Sick Otaku

At the end of the twentieth century the Orient is once more the focus of European desire and fantasy. This time it is the turn of the media, advertising and youth culture to imagine in Japan and Hong Kong what they can no longer imagine in Europe and America. In the 1990s Japanese and Asian imagery has become more and more prominent in American and European youth culture. Japanese things and Asian faces have filtered into the chilly arena of the super- cool. Increasing numbers of magazine and fashion models have Asian features.

Contemporary images of Japan are images of the future. In a relationship which began in the film Bladerunner, Science Fiction images of the future and images of Japan have fused into one. European and American youth who have become disillusioned and cynical about youth politics and cultural resistance, have been invited to imagine East Asia as the true location of corpulent, hard-boiled subculture, and an East Asian youth movement. Imported Japanese animated films have helped to feed the image of Japanese youth as robotic, ruthless and visual animals of a post-modern future. Otomo Katsuhira’s film AKIRA , released in Europe and America in 1990 was received as a blast of new energy by youth across the West. References to Japan have become important signifiers of coolness in the packaging of youth culture.
In fact, these images represent only the visible tip of a far more extensive and uncontrolled transfer of ideas, politics and culture from the East to the West. The themes underpinning Japanese youth culture in the 1970s and 1980s have become meaningful and relevant to European and American youth in the 1990s. A prediction made by the French Hegelian philosopher, Alexander Kojève in 1959, that “the interraction of the West and Japanä will result not in a vulgarisation of Japan but rather in a Japanization of the West,” is being born out.

Western youth have become extremely receptive to ideas and images which first flourished in Japan. In the 1990s, weakness, dependence, passivity, and childlikeness, have been key themes in Western youth culture and fashion. They are new themes in Western youth culture which have a strong connection and similarity to the themes of Japanese youth culture from the mid 1970s. The best example of this connection is the case of cute.
Japanese cute

Kawaii style dominated Japanese popular culture in the 1980’s. Kawaii meaning ‘cute’ in English essentially means childlike, and by association: adorable, innocent, simple, gentle, and vulnerable. Cute style saturated design and the mass media whilst they were expanding rapidly in Japan between the mid seventies and the mid eighties. Cute style reached its height of saccharine intensity in the early 1980s. Cute fashion gradually evolved from a pretty serious, pink, romanticism of the early 1980s, to a more humorous, kitsch, and androgynous style which began to fade in the early 1990s - before making a return in the mid-nineties as Japan celebrated its own version of the seventies-retro. In the mid- nineties Japanese cute returned as the more kitsch and knowing ’super- cute’ (chou-kawaii).

Childishness and individualism

There had been no strong pattern of thought which linked adulthood with individual freedom in modern Japan. Maturity, which in the Britian and America, has, until recently, been linked to the authority and rights of the individual man, has tended to be thought of according to a Confucian-derived model. That is, maturity has commonly been thought of as the ability to cooperate well, accept compromises, fulfil obligations, and carry out social responsibilities. Only childhood has unambiguously symbolised individual freedom in modern Japan. Rebellion from society in Japanese youth culture during the post-war decades, developed into a rebellion from adulthood as well.

Cute fashion was all about the apparent recovery of a childlike emotional and mental state. As Disney romanticised nature in relation to industrial society, so Japanese cuteness romanticised childhood in relation adulthood. By idolising their childhood’s young Japanese people implicitly damned their individual futures as adults in society. Condemning adulthood was an individualised and limited way of condemning society generally. Cute fashion idolises childhood because it is seen as a place of individual freedom unattainable in society.

Cute in European and American Youth Culture

In the 1990s cute and childlike elements began to emerge from within Western youth cultures. Radical, assertive young women began to wear baby-doll dresses or old-fashioned frilly frocks, with Dr Martin boots and other macho accessories. They become known as ‘Riot Grrls’. This was a style which originated in female rock and punk bands, such as Hole and Babes in Toyland, coming out of East Coast America in 1990. Courtney Love, the lead singer of the Hole, become famous for wearing flimsy baby-doll nighties with high waists and hems in a punky assertive way. Courtney described her style as the “kinderwhore” look. At the same time the all-girl Japanese rock-band Shonen Knife, also became popular in America and the UK. They were identified by their eccentric, little Japanese girl image. Singing lyrics about jelly beans, Barbie doll, and rockets, Shonen Knife became the support-act for the rock- band Nirvana, reflecting their status as a pivotal source of inspiration in Anglo-American pop- culture.

The Riot Grrl style spread from America to the UK during the 1990s, but the British comic strip Tank Girl created for Deadline comic in 1988, was in many senses an early prototype of the half-punk/half- child image. In 1996 Tank Girl was turned into a Hollywood film, reflecting the rise of the Riot Grrl image from underground to mainstream commercial youth culture in the space of the first half of the 1990s. Pop-singer and cultural trend-setter, Bjork, utilised the new childlike look and behaviour. As did the film-star and ‘it girl’ of 1997, Chloe Sevigny.

Since 1996, the Spice Girls represented a gentler form of the Riot Grrl image. The Spice Girls slogan was “girl power”, a lightly feminist concept which was targeted at children and a family audience. The Spice Girl’s image was a reliable, professional combination of infantilism (personified by ‘BabySpice’) and assertiveness (personified by ‘Scary Spice’).

The tough but infantile Riot Grrrl style in Britain has been directly and indirectly influenced by Japanese cute culture, especially the sophisticated infantile styles developed around Tokyo’s Cutie For Independent Girls magazine, in the late 1980s. Britain’s principle youth culture magazine of the 1980s, The Face, promoted selected aspects of Japanese youth culture, through the 1990s, in articles on subjects such as otaku (nerd subculture) , shinjinrui (new breeders), and UFO (United Future Organisation) - the Tokyo DJ-ing outfit. Articles and photoshoots in The Face made frequent reference to Japanese youth culture and Japanese cute.

Miss Selfridge is the most important fashion designer and clothes shop in the UK. In the 1990s, the design team of Miss Selfridge focused on producing tiny T-shirts, and girlish, childlike clothes, that had been strongly influenced by Japanese cute. The influence of Japanese cute culture, on high-street fashion was made even more clear from the mid- 1990s when Japanese logos, Japanese toys, ‘Hello Kitty’ logos, and Japanese print-clun arcade machines found themselves on to the shop floor of Top Shop and Miss Selfridge.
Other infantile fashion trends in Britain and America which were preceded in Japan, include the mini- back pack. The mini-backpack, invented in 1984, became a ubiquitous sight on the streets of Japan in the late 1980s. It became a ubiquitous sight in British clubs and bars in the mid 1990s. Likewise dummies, lollipops, cuddly toys, transferred themselves from the streets of Tokyo in the 1980s, to European and American club culture in the 1990s.

Cuteness and the lack of confidence in individualism among European and American Youth

As key Western political ideas based on the freedom of the individual have been abandoned, the social structures and youth cultures of Western societies have become increasingly similar to those of Japan. As the belief in individual freedom has become more uncertain in America and Britain during the 1990s, then so its youth culture has become less assertive. Young people in the America and Britain have been encouraged to question whether individualism - so long taken for granted - is a good thing, or not.

Many young people have become confused about what exactly a strong individual should act like anyway. In this regard, British youth have become more like Japanese youth. On a practical level too, in European societies with rapidly decreasing social and political freedoms, becoming an autonomous and independent individual has become an increasingly difficult proposition. Riot Grrl and Babe fashion in Europe and America express the sentiments of new people who are certain that they will be able to gain nothing of substance from their adult lives.