[108] “顔映し,” in Wiktionary, accessed August 30, 2017, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A1%94%E6%98%A0%E3%81%97#cite_ref-KDJ_1-0.

[109] Shiokawa, ‘Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics’, 95; Adrian David Cheok, Art and Technology of Entertainment Computing and Communication (London ; New York: Springer, 2010), 225; Adrian David Cheok, ‘Kawaii: Cute Interactive Media’, in Imagery in the 21st Century, ed. Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2011), 247.

[110] Shiokawa, “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics,” 95.

[111] Shiokawa, 95.

[112] Cheok, Art and Technology of Entertainment Computing and Communication, 225; Cheok, “Kawaii: Cute Interactive Media,” 247.

[113] “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics,” 95.

[114] Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” 39.

[115] ‘Cuties in Japan’, in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 236.

[116] Debra Occhi, “Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message: Comparing Japanese Kyara with Their Anthropomorphic Forebears,” Asian Ethnology 71, no. 1 (2012): 113.

[117] Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 2012, 85–86.

[118] Wallach, “Yamikawaii — Japan’s Darker and Cuter Version of Emo,” para. 2.

[119] Harry Harootunian, “Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History,” 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), 97.

[120] Harootunian, 102.

[121] Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1997), http://repository.wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=scholarship.

[122] Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2016).

[123] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17.

[124] John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 43.

[125] Dower, 550.

[126] Dower, 551–52.

[127] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011), 227.

[128] In 1986, the average Japanese worker worked 2150 hours, against 1924 of the American worker and 1643 of the French worker; of the fifteen vacation days to which he was entitled, they used only seven. In a 1988 government survey, more than half of the respondents said they preferred more free time to a salary increase.

[129] Gregor Jansen et al., The Japanese Experience: Inevitable, ed. Margrit Brehm (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany : New York, N.Y: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003), 12.

[130] Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 276; Eiji Oguma, ‘Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil’, trans. Nick Kapur, Samuel Malissa, and Stephen Poland, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 23 March 2015, http://apjjf.org/2015/13/11/Oguma-Eiji/4300.html.

[131] Michiya Shimbori et al., “Japanese Student Activism in the 1970s,” Higher Education 9, no. 2 (March 1, 1980): 139, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01680430.

[132] Shimbori et al., 140, 142.

[133] Takashi Murakami, Superflat (Tokyo: Madora Shuppan, 2000), 19; Takashi Murakami, “All my works are made up of special effects.,” interview by Philippe Dagen, Book section [Murakami Versailles], 2011, 23.

[134] William W. Kelly, “Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideologies, Institutions, and Everyday Life,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993), 198.

[135] Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” 242–43, 251.

[136] Tomiko Yoda, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary 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), 247, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30686.

[137] “Cuties in Japan,” 250–51; Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Richmond, Surrey: Routledge, 2000), 32.

[138] Ilya Garger, “Global Psyche: One Nation Under Cute,” Psychology Today, March 1, 2017, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200703/global-psyche-one-nation-under-cute.

[139] Takashi Murakami, Little Boy: The Art of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New York; New Haven: Japan Society, Inc. / Yale University Press, 2005), 100.

[140] Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” 222.

[141] Kinsella, 225.

[142] Susan O. Long, ‘The Society and Its Environment’, in Japan: A Country Study, ed. Ronald E. Dolan and Robert L. Worden (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing, 1991), 95.

[143] Long, 96.

[144] Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” 243.

[145] Kinsella, 242–43.

[146] Kinsella, 143.

[147] LaBelle, Sonic Agency, 129.

[148] Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, “Introduction,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1989), xi.

[149] Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millenial Japan,” 33.

[150] Miyoshi and Harootunian, “Introduction,” viii–ix.

[151] Miyoshi and Harootunian, xii.

[152] Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1980), 162.

[153] Koichi Iwabuchi, “Complicit Exoticism: Japan and Its Other,” Continuum 8, no. 2 (January 1, 1994): 49–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/10304319409365669.

