Received: 29/09/2016
Reveiwed: 27/10/2016
Accepted: 14/11/2016
316.723:316.324.8(520)
7.038(520)
Original scholary paper
Ana Došen
Cultural Narratives of
Superflat and Supercute –
Feasting on the Imaginary
Abstract: Japanese artist Takashi Murakami conceptualized the Superflat art movement based on a “flattened” form of Japanese animation,
manga and Edo wood-block art and its specific way of controlling “the
speed of the observer’s gaze”. His “theory of art in two-dimensions”
proclaims the absence of depth where all the differences of cultural,
social, historical (temporal) contexts operate as comparable and equal.
Additionally, the phenomenon of Japanese cuteness (kawaii) – emanating the playful, the immature and the gentle – demonstrates an immense
fascination towards the realms of “flat” fictional characters. The proliferation of cute characters, ranging from those globally recognized to locally contextualized mascots (appearing on diverse consumer products),
seems to be unrelenting. This paper explores the cultural narratives of
superflatness in which viral consumerism obliterates the distinction between art and commodity, and gives prominence to no-depth content
designed for instant gratification, measured in a blink of an eye.
Keywords: cuteness, narrative consumption, Takashi Murakami, superflat, Hiroki Azuma, otaku, moe
Introducing Imagined Japan
If we accept Benedict Anderson’s perspective that “communities are to be
distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined”1, then it is reasonable to claim that we are always dealing with
the phantasmal and fabricated when investigating culture(s). Anderson’s no-
Ana Došen
| 49
tion of “imagined communities” was further expounded by Homi Bhabha who
claims that “nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and
only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation
– or narration – might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language
that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west”2. Having said
this, within dominant western discourses, it seems that Japan has been, more
than any other state, identified as one “less real”. Probing Japan’s empire of
signs, Roland Barthes imagines the fictive system called Japan, isolated somewhere faraway in the world. In addition, Oscar Wilde cunningly observes that
one does not understand Japanese art at all if he/she imagines Japanese people
in the same manner as they are depicted in art and presented to us. “The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual
artists. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country,
there are no such people.”3 Thus, how does one investigate and understand
this “fabricated” or “nonexistent” country? It is conceivably more effective
to explore the realm of the imaginary that the Japanese themselves emerge in,
than to engage in an analysis of the nation’s actual occurrences.
Having stated this noticeable inclination towards the reading of an imagined
Japan in the discourses of Western authors, another approach comes to mind.
Stathis Gourgouris asserts that “we cannot read a nation – nor write it, of
course. We can only traverse it, traverse its fantasy as (its) history, in the same
way that history traverses us as thinking, reading, writing, living subjects”4.
Therefore, this paper should be understood neither as a reading of nor writing about Japan, but rather as a wandering through its imagined community
and touching some of its fictional objects. The focus is on Japanese cultural
narratives which obliterate the distinction between art/fiction and commodity,
and give prominence to no-depth content designed for instant gratification of
consumers/art enthusiasts. Reflecting on the flatness of such artefacts could
extend to heterotopias outside of Japan and illuminate the more general tendency towards creating a globally networked and mediated world.
Profusion of Cuteness
Ending two centuries of isolationist policy (sakoku), the Meiji Restoration
(1868) brought unequivocal change to the Japanese society, which consequently adopted European and American values and technologies in the name
of modernization and progress. As the urge to become “equally civilized”
became extensive, Western material culture (clothing, transportation, archi-
50 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #9
tecture) was embraced in an almost uncritical manner, followed by an observable change in art and literature as well. Consequently, consumer culture
has transpired to be an inseparable facet of Japanese national identity, ever
since the early decades of the 20th century when “modern life” prescribed the
experience of indulging in commodities, especially targeting young women.
“The expanding metropolitan sites like Tokyo and Osaka supplied a vast
space for discourse to imagine and figure a new form of life, a place for
fantasizing what had not yet become a lived reality for all.”5 Furthermore, in
the postwar years, the society went through an immense transformation as
potent economy growth provoked both “the atomization of the individual”6
and substantial mass consumerism. According to Harry Harootunian, similarly to other industrializing countries after the war, such as France, Italy and
Germany, in Japan “the heroism of production was being replaced by heroic consumption”7. On the other hand, partially due to governmental export
policies, Japan’s immense consumerism of the 1980s has been recognized as
“taken to an extreme unimaginable in other parts of the developed world”8.
