[1] Elizabeth Legge, ‘When Awe Turns to Awww... Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime’, in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 142.

[2] Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 16.

[3] On the website, the figures appear on the right side of each entry’s text, sequentially. However, in this document, I have opted to present all figures in Appendix II – Figures in separate sections corresponding to each entry, for practical and conceptual reasons. On the one hand, this keeps my text decluttered and avoids expanding the number of pages substantially. On the other, the act of collecting the pictures, GIFs, and videos à propos of each entry has been crucial in the making of this encyclopedia, for reasons which I will address shortly (namely, regarding the curiosity cabinet). As such, in presenting them separately from the text, I wish to highlight how the figures are not simply illustrations or visual aids for the text but constitute a world—a form of thinking, a meaningful reflection—of their own.

[4] Krauss and Bois, Formless, 16.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3.

[6] Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 19.

[7] Boyer, 18–19.

[8] Krauss and Bois, Formless, 18–21.

[9] Stephanie Bowry, “Before Museums: The Curiosity Cabinet as Metamorphe,” Museological Review 18 (January 1, 2014): 36–37.

[10] Bowry, 39.

[11] Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.626252.

[12] Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 816, https://doi.org/10.1086/444516.

[13] Mark Mitchell, “Japonisme, Japonaiserie and Chinoiserie,” The Art Blog by Mark Mitchell (blog), February 27, 2014, https://www.markmitchellpaintings.com/blog/japonisme-japonaiserie-and-chinoiserie/.

[14] Maria Paula Diogo and Dirk van Laak, Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 193.

[15] Wester Wagenaar, “Wacky Japan: : A New Face of Orientalism,” Asia in Focus: A Nordic Journal on Asia by Early Career Researchers, no. 3 (2016): 46–54.

[16] In the animanga fandom, moé anthropomorphism is “a form of anthropomorphism in anime and manga where moé qualities are given to non-human beings, objects, concepts, or phenomena… Part of the humor of this personification comes from the personality ascribed to the character (often satirical) and the sheer arbitrariness of characterizing a variety of machines, objects, and even physical places as cute.” “Moe Anthropomorphism,” in Wikipedia, April 17, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moe_anthropomorphism&oldid=836931650.

[17] Thomas Lamarre, ‘Introduction’, in Mechademia 6: User Enhanced, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), ix–x..

[18] Kanako Shiokawa, ‘Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics’, in Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A. Lent (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press 1, 1999), 120.

[19] ‘The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency’, in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 35.

[20] Casey Brienza, “Manga without Japan?,” in Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics without Japan?, ed. Casey Brienza, 2015, 1.

[21] Brienza, 4.

[22] Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade, ‘Introducing Japanese Culture: Serious Approaches to Playful Delights’, in Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 347.

[23] Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millenial Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 46.

This thesis is an “encyclopedia” of essays exploring the links between cuteness and negativity in the contemporary milieu, with a focus on the Japanese cute, known as the kawaii. I present this encyclopedia both on paper, in the form of a Ph.D. dissertation, and online, in the form of the website https://www.heta.moe/, where it comes to its full potential as an interactive, nonlinear work—thus, I suggest “using” the encyclopedia as available online. Because my creative juices as an artist and an academic are fundamentally the same, I regard this encyclopedia as an (ongoing) art project in and of itself. Therefore, my research question is not articulated in the terms traditionally found in Ph.D. dissertations, i.e., there is no overarching problem to be dissected, no cutting its internal parts, believing that totality exists even if it is unattainable. Instead, it is an exercise in hermeneutics, applying a quasi-Talmudic method of study that takes a core prompt or statement (“kawaii and negativity”) and explores its declensions of content, form, expression, and association. Each entry in the encyclopedia comes with its own set of hypothesis and deductions, weaving an intricate meaning-making fabric in which, ideally, each piece sheds light on the others.

