I became aware of this article on BusinessWeek.com, “Anime, from Cute to Scary”, written by an editor who moved to Tokyo and was afraid of how Japan’s intense interest (I don’t want to say obsession, though he surely would) in cuteness began to influence his daughters. At one point he describes Morning Musume as “about a dozen teens wearing short skirts, glossy lipstick, and butterfly hair bands doing dance numbers and belting out forgettable bubble-gum love songs” – the kind of dismissive generalizations that someone would expect in a cheap shot at Jpop.
However, the story takes a welcome unexpected turn. As the writer frets and frets about the way cuteness and sex and femininity all combined in unexpected – and for him, disturbing ways – his wife responds:
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.
Ah, the voice of reason. Of course, I finished this article believing the guy doesn’t deserve a wife this smart. But the wife provides both solid arguments about why the writer’s fears are biased and how he’s something of a hypocrite in his hysteria.