[154] Murakami, Superflat, 5.

[155] Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1989), 21.

[156] Ivy, 26–33; W. David Marx, “Structure and Power (1983),” Néojaponisme (blog), May 6, 2011, paras. 1-2, https://neojaponisme.com/2011/05/06/structure-and-power-1983/.

[157] Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millenial Japan,” 34.

[158] Yoda, 34.

[159] Yoda, 36–37, 44–45, 47.

[160] Yoda, 44.

[161] Murakami, Superflat, 19–23.

[162] Adrian Favell, Before and after Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art, 1990-2011 (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher, 2011), 68, http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF%20MS.pdf.

[163] Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” 33, 36.

[164] Favell, Before and after Superflat, 65.

[165] Murakami, Little Boy, 153.

[166] Kristen Sharp, “Superflatworlds: A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art,” 2006, 102, https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:9886.

[167] Takashi Murakami, “A Message: Laying the Foundation for a Japanese Art Market,” Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., accessed October 12, 2017, http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/whatskaikaikiki/message/.

[168] Favell, Before and after Superflat, 65.

[169] GARAGEMCA, Transculturation, Cultural Inter-Nationalism and beyond. A Lecture by Koichi Iwabuchi at Garage, YouTube video (Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckebrWCgmeA.

[170] Adrian Favell, ‘Aida Makoto: Notes from an Apathetic Continent’, in Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), loc. 9551; Favell, Before and after Superflat, 224.

[171] Jonathan Yee and Eileen Kinsella, “Why Collectors Love Takashi Murakami, Part 2,” artnet News, November 14, 2014, https://news.artnet.com/market/art-market-analysis-why-collectors-love-takashi-murakami-part-2-162123.

[172] Christine R. Yano, ‘Flipping Kitty: Transnational Transgressions of Japanese Cute’, in Medi@sia: Global Media/Tion in and Out of Context, ed. T. J. M. Holden and Timothy J. Scrase (London u.a.: Routledge, 2006), 2008.

[173] “The Kawaii Ambassadors (Ambassadors of Cuteness),” Web Japan, August 2009, http://web-japan.org/trends/09_culture/pop090827.html.

[174] Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.

[175] GARAGEMCA, Transculturation, Cultural Inter-Nationalism and beyond. A Lecture by Koichi Iwabuchi at Garage, 41:55.

[176] GARAGEMCA, 41:55.

The kawaii today is present in a broad range of cultural commodities, not just Japanese comics and animation. For instance, aidoru and tarento (Japanese singers and television entertainers), purikura (photos with cute filters and stamps), kyaraben (meals arranged to look like cute characters), high fashion and street fashion like lolita and decora, videogames from Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog to classic visual novels like Clannad, and even in the work of videogame music by composers like Nintendo’s Kondo Koji, known for the iconic Super Mario Bros theme. [Video 3] In this section, I will address the roots of the word kawaii in Japan and the historical events that shaped the emergence of Japanese cute culture in the postwar decades, as well as the context of Japanese postmodernism, the Superflat art movement, and Cool Japan in the 2000s.

Like the “cute,” the kawaii carries a similar etymological ambiguity. Despite the phonological resemblance to the Chinese word kě'ài (可愛, “lovable”), the adjective kawaii (かわいい) is a modern form of kawayui (かわゆい), which in turn derives from the archaic Japanese expression kao hayushi (顔映し) or kawayushi, meaning “red-faced,” in the sense of embarrassed or guilty of conscience.[108] The term first appeared in late Heian sources like Konjaku Monogatari, an anonymous anthology of Buddhist and secular tales collected in the early twelfth century, and early eleventh century Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) by Murasaki Shikibu. In these texts, the word is used to describe a sentiment of empathy and pity,[109] which is still observable today in the adjective kawaisōna, with the same root as kawaii, meaning “poor,” “pitiable,” “pathetic,” or “pitiful.”

