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Anime, from Cute to Scary Date: 6/21/2005 |
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Beyond the lovable Hello, Kitty, how worried should one be about the art form's portrayal of females as pouting, helpless creatures? My education into the deeper meaning of Japanese anime ?- cartoons, film, and manga comic books whose design is inspired by this uniquely Japanese, ultracute visual style -- really started with Anpanman. A few years ago, my two girls, Marie, now 9, and Elena, 6, arrived in Tokyo. It wasn't long before they became transfixed by the wacky world of Japanese anime and thus became my anime sherpas, my window into Japanese pop culture targeted at toddlers and preteens. Anpanman, created by Takashi Yanase back in the late 1960s, is a somewhat unusual cartoon hero. His head is essentially a popular Japanese sweet, a bun filled with bean-jam paste. His father is a baker (natch!), and many of his friends are also bread heads. There is, for instance, the hot-headed Currypanman, a spicy curry-stuffed bread, and Melonpan-chan, a real cutie-pie. Anpanman spends a lot of time flying around helping children out of squeezes and saving villages usually being threatened by the very naughty Baikinman. CRINGING AT CUTENESS. Of course, Anpanman was just the beginning. Other cartoon characters ?- and temporary obsessions -- such as Ojaru-Maru and Crayon Shin-Chan would later follow. This all seemed like harmless, cute stuff at the time, and the basic values being peddled ?- friendship, teamwork, righting wrongs, and so on ?- were just fine. I did occasionally feel a craving for insulin given all the unrelenting cuteness blasting out of our TV screen. But hey, this was Tokyo, and I grew up in Chicago watching cleverly ironic cartoon icons such as Bugs Bunny and the Pink Panther. Then the madness set in. Hello, Kitty artifacts started proliferating around the home, and Marie starting collecting stickers, pendants, and diary books adorned with Kitty's ultracute face and that of her pals. And I started to notice how female cartoon characters often affected cute poses, pouting their lips and stamping their feet. Much to my horror, Marie and Elena would sometimes do the same. That's when I started to freak. Japanese love all things cute and innocent -? what they sometimes call kawaii (see BW Online, 6/25/02, "In Japan, Cute Conquers All"). This concept has become so deeply ingrained in Japanese culture that it has affected gender roles, particularly of Japanese women. It's very common on Japanese TV to see women act a bit, well, cute -- wrinkling their noses, taking their voices up a half-octave, and sometimes acting helpless and purposely clueless, in desperate need of help and direction from men. BAD INFLUENCE? A few years ago, a Japanese all-girl pop group called Morning Musume took the country by storm. Just imagine about a dozen teens wearing short skirts, glossy lipstick, and butterfly hair bands doing dance numbers and belting out forgettable bubble-gum love songs. Marie especially loved this empty-calorie pop candy, and I started to wonder how much of this stuff my girls might ultimately incorporate into their personalities. Anime also another, darker, side that really unhinged me. A lot of manga is basically soft porn, in which cute cartoon figures, often in school uniforms, are portrayed of objects of sexual desire and act accordingly. Every day on the train I would see middle-aged men reading this stuff, staring at ultracute cartoon heroines doing really naughty stuff. In Japan's pink trade (adult entertainment industry), phone booth flyers are full of come-hither pitches from girls in the late teens, some of whom cradle teddy bears or look like they just walked off the schoolyard. This wasn't cute anymore. I began to wonder if Japanese culture was in the grip of some sort of massive Lolita complex. CULTURAL ARROGANCE. I started to project 15 years ahead and see Elena and Marie in their twenties, hanging around Shibuya (a youth fashion conclave in central Tokyo) in school uniforms, with Hello, Kitty pendants dangling from their mobile phones, sending out cute vibes to get the attention of creepy guys. I didn't exactly wake up in the middle of the night screaming, but at one point I did feel an urgency to get the girls out of Japan as soon as possible. I ran my strange impressions, my amateur anthropology, and obsessive worries by my wife, Yuki. She listened knowingly but never said all that much. Then one day, when I probably made one biting remark too many at the dinner table about Japan's infantile kawaii mania, Yuki finally blew her top. She accused me of cultural arrogance for obsessing on Japan's quirky side but ignoring that kids in the U.S. are overwhelmed with far more graphic representations of sexual desire than kids here are. Yuki reminded me, too, that Japan's supposed exploitation of women never seemed to bother me before the girls were born and that many years ago she found a particularly racy manga stuffed in my briefcase (it was for sociological inquiry only, I protested). Finally, she slammed me for assuming that Marie and Elena were passive absorbers of cultural junk, incapable of developing the kind of character traits that would allow them to find their own way in the world. HECK OF A ROLE MODEL. When Yuki finished her verbal-lashing, I fumbled with my chopsticks and tried to formulate some sort of rebuttal. But the truth was my wife had just put me through the shredder. In fact, Yuki was an awesome opponent ?- and frequent victor -- in our private marital debating society. Then I realized that I had nothing to worry about. Marie and Elena had one heck of a role model for unbundled female assertiveness, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar attitude right at home. Ever since, I have lightened up a bit about the impact of Japanese anime on my daughters and their development. We have plenty of time to introduce them to all sorts of role models, and with a little luck and guidance they'll turn out just fine. And when those anxiety sharks start circling within me about their future, I simply grab Elena's Hello, Kitty doll and give it a big hug. It works every time. |
| Source: Business Week |
