocence, even hope, in the face of a frightening, deadly serious and very adult world. In this way, I think it is a very brave face to show to others, when all the evidence seems to point to the contrary – that the way of the world is violence, hatred and cruelty. When contemplating the bleak landscape of hopelessness that seems to pervade much of “Western” culture today, I’ll take the cheerfulness and optimism of “Hello Kitty” any day.