During the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), the meaning of the kawaii shifted to describe “animals and persons of a lesser standing, with an emphasis on their helpless state,”[110] growing a gendered association with women who fit the neo‑Confucian ideals of demureness and obedience.[111] The words kawayuishi and kawayui were printed in dictionaries from the Taishō period (1912-26) to the end of World War II,[112] but it was not until the 1970s that the kawaii gained its contemporary meaning. Shiokawa Kanako argues that this shift coincides with the transformation of the kawaii from a closed concept applicable to a small number of things, to an umbrella term that “soon… achieved today’s status of a very useful, pleasantly positive, but strangely nondescript expression.”[113] Today, other Japanese words whose meanings orbit around the kawaii include sunao (“obedient,” “meek,” “docile,” “honest,” “frank”), enryogachi (“shy,” “reserved”), kodomoppoi (“childish,” “childlike,” “immature,” “infantile”), mujaki (“innocence,” “simple-minded”), or musenkinin (“irresponsible”). On the contrary, terms such as kibishii (“severe,” “strict,” “rigid,” “harsh,” “though”), kitsui (“rigid,” “sharp”), or nikui (“hateful,” “poor‑looking,” “detestable”) serve as antonyms of kawaii.

Scholars like Joshua Dale contest whether the word kawaii, today, retains any negativity beyond this “pleasantly positive” ring. Dale argues that while “The modern kawaii comes from the word for pitiable (kawaisō)… at present the word has no negative connotations.”[114] Still, Kinsella’s research on cute culture in the 1980s and 1990s Japan makes a strong case that the “cute and pitiful were often the same thing,” suggesting that “a sense of weakness and disability—which is a part of childishness—was a very important constituent of the cute aesthetic.”[115] On a similar note, in the 2000s, Miura Jun, a cultural critic and illustrator who introduced the term yuru kyara for Japanese local mascots with unsophisticated designs, stated that these characters display “a sense of instability that makes them all the more lovable, and one’s heart feels healed just by looking at them.”[116] [Figure 23] For Miura, then, the mascots’ “internal instability,”[117] i.e., their weakness both in terms of artistry (of design) and the soundness of construction (of the 3D costumes), intensifies their cuteness. Additionally, the fact that, in everyday life, the kawaii is in the eye of the beholder, results in it being used to challenge the boundaries of the social (and antisocial), as in the case of Japanese high school students surprising their teacher by describing a drawing of a girl impaled on a merry-go-round as “cute.”[118] It seems that, at least in some instances, contemporary kawaii does maintain a nuance of pity, helplessness, and embarrassment, distinct from the manipulation in “cute,” and the term’s flexibility makes it is readily applicable to the aesthetics of negativity.

The pervasiveness of cute culture and aesthetics in Japan is often linked to the country’s “long postwar.”[119] In historian Harry Harootunian’s words, “what lasted a few years as military occupation became the trope of lasting experience Japanese have lived for a half-century.”[120] Artist Murakami Takashi, who masterminded the postmodern art movement Superflat, has advocated this discourse on the kawaii as a symptom of “cultural schizophrenia,”[121] the manifestation of repressed feelings of emasculation and infantilization resulting from Japan’s passage from colonizer to colonized at the end of World War II—including both “hard” and “soft” traumas ranging from physical devastation to the country’s “defanging” in the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which forbids the use of state belligerency. His 2005 manifesto book and exhibition, Little Boy (significantly, held at the Japanese Society in New York) cemented this connection with a pun on the image of a child and the code name of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima.