The nexus between Japan’s national identity and mass consumption should
be subsequently inspected through a compound of the real and the imagined.
In the recent decades, reality in Japan has been intrinsically intertwined with
fantasy and this sense of divergence seems to be especially appealing to nonJapanese youth.9 Japan offers theme cafés with video game ambience (such
as Final Fantasy Eorzea cafe) or with waitresses dressed up as manga or anime characters, and love hotels with a vast array of settings – from the UFO
space-shuttle to Hello Kitty S&M rooms. Figurines featuring half- or completely naked adolescent girl characters from manga or anime are expensive
collectors’ items, producing insatiable desires among salarymen wandering
through corridors of the Tokyo Akihabara district.
Cool Japan10 awakens the world’s interest in this culture and its history but
also marks today’s Japan as a strange liminal space between the real and the
phantasmal. The proliferation of cute characters seems to be unrelenting,
ranging from those globally recognized to mascots within specific local contexts (which appear on a variety of consumer products from stationery and
food packaging, over kitchen appliances, cell-phone cases and accessories
to those emerging from corporate logos, brochures of traveling agencies or
public transportation safety warnings). Japan’s prefectures, the national tax
agency, some police stations, banks and post offices all have their own cute
characters appealing to their citizens/clients. The somewhat global Hello
Kitty mania is merely a part of Japan’s cute characters craze – the Japanese
seem to be obsessed with a range of similar characters. It is noteworthy to
Ana Došen
| 51
emphasize that I am not exclusively referring to those characters originating
from popular anime or manga, already embedded in format narratives, but
to kyarakuta – characters designed to emanate just a few traits and to be excessively cute.11 These are not meant to be typical children’s toys but rather
consumer products created for “adult children”.12 In addition, the popularity
of such characters is evident having in mind that “Yuru-kyara13 Grand Prix”,
held in 2012, listed 865 mascots to compete for being the most popular.14 A
rival to the Sanrio corporation (specialized in licensing and producing cute
characters, with Hello Kitty being the most globally recognized), San-X is
the Japanese company which has been producing numerous fictional merchandise characters such as Tarepanda, the lazy panda, first appearing on
stickers in the mid-1990s, the overly evasive duckbill Kamonohashikamo,
and Rilakkuma, the relaxed bear. Besides being cute, all these anthropomorphic characters, whether they are animals, food, objects or spirits, emanate
a peculiar, often unexpected trait. The superficiality of these characters does
not indicate that they should be comprehended as “floating signifiers”. On
the contrary, Christine R. Yano exemplifies this point with Hello Kitty:
She is not an object without referents whose meaning floats untethered to any
embedded set of denotations. On the contrary, Hello Kitty always begins with
plenty of meaning in a carefully constructed design of aestheticezed, feminized
blankness. She inhabits the “thingness” of the “thing” in the physical properties
of cuteness she brings to meaning making. The cute thing in particular may be
the most “thinglike of things”, an “object par excellence” through its very passivity (Ngai 2005: 834). This so-called object par excellence calls upon interaction – thing and humans – for use and meaning, including aspects of selection,
acquisition, collection, care, display, gifting, reuse, and disposal […]. These
many-layered processes contribute to meaning making in significant ways that
emphasize the active component of interaction between object and user.15
The reasons for this type of preference for fictional characters among the
Japanese have been explored among various scholars and could be summarized into three categories (excluding the superficial pseudo-psychological
explanation that cute things relax the hardworking Japanese): the cathartic
function (especially referring to the Lolicon genre16 which is purported to
dissolve potential perverted affections towards the under-aged), the religious
aspect (related to Shintoistic animism), and as an overt infantilization of the
self (as a result of denying the WWII defeat).17
This leads us to the work of Japanese cultural theorist, Eiji Otsuka who
probed the transformations in patterns of youth consumption in the 1980s.18
52 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #9
He points out that whether we are on the subject of comics or toys, “it is
not the things themselves that are consumed, but rather the grand narrative
which is contained therein”19. However, as it is impossible “to sell the grand
narrative”, the consumers are lured into buying a fragment of it. In addition,
the “productive role of the consumer” is manifested through a quantity of
consumed products (small narratives which support and are derivatives of
the grand narrative) and their accumulation propels the consumers to produce their “own small narratives”. 20 This active role of the consumer is most
apparent in the biannual Comic Market (Comiket) which gathers amateurs or
other self-publishing authors whose work is often mere re-interpretation of
mainstream comics.21 According to Otsuka, narrative consumption “points
to a state of affairs where both the production and consumption of the ‘product’ are unified”22. However, as most of those mentioned characters emanating the playful, the immature and the eccentric do not provide grand narratives but are rather explained through two-three liners, we have to take into
consideration the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.