Apart from my artist statement in Part III, this thesis does not take a descriptive or explanatory approach to my artworks but seeks to develop their aesthetic principles and thought processes (e.g., kawaii or anime and manga, the assemblage) through the medium of writing. The choice of form, structure, and themes captures the central idea that my artworks and writings world-build an authorial universe together with or alongside each other. If there is an overarching question, then, it should be: what can a Ph.D. dissertation do, what and how can it perform, to reflect my artistic identity? That is, idiosyncratic and constantly changing, sometimes obscure—hopefully—capable of the unexpected; a bit skittish, nervy. The answer, or one possible answer, or the answer I came up with, is that it can serve as a stimulus to encourage the creative exploration of everyday objects, to engage with that which enters my mind and my eyes, now and in the future. A reason to focus my attention (for a short time), and to play with ideas as one does with a ball of string, twisting and untangling. Here, the cute is on my side: as “a dumb aesthetic”[1] indexing everything that academic discourse (traditionally) is not, cuteness can conduct certain “acts of sabotage against the academic world and the spirit of system.”[2] Tackling the cute as an aesthetic category suggests, even demands, a deviation from traditional dissertation models, valuing attributes opposed to forms of phallogocentrism, e.g., the childish, the small, the playful, the fragmented, the sentimental, or the feminine.

In other words, I want my Ph.D. dissertation to be like a playing partner. Instead of a single question and a single text, I present a cluster of short entries relating to kawaii phenomeno-poetics, i.e., one’s experience of the affective, imaginative, and aesthetic meanings exuding from cute objects. I have divided this document into three parts: “Part I – Encyclopedia,” “Part 2 – Three Papers,” and “Part III – Artist’s Statement.” Part I consists of twenty-two shorter entries of 2500 to 4000 words. In entries such as “Absolute Boyfriend,” “Fairies,” or “END, THE” I focus on a single work—respectively, a manga by Watase Yū, the animated television series Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, and Shibuya Keiichiro’s video opera THE END—by delving into their thematic, conceptual, and aesthetic substance. Other entries, like “Gesamptcutewerk,” “Pastel Turn,” or “Zombieflat” lack a central object, instead weaving an analysis of various cultural artifacts, connected by an underlying motif, e.g., the “total work of art,” “pastel colors,” and “undeadness.” All the entries in Part I have in common a freer, more speculative discourse, considering a broad range of objects including pop-cultural artifacts like manga, anime, or videogames, but also painting, sculpture, video art, performance, and so on.[3]

Part II follows the “three papers” Ph.D. thesis format, a more recent alternative to the traditional dissertation, with a decentralized structure and shorter length. Contrary to the encyclopedia entries in Part I, these papers have about 8000 words and follow the proper format of a humanities research paper, with an abstract, introduction, discussion, and fewer pictures. The three papers presented in this part are “Gaijin Mangaka. The boundary-violating impulse of Japanized “art comics,’” “Nothing That’s Really There: Hatsune Miku’s Challenge to Anthropocentric Materiality,” and “She’s Not Your Waifu; She’s an Eldritch Abomination: Saya no Uta and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels.” The first paper focuses on š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka,’ a special issue of the celebrated pocket-sized comic anthology š! in which I have participated, addressing the question of Japanized contemporary art by Western artists. The second investigates the Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku as hyperobject (a concept by philosopher Timothy Morton) from a feminist new materialist perspective. Finally, the third paper delves into Saya no Uta (“Song of Saya”), a Lovecraftian-Cronenbergian adult visual novel, examining it in light of Queer Game Studies and antisocial queer theory. Although on the website, I make no distinction between Part I and II—all entries belong to my imaginary collection of art and pop-cultural objects—these three papers attest to my capacity to navigate different theoretical frameworks and write according to the standard format of academic journals. At the time of this dissertation’s completion, I have submitted all three articles to international journals with blind peer review. Moreover, “Gaijin Mangaka” relates directly to my artistic “tribe,” i.e., non-Japanese artists using Japanese pop-cultural references in their works, and therefore is suited for a lengthier analysis in the context of this dissertation.

Part III consists of my artist’s one-page statement, a short statement, and bio. The artist statement, to be used in my professional practice as an artist, presents an overall vision of my work, situating it in contemporary art practice. Part III is to be complemented by the Appendix III – Portfolio, consisting of my portfolio of works produced during the duration of my Ph.D., and the final exhibition of my artworks, which will take place at my faculty on the day of the thesis defense.