While Portuguese missionaries were the first Europeans to arrive on Japanese shores in 1543, the country soon closed its frontiers to the outside world to resist both to the Chinese Celestial Empire ambitious imperialism and to the rise of European expansion. The 250 years of Sakoku (“closed country”) isolationism under the Tokugawa dynasty, based on a reinforced shogunate hierarchy, was a period of stability and prosperity, during which only Rangaku studies (Dutch/Western books and scientific and technical treaties) kept an effective channel of communication with Europe.[122] The re-opening of Japan to foreign trade and diplomatic relations (Treaty of Kanagawa) followed the arrival to the Edo bay of the American Black Ship flotilla led by Commodore Matthew Perry’s expeditions of 1852–53 and 1854.[123] The end of this policy of national isolation brought about vast political and social changes inspired by Western models during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and continued throughout the Taishō Democracy (1912–26), a period which spanned the time before and after World War I. In turn, Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, became the symbol of a historical moment in which, in the eyes of the Japanese, “the West—which essentially meant the United States—was extraordinarily rich and powerful, and Japan was incredibly weak and vulnerable.”[124] [Video 4] The 1951 congressional hearings of Douglas MacArthur, the American general who led Japan’s military occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1952, crystallized this inferiority complex for posterity when he declared that Japan was “like a boy of twelve” who stumbled into war somewhat inadvertently.[125] As argued by historian John Dower,

In the wake of World War II, Japan entered a period of kyodatsu (“exhaustion,” “despondency”), immortalized in Takahata Isao’s 1988 anti-war anime feature film Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), in which the task of physical survival was seemingly impossible. [Figure 24] This hurdle was overcome with distinction by the Japanese economic miracle from the post-war era to the end of the Cold War, in which the country achieved unprecedented levels of economic growth and material prosperity. The world fair held in Osaka in 1970, with the motto “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” symbolized by Okamoto Tarō’s building-sculpture Taiyō no Tō (Tower of the Sun), encapsulated this period’s celebratory mood. [Figure 25] Nevertheless, a “politically depressed position”[127] gradually set in. The 1973 oil crisis and the recessions of the second half of the 1980s culminated in the Tokyo stock market crash in 1987, and the bubble burst in 1991. The “lost decade” (ushinawareta jūnen) of the 1990s exposed the hefty social and environmental costs of Japan’s economic growth: air and soil pollution, the karōshi (“death by overwork”) epidemic,[128] corruption and fraud, child prostitution, rising suicide rates, among others.[129] Over the second half of the 1990s, the Tokyo subway sarin attack by Aum Shinrikyo—a doomsday cult that was popular among university students for its use of anime and pop imagery [Figure 26a, b]—the Kobe earthquake in 1995, and the Tokaimura nuclear accidents of 1999 aggravated the atmosphere of precarity as Japan entered into the new millennium.

The postwar political depression can be traced back, for instance, to the sense of disappointment at the civil and student uprisings of the 1960s, which failed to block the United States-Japan Security Treaty, reform the universities or produce a lasting political movement.[130] [Figure 27] Instead, the riots strayed toward violent internal conflicts among the Japanese New Left (a period known as uchi-geba, “inner violence”), followed by a surge of left-wing terrorism in the late 1970s.[131] These groups’ radicalism and antisocial behavior prompted a general retreat from activism, as students became more concerned with grades and practical matters like impressing prospective employers.[132] In art, avant-garde collectives like Gutaï, Kyushu-ha, Neo-Dada Organizers, Zero Jigen, Hi Red Center, or the Expo ’70 Destruction Co-struggle Group, that rebelled against the Japanese art establishment and traditional master-disciple relations, captured the Japanese public imagination. But their scandalous performances were interpreted more as a part of the eccentric lifestyle of new generations than bona fide artistic actions and failed to put down lasting roots in Japan—despite the considerable attention they have received from the Western art world and scholarship.[133] [Figure 28]