Moe – between Art and Consumerism
Paying close attention to the dynamics of nationalism, globalism and consumerism, Murakami conceptualized the Superflat art movement based on
the “flattened” form of Japanese animation, manga and Edo wood-block art
and its specific way of controlling “the speed of the observer’s gaze”23. Contrary to the Western single point perspective, multiperspectivism and several viewpoints within the same image of Japanese graphic art foreground
the layering which enables heterogeneity and dehierarchizing. Murakami’s
“theory of art in two-dimensions” proclaims the absence of depth where all
the differences of cultural, social, historical (temporal) contexts operate as
comparable and equal. Furthermore, his art movement mobilized a group of
contemporary artists originating from different backgrounds of mass culture
– manga, anime, the gaming industry, fashion and design, but whose work
expressed the “flatness” and stylization typical for traditional wood-block
artists. According to Murakami (often hailed as the Japanese Andy Warhol),
supeflatness articulates the perspective that the art-commodity dichotomy
has been severely disrupted, as neither is art simply creative expression, nor
is a product a mere object of trade. Hence, Murakami challenges the notion that art and commodity necessarily exclude each other, acknowledging
that hybridization is a process inevitable for the construction of identity. His
strategy revolves around the “immersion in the aesthetic values of contemporary consumer culture and the deliberate use of the networks of consumer
Ana Došen
| 53
capitalism to support distinction of his work as art”24. The mutability of both
art and commodity offers a perspective of innumerous configurations which
essentially avert the stable, homogenized identity. Significantly, the Superflat
art foregrounds Japanese identity, but insists on its fluidity as an unavoidable
dissemination of the images and representations in the globalized world.
Regarding the matter of cultural exchange and inter-related influences in
global processes, I would like to draw attention to a subject related to Japan’s postmodernity. Namely, at the MOCA gallery in Los Angeles, highly
acclaimed Japanese theorist, Hiroki Azuma gave a lecture on Murakami’s
Superflat project and the “structure of Japanese postmodernity”, stating the
following:
[…] The so-called “Japanese tradition”, for example the literature, fine art
or the Emperor system is in fact the historically new construction after Meiji
Revolution, and now Japanese society has been so deeply Europeanized and
Americanized that any nostalgic return towards its traditional, original, or
“pure” Japaneseness, seems a fake. You can easily find how Japanese typical
landscapes actually are in contemporary films or comics, those filled with Seven-Elevens, McDonalds, Denny’s, comics, computers and cellular phones…
they are all of American origin.25
Furthermore, interested in the transformation of consumption in postmodern
society as a whole, Azuma insists that contemporary Japaneseness is a direct
consequence of post-war American pop culture. In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Dobutsuka suru posutomodan: otaku kara mita nihon shakai)
(2001) Azuma examines the contemporary consumer society through the
phenomenon of Japanese otaku culture. Otaku is the term which refers to
obsessive fans that primarily consume, but also produce manga and anime,
and their derivative merchandise. Diverting from Alexandre Kojève’s differentiation between posthistorical Western (American) animality and Japanese
“snobbish” civilization26, Azuma pioneers a model of a “database animal”,
marking Japanese otaku as animalistic – immediately gratifying their consumer needs in a database system which assumes the place of absent grand
narratives. Becoming-animal, thus, presupposes the process of abandoning
the “desire structure” found in today’s consumer societies in which needs are
instantly satisfied. “The objects of desire that previously could not be had
without social communication, such as everyday meals and sexual partners,
can now be obtained very easily, without all that troublesome communication, through fast food or the sex industry.”27
54 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #9
The notion of moe plays an important role here. This slang word denotes a
strong affection towards characters in manga, anime and video-games. Moe
elements predominately refer to the visual domain28 and since the 1990s they
have become vital in the otaku market production in a sense that the character
setting creates the narrative, as opposed to the previous approach in which
the narrative defined the character. This strategy can be easily understood
through the following example – a character from an anime proposal sparks
interest among the otaku which then leads to the production of a spin-off
video game that gets a release before the anime itself. According to Azuma,
otaku culture is based on narrative consumption of omnipresent simulacra;
only instead of the rhizome model (with signs linked in diverse patterns) he
regards the postmodern world as a database which is established through
a double-layered structure. The outer-layer consists of the simulacra (the
work) and the deep inner layer attached to the database (settings).
