The Japanese and the 'Cute Factor'

Japanese Post Offices are hideous, grey places. In England, there is at least a security partition that protects the public from glimpsing the horror of bits of paper that the staff have to sort through. In Japan, they forgo this, displaying mounds of papers, envelopes, folders, files, cabinets, in-trays, out-trays, shake-it-all-about-trays, which coupled with the apparent fetish they have for administration and paperwork makes for a crushingly bleak picture, to my chaotic sense of filing at any rate. Not since Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” have I seen such a nightmarish hell-hole vision of bureaucracy. With fluffy squirrels. These incongruously cheerful characters, the Post Office mascots, appear in some form or other in every branch, be they posters, cuddly toys or the images on the cash machines that poignantly tell me to “be careful of things left behind”.

The logo on the side of Kawasaki Fire Departments’ delightfully dinky engines is a heroic fox in full fire-fighter gear. The instructions on the back of rice packets give the rice cooker a series of adorable expressions (my favourite being the worried gadget sweating under the heat of boiling rice). A warning notice near a pylon compound gives the pylon a big snarly cartoon face, which despite its ferocious intent, is still disarmingly cute. You only have to look at Manga to see that the Japanese love cute things, the characters all having big doe-eyes, the ubiqutious non-specific Manga-gonks squeezing those eyes shut and squealing with delight. Whether the aforementioned cute thing turns out to be an unstoppable killing machine, or gets torn to pieces by a multi-tentacled demon is another matter.

The instantly recognisable image of a bubble-gum girl in a pink sparkly world is beautifully realised in Nakamoto senseis motorcycle helmet - dark glitter, emblazoned with flower stickers. School-girl chic reigns supreme here, with some twenty to thirty-something women adopting the look. What with Shinto ideals of purity and simplicity, it's not surprising that this cute kind of innocence is considered attractive, thus providing a good base from which to speculate.

Considering the size of Japanese houses, it’s only natural that they (like New Yorkers) would favour the smaller pet. These normally take the form of ludicrous dogs, more often than not, kitted out to the nines with a fluffy wardrobe. The sight of a dacshund in a bomber jacket, yielded to me by my trip to Manhattan, has been matched time and again here. Dogs sport kilts, bumble-bee outfits, hoodies, tu-tus and sowesters (try to picture a Golden Retriever dressed as a fisherman). Hayley has witnessed the fluffy poodle thing of a neighbour, barking furiously and wearing pyjamas, the canine harangue probably translating as "don't look at me!!!" And that's without mentioning the neo-beatnik cat of Yokohama.

Pet shops in Japan are massive window displays of fuzz ’n’ fluff, with a corridor behind the cages, so the staff can nip in and clean up should the animals decide to do something unpleasant. I think there might be concealed cylinders that pump cute-gas into the cages, as every time I walk past this shop, the inmates are performing a frenzied dance of adorability, attracting scores of Japanese women who stand there, cooing “kawaii!” However, prolonged exposure to such a sight gradually reveals the darker side of the 'cute factor'. I find pet shops morally dubious anyway (says the man who's eaten whale) but drawing on an earlier complaint about a utilitarian attitude of the Japanese, I think they see pets more as objects than companions. That's not to say it's a universally Japanese (or human) attitude - the glory of Golden Week had me finding a young lady in a park with her pet tortoise, stroking his tiny scaly head beneath a gigantic pink parasol. Maybe I've lived around cats for too long, but how much emotional connection can you have with a cold blooded creature in a shell?

Of course, if you don’t have time to give a pet the attention it needs (which many Japanese people don’t) or you don’t relish the thought of being repeatedly licked by something that eats its own faeces, you can always go for the Nintendog option. A CGI dog (a variety of breeds) which you stroke, feed and play with using one of those electronic pen gizmos. I think they might have been released just as I arrived, my brief investigation of Japanese television presenting me with several opportunities to see the advert - mighty strange it was too. The expression on the woman’s face as she goes “Aaaaaaaaaaaw!” over this upmarket tamagotchi would be heartbreaking if she didn’t look so happy. I don’t know if you’re given the option of neglecting or starving it to 'death'. I’m reminded of an article I read about a woman whose tamagotchi was 'kidnapped' - she received letters threatening dire consequences should a ransom not be paid. That said, the article was in the Sun (Princess Di memorial issue, no less) and I generally consider Fortean Times to be a more reliable source of information.


Unrelated, but if you have time, the new link in the weblogs menu, Overheard in Chicago is worth a look...