The 1970s shirake sedai, or “spoilt generation,” perceived to be apathetic about social issues, was followed by the shinjinrui (“new humanity”) in the 1980s, a cohort of young people “feted and feared for their misplaced, though voracious, consumer appetites.”[134] Of particular importance at this time was the generational epithet “moratorium people” (moratoriaum ningen), coined by Okonogi Keigo in 1978 to characterize these apathetic and consumerist youths who refused to grow up and enter the world of adults. [Figure 29]  According to Kinsella, the moratorium people embodied the contradiction between the new ideas and sensibilities of post-war generations on love, sexuality, friendship, freedom, and happiness, and their lives still organized in terms of hierarchy, authority, and social obligation (in Japanese, giri).[135] This contradiction was especially pronounced for young women, relegated to secretarial duties and expected to become “professional wives” and mothers supporting their overworked husbands and children.[136] In this sense, the younger Japanese generations did not fully enjoy the civic rights acquired during the Occupation, translating into a mistrust felt by young adults in the face of society, beginning with the adoption of children’s culture, like manga, by college students in the 1960s, as a rebellion against traditional Japanese values.[137] Even today, the idea that Japan’s youth fails at “adulting” underlines panics related to NEETs (“Not in Education, Employment, or Training”), hikikomori shut-ins, otaku nerds, enjo-kōsai schoolgirls into “compensated dating” (going on dates with older men in exchange for money and gifts), parasite singles (unmarried career women who live with their parents throughout their 30s and 40s), and herbivore men (with no active interest in pursuing sex or relationships), who often emerge as scapegoats for the country’s demographic crises.

Ironically, while the Japanese society at large condemns the moratorium people, in the eyes of the world, Japan has become “one nation under cute.”[138] From the 1970s onwards, kawaii culture rose to unprecedented heights, transforming into “a living entity that pervades everything”[139]; from the grassroots emergence of maru-moji (“round letters”) cute handwriting among schoolgirls[140] to the booming “fancy goods” industry, epitomized by the launch of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty in 1975[141] [Figure 30 & 31]; from the stratosphere of pop stars like Matsuda Seiko, the “eternal idol,” or the likes of AKB48, Hatsune Miku, or Babymetal, to everyday consumer behavior, like eating ice cream and sweets, or the making of kyaraben lunch boxes, arranged to look like cute characters by dedicated homemakers. [Figures 32, 33 & 34 ] The kawaii is used by subcultures rebelling against the establishment [Figure 35], and by the establishment itself—the government, the police, the military, and all sorts of private and public institutions, which employ stylized animal mascots or cute anime girls as a tool for strategic communication with the public [Figure 36 & 37].  In the 2010s, even the “moratorium people” themselves have been cutified in a new wave of beloved characters from companies like Sanrio and the San-X, in kawaii mascots for the millennial generation like the lethargic, genderless egg yolk Gudetama (Sanrio, 2013) or the OL (“office lady”) red panda Aggressive Retsuko, an accountant in her mid-twenties who vents her deep-seated labor frustrations by singing death metal in karaoke at night (Sanrio, 2015). [Videos 5 & 6]

Ultimately, the dissemination of the kawaii reacts against the “tremendous tension”[142] of interpersonal relationships in Japan, resulting from the Confucian public sphere and collective capitalism where “relative status differences define nearly all social interactions.”[143] The Japanese language itself reflects this: verbal tenses, personal pronouns, nouns, and adjectives have specific endings applied according to superior/inferior relations, and the list of honorifics is long (-san, -chan, -kun, and -sama are some examples). According to Kinsella, “This underlying ideology is another reason why rebellion against society in Japanese youth culture has developed into a rebellion against adulthood”; it also explains why “intellectuals, ascetics and artistic outsiders from Japanese society have long carried the stigma of infantilism, and some have possibly even played up to the image of being childlike eccentrics”[144] (e.g., Murakami Takashi—more on this shortly). Contrary to the Western tradition where adulthood equals emancipation, in Japan “maturity is commonly considered as the ability to cooperate well in a group, to accept compromises, to fulfill obligations to parents, employers, and so on, and carry out social responsibilities.”[145] This aspect has shaped kawaii culture at large, as an “indolent little rebellion rather than a conscious, aggressive and sexually provocative rebellion of the sort that has been typical of western youth culture.”[146] Although Western countercultures have also incorporated what Bradon LaBelle calls “weak-strength”[147] in their protests, for instance, in Flower Power and other movements of passive resistance, kawaii culture rarely takes on the form of a counterculture sensu stricto, i.e., it may gnaw at prevailing social norms, but it is seldom formulated, openly, as anti-establishment.