In addition, I include a Glossary (Appendix I) of Japanese and fandom terms which appear throughout my dissertation—for instance, “manga,” “anime,” “otaku” or “moé”—whose meaning and history is of importance to better grasp many of the encyclopedia entries. Every time that a term in the glossary appears for the first time in each chapter, it is underlined. Still in the realm of specific words, I would like to stress that throughout this dissertation I use the term “animanga” to indicate the joint products and culture of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics), as well as directly related products that are often adapted and informed by them, such as light novels (novels with anime-style illustrations) and visual novels (anime-style videogames). I have also decided to present the names of people and characters originating from Japan in the Japanese order (e.g., Murakami Takashi, not Takashi Murakami), in which the surname comes before the given name (unless they manifest a preference otherwise). Moreover, while I maintain the Japanese titles of anime, manga, and videogames, I offer their official translated titles (or unofficial, in case of untranslated works) in English. On the other hand, in what concerns non-Japanese names or words used in titles of Japanese works under their Romanized form, I kept their original spelling (e.g., Ikeda Ryoko’s Versailles no Bara, or The Rose of Versailles, not Berusaiyu no Bara; Hagio Moto’s Thomas no Shinzō, or The Heart of Thomas, not Tōma no Shinzō).

In the remainder of this introduction, I will detail some aspects concerning my dissertation’s methodology, namely, its “encyclopedic” format. I offer a brief observation of the field of Cute Studies and make a general introduction to the question of cuteness and negativity, in which I pre-emptively tackle a set of “negative” concepts which will recur in Parts I and II (such as the abject, the formless, the uncanny, the eerie, the weird, the obscene, the grotesque, or the disgusting). After that, I turn my attention to this dissertation’s main topic, the Japanese cute or the kawaii, addressing its etymology, history, and culture. In the same vein, I present an overview of cuteness and manga—including the Interwar period, girls’ comics (shо̄jo manga) and boys’ comics (shо̄nen manga)—as their coevolution is especially relevant not only to grasp the aesthetics of the kawaii but as a primer to various encyclopedia entries. Finally, I close this introduction with a few concluding remarks (“Coda: Feeling Cute, Might Delete Later”), suggestive of loose ends and future prompts to be explored about cuteness and negativity.

While the dictionary and the encyclopedia are at odds with the Ph.D. dissertation in many ways—the adjective “encyclopedic” can be used to negatively pass judgment on a thesis, highlighting a propensity for quantity over quality or an excess of the content itself—they are all, at heart, teleological formations. The dissertation culminates in a thesis, in which all parts (literature review, methodology, results) converge towards a theory to be proved, aiming for the specialization of students in one field of knowledge. Even when opening new lines of inquiry in “future work” sections, it entails a sense of conclusion of a research phase with everything else lying beyond its scope, and Ph.D. students, often suffering from academic fatigue, fantasize about writing the last word in their dissertation. In turn, dictionaries and encyclopedias seek to collect the entirety of knowledge or branch of knowledge. Their alphabetical order is a strategy to organize that which has no inherent ordering, as no word or entry is more important than the other. So too, in my dissertation, the entries are ordered alphabetically, and therefore “randomly,” evading a logical chain in favor of non-sequentiality.

Although, while compiling the final dissertation document, the pieces seemed to fall into place. In particular, the last entry, “Zombieflat,” wraps things up almost as a concluding remark. Still, one is in no way obligated to read my encyclopedia in alphabetical order. If anything, I urge the readers to dive in and find their way down the rabbit hole, to pursue whatever catches their attention. Or, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (or even a Japanese visual novel), to make choices and build different “routes” or “branches” as they go. To make this remapping or rerouting on the part of the reader easier, I offer, at the end of each entry, a few suggestions on what entries to read next, in the form of “See also.”  

In the making of this dissertation, I wish to continue a lineage— whose roots one can be traced back as far as Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580)—initiated by heterodox (or even, heterological) “dictionaries” like George Bataille’s Dictionnaire Critique in the Documents (1929-30) magazine and continued by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in L’Informe: mode d’emploi (Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996). [Figures 1 & 2] The latter, resulting from the homonymous exhibition that the pair curated at the Centre Georges Pompidou from May 22 to August 26, 1996, was translated to English in 1997 as Formless: A User's Guide (1997). Both subvert the dictionary as a tool that objectively describes the meaning of words, mocking its aspirations to totality, replaced by a collection of short, idiosyncratic essays. Indeed, Bataille’s dictionary “is not much of one.” As Krauss and Bois put it:

In Formless, the book’s division clashes with its alphabetical order: because all 28 entries are organized from A to Z, the book’s four parts (“Base Materialism,” “Horizontality,” “Pulse,” “Entropy”) seem subject to chance or, at least, conditional to the dictionary’s deterministic order. Like Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), Krauss and Bois also write their book using four hands—indeed, as the former state, “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”[5]

My encyclopedia, which is also “not much of one” and “crowded” with heterogeneous characters and contents, uses Bataille’s dictionaries and Formless as models for the dissertation, not just in structure and length, but in their engagement with what Ernest Boyer calls a “scholarship of integration” or “connectedness.”[6] As Boyer writes, “By integration, we mean making connections across disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating nonspecialists, too.” And continues: “In calling for a scholarship of integration, we do not suggest returning to the ‘gentleman scholar’ of earlier time, nor do we have in mind the dilettante. Rather, what we mean is serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear original research.”[7] To Krauss and Bois, this connectedness is a way “not only to map certain trajectories, or slippages, but in some small way to ‘perform’ them.”[8] In my case, these “trajectories” and “slippages” draw together Western and Japanese objects and frameworks. Indeed, I was first interested in the Japanese cute, the kawaii, because of the way that Japanese comics, animation, and videogames reflect many topics present in Western art and theory in fresh, unexpected ways.

Another crucial feature of dictionaries and encyclopedias is their provisional nature, as language and knowledge are continually shifting and evolving. Ironically, encyclopedias like the online Wikipedia, that incorporate provisionality and open-endness, are often scorned by the gatekeepers of knowledge and referencing them remains, for the most part, an academic no-no. In my encyclopedia, I deliberately insist on the interplay of “high” and “low” sources of information, using books, monographs and papers alongside Tumblr posts and collaborative websites like KnowYourMeme, TvTropes and fan wikis. In doing so, I seek to reflect my experience as a trained scholar and artist who is also a product of the Internet revolution, marked by the rise of user-generated content and social media. Indeed, my interest in the kawaii itself would not have been possible without the unprecedented circulation and accessibility of Japanese popular culture in the 2000s. After all, the millennials were the first generation to be brought up en masse on Japanese cartoons like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Evangelion, or Pokémon, thanks to globalization and the World Wide Web. In the spirit of provisionality, an essential aspect of my encyclopedia is that it will remain, on my website, as an open-ended collection of entries, subject to growth and change. Hence, the dissertation submitted to my school administrative services is but a momentary crystallization. After the conclusion of my Ph.D., I will continue to add new entries, and existing entries may be changed or removed, in a continual editing process of which I will keep track in the Blog section of the website.

My encyclopedia also employs the archetype of the cabinet of curiosities or wonder-room as an organizing principle, insofar as, like the curiosity cabinet, mine is also a compendium of artifacts. Renaissance wonder-rooms were collections of unusual objects organized in idiosyncratic categories, according to flexible guidelines and the collector’s imagination.[9] [Figure 3] As historian Stephanie Bowry puts it, “Far from being chaotic, cabinets attempted not only to represent, but to actively perform the entangled nature of objects through their selection and categorization of material, and to experiment with the limits of representation by creating new kinds of objects.”[10] The curiosity cabinet exists at the intersection of the encyclopedic and the “weird materialities”[11] of culture, bringing out the entanglement of theory and practice as products of the same world-building drive. What interests me in this model is that, like the dictionary and the encyclopedia, the curiosity cabinet is an open-ended collection subject to growth and change, negating the closure expected from Ph.D. dissertations. However, compared to the dictionary and encyclopedia, which tend towards abstraction (i.e., concepts, words, events), the cabinet of curiosities is endowed with an objectual nature. I identify with it more because each of my entries originates from “deep looking” (to borrow Pauline Olivero’s “deep listening”) at an object, artwork, or character, and mapping its connections to other artifacts and concepts. The artifacts in my dissertation range from the “fine arts” (painting, sculpture, video art, performance, installations, etc.) to pop and mass culture (comics, animation, merchandise, fashion, pop singers) to “objets trouvés” (“found objects”) such as computer viruses or posts on Tumblr. This diversity seeks to reflect the kawaii’s kaleidoscopic sprawling into every corner of contemporary art and culture. In a sense, in building my encyclopedia, I, too, am a collector of sorts, adding my treasures to an imaginary (virtual) room.