In otaku culture ruled by narrative consumption, products have no independent
value; they are judged by the quality of the database in the background. So, as
these databases display various expressions depending on the differing modes
of “reading up” by users, consumers, once they are able to possess the settings,
can produce any number of derivative works that differ from the originals. If
we think of this situation as occurring only in the surface outer layer, the original product or work can seem swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra.
However, in reality, it is better to assume the prior existence of a database (i.e.,
settings) that enables both an original and the works derived from it, depending
on how one “reads up” the database.29
Accordingly, what is perpetually consumed is the moe element or the combination of the database elements, and the satisfaction of the otaku needs
is both mechanical and immediate. The increase of mixmedia, whose logic
denies linear thinking or the standardized pattern of production (from comic
to animation to franchised toy), generates, in Azuma’s words, a grand non
narrative. “Instead of narrative, it is the character that forms the ground from
which spring the ‘small narratives’”30 – thus, the plenitude of cute characters
discussed earlier seems to be both logical and inevitable. In today’s world,
the human is replaced by the otaku who has gone through an animalization process and now participates “in depthless communication based on the
symbolic exchanges and self-image that is barely maintained within the limited information space”31.
The issues concerning the art(product)-artist(creator)-fan relation set in the
ambience of the sustained interflowing of reality and fiction are reoccurring
Ana Došen
| 55
and perpetually seeking self-referentiality. As demonstrated in this paper, the
dynamics of nationalism, globalism and consumerism established the fluidity of identities and their “cultural intertextuality”. Despite different consumerism patterns in various contemporary societies, Roger Pulver’s notion that
“all Japanese culture is fantasy. A fantasy that is as real as it gets”,32 could
also be applied to the rest of today’s technologically mass-mediated world.
This point of view is based not just in line with Anderson’s perspective mentioned earlier, but through recognizing the overall consumption of fiction in
the “desert of the real”. Through social media dominance, the non-verbal,
visual elements have become significant components of a global network
communication system. Having in mind the usage of emoticons and stickers
incorporated in trending communicative practices of messaging and posting,
it seems that global communication has already been immersed in a realm
of supercute and superflat, apparently recognized as more visible in cultural
narratives of “imagined” Japan.
56 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #9
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities – Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, London & New York: Verso, 2006, 6.
Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, London & New York: Routledge,
1990, 1.
Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writing of Oscar Wilde, Richard
Ellmann (ed.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 315.
Stathis Gourgouris, “The Nation’s Dream Work,” in Spectre of Nation,
Belgrade: Belgrade Circle, 1997, 224.
Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity – History, Culture and
Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2000, 13.
Term borrowed from Shuhei Kosaka who claims that “the contemporary era
is one of consumption and of fiction”. Quoted in Yumiko Iida, Rethinking
Identity in Modern Japan – Nationalism as Aesthetics, London & New York:
Routledge, 2001, 162
Harootunian, op. cit., 19.
Iida, op. cit., 179. Emphasis mine.
See Alison Anne, “The Japan Fad in Global,” Mechademia: Emerging Worlds
of Anime and Manga, no. 1, 2006, 11-21.
Japanese content industry (kontentsu sangyo) refers to production and
distribution of manga, anime, video games, music and other “soft power”
products. These industries have been supported by Japanese ministries in
order to promote Japan globally and boost the economy. The term cool Japan
was introduced by American journalist Douglas McGray who marked Japan
as a cultural superpower which is more influential at the beginning of the
third millennium than it was in the 1980s, when Japan’s economy was at its
strongest.
The latest craze in Japan sparked fictional personalities which are actually
stickers in the most popular chat app: Moon, who is always excessive
whether he is happy, sad or angry, the rabbit Cony – most often in a manic
good mood – or Brown the bear who mostly does not change his facial
expression.
However, numerous characters have been adapted into children’s books,
anime or video games.
The term yuru-kyara specifically relates to mascots of different regions,
businesses or organizations.
Daisuke Wakabayashi & Miho Inada, “Isn’t That Cute? In Japan, Cuddly
Characters Compete,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25th, 2012.
Available at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323717004578
156610405635572. Accessed August 10th, 2016.
Christine R. Yano, Pink Globalization – Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific,
Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013, 19.
