Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

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 the 1990s stagnation. Sanrio, the maker of the Hello Kitty line (now expanded to more than fifty cute characters), grosses more than $1 billion a year through sales and licensing. Since the 1980s, animated films have taken first and second position in domestic cinemas almost every year, leaving films with real-life adult actors dead at the box office. Today, about half of all domestic film revenues come from anime.

The conquest of cute happened slowly, taking about thirty years to sweep all before it.