The cute and the curious share some common ground as aesthetic categories. On the one hand, the curious bears a suggestion of smallness, as it is often not surprising or impressive enough to be “astonishing” or “amazing,” thus hinting at a passing interest in things sufficiently tiny to fit into a cabinet. On the other, despite its strong influence in contemporary culture, cuteness remains, for the most part, a “curiosity” in aesthetic criticism, resisting the solemnity of established categories like the beautiful or sublime.[12] Exotic Japan has also been a cabinetizable curiosity in the eyes of the West, reduced to the decorative motif of Japonaiserie,[13] i.e., the porcelain, lacquerware, and screens eagerly sought after by seventieth-century collectors and onward—although this cabinetization was not a one-way road, as the Japanese shops exhibiting curiosities from foreign countries at the height of the country’s isolationist foreign policy show.[14] Even today, kawaii culture fits neatly into the discourse of “wacky orientalism,”[15] with lists of Japan’s most disturbing prefecture mascots (yuru kyara) amusing the Internet alongside news of Hello Kitty dildos and insane street fashion like gyaru or decora. [Figure 4] For better or worse, these stereotypical associations of “Japaneseness” hold a poetic significance in their transgression of the boundaries of nature and artifice, reality and fantasy, encouraging the formulation of playful connections between objects, concepts, and affects.

Moreover, while the portfolio and the encyclopedia exist separately on my website, the homepage is a section in which writings and artworks are mixed in with each other: the GRL KABINETT. Here, each entry (of the encyclopedia and portfolio) is represented by an AI-generated anime girl created with https://make.girls.moe, a website which uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create characters; and curated from a pool of several hundreds of automatically generated girls to best fit each entry. In the spirit of moé gijinka (or moé anthropomorphism), i.e., concepts or things converted into cute anime characters,[16] and Japanese bishōjo games, readers choose a girl and click the image to access her contents, then go back and choose another, and so on. Because the girls are unlabelled, accessing the entries from the GRL KABINETT also encourages visitors to engage playfully with the contents of the website. It not only intensifies the unpredictability (and memory) factor at play but transforms the reader’s affective inclinations towards one girl or another in a mediating element between them and the textual materials in the encyclopedia or artworks in the portfolio.

The choice to represent the curiosities in this virtual cabinet through moé anthropomorphism, instead of icons retaining a mimetic relationship to their content, hints at the contradictions of cute aesthetics in contemporary culture, namely, at cuteness’s permanent tension between reinforcing and subverting the existing social order, sometimes, in the same gesture. Indeed, as scholar  Thomas Lamarre puts it, “unless you’ve mastered easy flight to other planets, you’ve surely run up against signs of increasing anxiety about the effects of capitalism in today’s world… Regardless of what you think about capitalism, it’s hard to escape a sense of disparity between the creativity of consumer activity today… and the contemporary crisis of capitalism.”[17] I find this contrast both funny and unsettling in ways that reflect, quite efficiently, the contradictions in my own writings and artworks. After all, what does it mean to thread so intimately among the products of consumer culture? Regardless of analytical depth, in the end, what will my wonder-room look like? Perhaps not so much like a cabinet of curiosities, but like the figurine-encasing displays in the rooms of an otaku? [Figure 5]

In embracing the relational quality of the cabinet of curiosities, I do not rely on a hard definition of cuteness. Instead, my premise is that “cuteness itself is defined in relative terms, based on the available elements in each story,”[18] each chapter, each entry. This indeterminism aligns with the belief that, as scholar Joshua Dale argues, cuteness is “a potential… response to a definable (albeit not completely defined) set of stimuli,”[19] and therefore an overarching, ossified definition would cut against the methodological grain of my encyclopedia. This “case by case” approach, based on close reading and close looking, facilitates the temporal and geographical transitions arising throughout my encyclopedia, as I impose no time or space restrictions on the analyzed objects. But also, it allows me to explore cuteness in terms of content and representation through different theoretical frameworks, drawing from an array of knowledge fields including art studies, critical theory, Japanese studies, anime and manga studies, comics studies, media studies, queer studies, gender studies, feminist theory, new materialism, and so on. In the Talmudic spirit, I also assume a stance in which no object is undeserving of detailed attention, assuming that (consciously or unconsciously) its ideas and forms are meaningful, regardless of their smallness. In fact, in my experience and art practice alike, it is often from details and the more fleeting sensations that words and images are fleshed out, rather than from totalizing thought systems.