Japanese “postmodernism” is a contested site, so much so that, according to Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, “to confuse Japan’s non-modernity with the West’s ‘postmodernism’ is perhaps a serious error.”[148] Japanese postmodernism entails not just the “local expressions of postmodern and global transformations of late capitalist society that have developed over decades”[149] but an historical and geographic displacement (e.g., the Middle and the Far East are only so in relation to Western countries), in which the West becomes the telos of non-Westerners, who can only ever be its imitator.[150] Ironically, even as the authenticity of Japan’s modernity and postmodernity came under scrutiny, Japan seemed to fulfill its destiny as the place where (Western) history came to an end.[151] For instance, in a footnote to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1968), philosopher Alexandre Kojève claimed that Japan is a “totally formalized” society whose encounter with the West will “lead not to a rebarbarization of the Japanese but to a ‘Japanization’ of the Westerners”[152]; while Roland Barthes famously called Japan L'empire des signes (Empire of Signs) in 1970. [Figure 38] The Japanese themselves have been complicit with the exoticization and commodification of Japaneseness,[153] not least postmodern Japaneseness, or the Japaneseness of the postmodern. Murakami Takashi taps into such portrayals of depthless Japan by Western philosophers in his artist’s books and manifestos, Superflat (2000) and Little Boy (2005); indeed, “The Super Flat Manifesto” opens with the promise-threat that “The world of the future might be like Japan is today—super flat.”[154] [Figure 39a, b] In such discourses, like in the techno-orientalist dystopias of sci-fi films such as Blade Runner (1984), Japan occupies, as Marilyn Ivy puts it, “an almost comforting figure of danger and promise,”[155] a thrilling menace to Western reason and individualism. 

In 1980s Japan, “postmodernism” itself became a new kind of informational commodity, fueled by the boom of “new academicians” or “postacademicians” like Asada Akira, author of Kōzō to Chikara: Kigōron o koete (“Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics,” 1983)—an elaborate investigation on European postmodern and post-structuralist philosophy which became an overnight bestseller in Japan. [156] [Figure 40] Postmodernism offered an opportunity to celebrate Japan’s “triumph over modernity and over history itself,”[157] intersecting with the discourses of nihonjinron, i.e., books written by Japanese authors for Japanese audiences on the uniqueness of Japanese identity. As Yoda Tomiko puts it,

In the recessionary 1990s, the celebration of Japanese postmodernism deflated as new critics, like Miyadai Shinji, Ōtsuka Eiji, and Azuma Hiroki, author of Dobutsuka suru Postmodern: Otaku kara mita nihon shakai (“Animalizing Postmodern: Japan Society from the viewpoint of the otaku,” translated to English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals), oft-cited in my encyclopedia,turned their attention to Japanese subcultures, like the otaku. [Figure 41] Asada and other new academicians criticized them for what, in their view, was a return to Japanese parochialism opposed to cosmopolitan postmodernity.[159] For Asada, “Alphabetized and contracted, J is Japan as a site if the trashy pop culture of otaku, video games and animations.”[160] But as Murakami goes to great lengths to explain in his 2000 book Superflat, in late-modern Japan, there is a more fluid relationship between art and entertainment  when compared to European and American concepts of “high culture.”[161] Respected artists, like Okamoto Tarō or cult director Kitano Takeshi, have doubled as televisions entertainers—a path that Murakami also pursued with various appearances in game shows[162] and the clownish nature of his public presence, which is often consistent with the trope of the infantilized intellectual (mentioned in the previous section). [Figure 42] Likewise, in the 1980s press, Asada and other “new academicians” became part of a broader star system of young Japanese creatives, in which their hard-line theoretical work did not differ fundamentally from that of advertisers like Itoi Shigesato.[163] The fact that it is not uncommon for department stores like PARCO to host prestigious art shows further contributes to this blurring of art and mass culture in Japan[164]; in fact, the first Superflat exhibition was held at Parco Gallery in Tokyo, in 2000.[165]