Ana Došen
| 57
16 Lolicon (the Lolita complex) and shotacon (the Shotaro complex) genres
depict (pre)pubescent female and male characters in an erotic manner. By
Japanese “obscenity edict” children are not considered to be sexual beings,
thus this type of fetishisation is possible as a clear demonstration of the
artistic imaginarium. Moreover, early beginnings of Lolicon are found in the
“magic girl” genre which allows a little girl to become full-grown woman
and experience and enjoy adult life without being scared or making mistakes
typical for puberty.
17 For further reading on the subject please refer to the following writings:
Steven Smet argues that Lolicon as an “exorcism of fantasies” contributes
to the low sex crime rate in Japan (noted in Helen McCarthy & Jonathan
Clements, The Erotic Anime Movie Guide, London: Titan Books, 1998).
Debra J. Occhi indicates that the animalistic imagery of kyara derives from a
long tradition of anthropomorphized representations in Shinto and Buddhism.
In The Wages of Guilt – Memories of War in Germany and Japan (1994), Ian
Burma notes that the Japanese youth of the 1970s and 1980s were ignorant
and indifferent to Japan’s role in World War II and rather chose a selfdelusion “strategy”.
18 Eiji Otsuka, “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of
Narrative,” Mechademia: Fanthropologies, no. 5, 2010, 99-116. This text
is a translated chapter of his influential A Theory of Narrative Consumption
(Monogatari shohiron) (1989).
19 Quoted in Mark Steinberg, “Otaku consumption, superflat art and the return
to Edo,” Japan Forum, no. 16 (3), 2004: 452.
20 Steinberg, op. cit., 452.
21 According to “Comic Market 90 Report”, 530 000 attendees gathered in
August 2016. http://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/C90/C90AfterReport.html.
Accessed September 30th, 2016.
22 Steinberg, op. cit., 452.
23 Takashi Murakami, Superflat, Tokyo: MADRA Publishing, 2000, 9.
24 Kristen Sharp, Superflat Worlds – A Topography of Takashi Murakami and
the Cultures of Superflat Art, RMIT University, 2006, 292.
25 Hiroki Azuma, Superflat Japanese Postmodernity, Available at https://
www.scribd.com/document/99174676/Azuma-Hiroki-Superflat. Accessed
September 30th, 2016.
26 I n Introduction to Reading Hegel, proposing the interpretation of the Hegelian
human as one who negates his own environment (nature), Kojève defines
postwar Japanese society as “snobbish” (human) because it devoted itself
to ceremonial and ritual practices for their historical, formal values. On the
other hand, American consumers are perceived as animalistic, living in a
classless society that complements Marxist thought as they can appropriate
the products which satisfy their consumer needs. According to Kojève,
humans have intersubjective desires (that which relate to the other), whereas
animals only experience the needs.
58 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #9
27 Hiroki Azuma, Otaku:Japanese Database Animals, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2009, 87.
28 Azuma mentions the “TINAMI” web engine which provides a search of
the illustrations database by a variety of categorized character traits – cat’s
ears, hair style and color, maid uniform, etc. This generated a practice
of classification and registration of every newly developed character or
continuous enlargement of the database by adding a new category in case of
an “original” element.
29 Ibid., 33.
30 Steinberg, op. cit., 459-460.
31 Quoted in Azuma, Otaku:Japanese Database Animals, 91.
32 Roger Pulvers, “Fantasy really is reality in many aspects of Japanese life
and culture,” The Japan Times. April 24th, 2011. Available at http://www.
japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2011/04/24/commentary/fantasy-really-is-realityin-many-aspects-of-japanese-life-and-culture/#.V-7cHtR97RY . Accessed
September 15th, 2016.
Ana Došen
| 59
References
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culture”. The Japan Times. April 24th, 2011. Available at http://www.
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60 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #9
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Wakabayashi, Daisuke & Miho Inada. “Isn’t That Cute? In Japan, Cuddly
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Ana Došen is a lecturer at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University where she teaches Introduction to media studies, Anime:
Media representations of South East Asia and East Asian Cinema. Graduated in Japanese language and literature at Belgrade University (Faculty of
Philology), and currently a Ph.D. candidate at Singidunum University with a
thesis focused on the notion of body and Japanese cinema. She has contributed articles in the fields of literature, media, film and cultural studies.
Email: [email protected]
Ana Došen
| 61