Finally, in examining the relationship between cuteness and negativity, I have made a deliberate effort to include art and pop culture that is not only Japanese but also Japanized—what scholar Casey Brienza has called Japanese pop culture “without Japan,”[20] meaning “products of a sometimes globalized, sometimes transnational, sometimes hyperlocal world… produced without any direct creative input at all from Japan”[21] but which nevertheless retain symbolic and stylistic markers associated with manga, anime, Japanese videogames, and so on. In Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (2011), scholars Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade endorse a similar view (with which I concur), writing that,

At the heart of any definition of Japanese popular culture are a number of contradictions. First, we believe that the use of a nation-state, such as Japan, as an organizing principle for the categorization of culture, especially contemporary popular culture, is ultimately untenable. We see Japanese popular culture as a study of information flows associated with Japan rather than anything “essentially” or “authentically” Japanese. In the case of Japan, this is sometimes less arbitrary because of the barriers of geography and language. Thus we demonstrate that the designation “Japanese” in Japanese popular culture is more an associative starting point than a marker of exclusivity or locus of origin for what are indeed a globalized set of phenomena.[22]

By expanding the objects of analysis to outside the boundaries of Japan’s territory (a particularly enclosed one, considering its insular position), I wish to emphasize that these essays are meant to reach a broader crowd beyond the niche of animanga fans and fellow weeaboos (“wapanese” or “wannabe Japanese,” obsessive Western fans of anime and manga). That is to say, the phenomenon of Japanization in the twenty-first century—and, increasingly, also of Koreanization, with the worldwide success of K-pop and K-drama—reflects the broader zeitgeist of postmodernity in art and beyond. In this sense, Yoda Tomiko has argued that the handle “J-” often accompanying the products of Japanese pop culture (e.g., J-pop) is useful precisely because of its degree of separableness from the national. As a part-object, “J-” embodies the contractions and contradictions of “Japan” (or any country, really) in globalized capitalism. As she puts it, “Rather than assuming that the Japanese popular culture today ultimately refers to some form of larger national frame, we may understand the prefix J- as inscribing the subculturation of the national.”[23] As such, the phenomenon of Japanization transcends my integration into a cultural group with the same interest in manga, anime, videogames, and so on. Instead, in its subculturized form, “Japan without Japan” becomes a kind of topographical McGuffin, i.e., a device that sets the “plot” (in this case, one’s imagination and desires) in motion, indexing the aporia of in-betweenness and impossibility, surplus and lack.

Presently, Japanese popular culture is an unavoidable “soft power,” which seeps into our everyday lives, and whose influence makes itself more and more visible in non-Japanese art schools and contemporary art. For instance, as the encyclopedia entry and paper “Gaijin Mangaka” addresses, in the 2020s, the realm of experimental graphic narratives, called “art comics,” has experienced a wave of non-Japanese authors openly influenced by manga. Likewise, references to Japanese popular culture, particularly comics and animation, have become a not uncommon occurrence in Western contemporary art, especially in the work of artists currently in their twenties and thirties. Sometimes, these can cause educators and students to clash and struggle, either to understand and accommodate these trends within their viewpoints (in the former’s case) or to present and navigate their preferences within a contemporary art world context (in the latter’s). I hope that my encyclopedia contributes, at some level, to a better understanding that the kawaii, anime, and manga operate beyond the boundaries of subcultures or “Japan” as a closed cultural and geopolitical unit and can be productively used to engage with all kinds of art and aesthetic criticism, including in educational contexts.

Likewise, I would like this thesis to be read not as a prescriptive or conclusive text on specific topics (the kawaii and animanga culture), but as a constellation of references to be appropriated by each reader, who is free to build their navigating chart for the strange, problematic, complicated, complex, and chaotic worlds unfolding from Japanese pop culture. More than “chapters,” each entry in the encyclopedia embodies a process, one which culminates in their inclusion in the final Ph.D. dissertation, but to some extent exists in parallel or independently from it. My “deep looking” at many of the artifacts is a journey in and of itself, with its history shaped over years of musings, contaminations, detours, and chance encounters. Their influence is not limited to these pages; it leaks into my life and my art practice. As such, in my encyclopedia, readers may unlock many of the recurring motifs that drive my artistic practice, forming a conceptual reservoir to be evoked when looking at and reading my artworks.