In Superflat, Murakami also underlines that, in Japan, “art” and “craft” did not exist as discrete categories until the late ninetieth century. Therefore, the slippery definition of “art” dates back to the Meiji period and “the difficulties that were experienced in transplanting the (Western) concept of art into Japan, including the classification, training, and exhibition of art, without the European post-Romantic concept of individual subjectivity and the ideology of original expression.”[166] Because Japanese words like geijutsu (芸術, emphasizing “technique” or “craft”) or bijutsu (美術, emphasizing “beauty”) failed to account for the Western concept of avant-garde, this resulted, as Murakami puts it, in “the frustrating ‘non-art’ status that much of Japanese art bears, both within, and outside of the country.”[167] To be sure, not only did the “traditional” art world in Japan (art schools, galleries, art markets, museums) not compare to the country’s big, well-oiled entertainment industry,[168] but Japanese comics and animation proved capable of producing some of the most innovative and influential artworks, both domestically and on a global scale. Likewise, radical ideas continued to pop up in unlikely places, such as the subcultures of cuteness, girlishness, amateurs, or pornography, that captured the interest and admiration of international audiences.

Moreover, the rise of Superflat in the contemporary art scene during the 2000s fueled and was fueled by Cool Japan, a governmental policy to promote Japan’s “indigenous” pop culture abroad, prompted by the 2002 article “Japan’s Gross National Cool” by American journalist Douglas McGray (even if Murakami himself has been critical of it).[169] Artists affiliated with Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki art production company, such Mr., Takano Aya, Aoshima Chiho, Ban Chinatsu, or Kunikata Mahomi, and those associated with the broader Neo-pop movement, like Nara Yoshitomo, Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, Odani Motohiko, Kudo Makiko, Aoki Ryoko, Murata Yuko, Tabaimo, Yanobe Kenji,  or Ando Hiro, among many others, put anime, manga, and the kawaii in the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums. [Figures 43 & 44] As sociologist Adrian Favell points out, Superflat practically became synonymous with Japanese postmodern art, muffling a variety of other styles, trends, and concepts of artists as Yanagi Yukinori, Nakamura Masato, and Sone Yukata, or those belonging to the Group 1965 (Shōwa 40 nen kai)—Ozawa Tsuyoshi, Matsukage Hiroyuki, Kinoshita Parco, Tosa Masamichi, or American-Brazilian Oscar Oiwa of Japanese descent.[170] Even pioneering Japanese pop artists, e.g., Ohtake Shinro, were to some extent overlooked, but have begun surfacing as Superflat’s popularity wears off in the Western art world, if not in the global art market.[171] Ohtake, for instance, was featured in the dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and the Venice Biennale in 2013. [Figure 47a, b]

In the 2000s, the kawaii became a vital cog in the Cool Japan machine, leading to what anthropologist Christine Yano has coined the term “pink globalization” to address the “spread of kawaii (cute) goods and related media from primarily Japan throughout much of the industrial world,”[172] for instance, cute icons like Hello Kitty or Sailor Moon. In 2009, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs even began to appoint kawaii ambassadors, tasked with publicizing Japan’s culture of cuteness around the world, such as lolita fashion model Aoki Misako or creepy-cute aidoru Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.[173] [Figure 48] While, in the 1990s, Japanization was mostly framed within a discourse of hybridism, indigenization, or domestication of foreign culture—one in which, as Ivy puts it, “The image of Japan as the great assimilator arises to explain away any epistemological snags or historical confusions”[174]—the Cool Japan trend signals a new project of cultural re-nationalization.[175] According to media theorist Iwabuchi Kōichi, then, the rise in the twenty-first century of manga, anime, Japanese videogames, and kawaii culture to the status of soft powers, capable of rivaling the hegemony of American culture, aligns with the tenets of “glocalization” and an “inter-nationalist” (instead of genuinely international) cultural diplomacy.[176]