Sick Otaku

Shortly after 3 pm on August 22, 1988, four-year-old Mari Konno left her home in the Iruma Village apartment complex in Saitama to play at her friend’s hours. At 6:23 pm, after she failed to return, architect Shigeo Konno, struggling to quell his panic, called the police to report that his daughter was missing. About the same time as Konno’s phone call, in a dark forest 50 km away, Mari was being slowly strangled to death.

As Mari made her way through the complex earlier that afternoon, a Nissan Langley sedan had pulled up nearby, and a man had climbed out of the driver’s seat. “Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere where it’s cool?” he asked. Mari nodded and taking his hand, skipped towards the car.

While Mari played happily with the buttons on the radio, the car purred down National Highway No. 16 toward Hachioji in western Tokyo. Just before reaching Musashino Bridge, it swung right onto a road leading towards Itsukaichi. An hour and a half after it had left Iruma Village, the car came to a halt on a narrow dirt road in the woods near the Shintama power station, which loomed like a mammoth gravestone above the trees.

The man and Mari got out of the car and walked down a mountain path fringed by hinoki and sugi trees to where the hiking trail toward Komine Pass begins. The cicadas were in full cry and the mountain doves cooed in the stifling heat. After 20 or 30 minutes, the two sat down at a spot some 20 meters off the path.

Mari was tired; she might also have been frightened, because she began to sniffle. The man panicked. What if she started to bawl? The hiking course was a popular one, and someone might hear. But he had no intention of returning her to her parents.

While Mari’s face froze in surprise, the man put his hands on her throat, thumbs on the larynx, and squeezed the life from her tiny body. When she finally went limp, he reverently undressed and fondled her. Then he laid her out as if in repose, bundled up her shorts, panties, shirt, and shoes, and walked, unnoticed, out of the forest and back to his car.

So ended the brief life of Mari Konno. And so began the murderous career of Tsutomu Miyazaki, a 26-year-old printer’s assistant. By the time he was arrested, Miyazaki had strangled and sexually abused three other young girls, terrorized a whole prefecture, and for 11 months, evaded an unprecedented police hunt for the man responsible for “The Little Girl Murders.”

When the police finally apprehended Miyazaki, they entered his home to find 6,000 videotapes of kiddy porn, splatter flicks, and cartoons. Among the grisly collection were videos and photos of his victims. It was evident that, for Miyazaki, his killing spree was little more than an extension of a lonely fantasy world. “It was like a game to him–a one-man play,” said Akira Ishii, a law professor at Aoyama Gakuin University and psychotherapist who followed the case closely. The case of Tsutomu Miyazaki, Interprefectural Felon No.117, ground its way through the courts. This fall (1993)the psychological evaluation that should finally decide Miyazaki’s fate–and lay to rest the ghosts of four murdered girls–will be announced. This is the second time the court has ordered an investigation into the crucial question: Is Miyazaki mad or bad? The answer will dictate whether or not Miyazaki is held criminally responsible for his crimes and will decide his sentence. “Miyazaki’s crimes were thrill killings of a rare kind,” concluded Dr. Susumu Oda, a psychologist at Tsukuba University. “Yet you could call him a textbook case.”

The text of Tsutomu Miyazaki’s life began in Itsukaichi, Tokyo, on August 21, 1962, where he was prematurely born. He weighed only 2.2 kg, and the joints in his hands were fused together, making it impossible for him to bend his wrists upwards. The deformation haunted him from early on. When he was five years old, a classmate teased him about his “funny hands.” In family photos after that, Miyazaki never showed his hands, and his eyes were often closed.

By the time he reached Itsukaichi Elementary School, Miyazaki was almost invisible. When he is remembered at all by teachers and classmates, it is as a quiet, lonely child who seemed utterly incapable of making friends. But young Tsutomu, like any other boy, did have dreams; in the third grade, he wrote an essay: “When I grow up, I want to buy a car and go driving. I’ll stop at a restaurant and eat some curry rice or something. I might even visit my relatives.” More often than not, however, he increasingly blamed his deformed hands for his inability to achieve anything concrete. He began to stay up into the night reading comic books.

Tsutomu was clearly a clever child. Locked in his own isolated world, he studied hard, and became the first student from his junior high school to pass the entrance exam to Meidai Nakano High School. He commuted two hours each way, every day, for three years, but eventually began to lose interest in his studies. Instead of joining his fellow students, Miyazaki would retreat to a quiet corner to work on another home-drawn comic book. His plan–to enter Meiji University (with which the high school was affiliated), major in English and become a teacher–was over by his final year, when he ended up 40th in a class of 56, with grades so poor that he failed to receive the customary recommendation to the university. Naturally, he blamed his handicap.

Miyazaki settled for a photo-technician’s course at a junior college and, after graduation in the spring of 1983, went to work at a printing plant owned by an acquaintance of his father. After thee years, during which he saved more than 3 million yen, he moved back to the family home, where he shared with his eldest sister a two-room annex to the main house near his father’s printing business. Known around town for his unfailing courtesy, Katsumi Miyazaki owned the _Akikawa Shimbun_, a major local newspaper in the Itsukaichi area, Tokyo’s most inland point. There, the Miyazaki family had considerable political influence.

The family had little influence over Tsutomu, however. His workaholic father was more interested in collecting political video clips and the latest cameras–enthusiasms that would echo grimly in his son’s crimes. Miyazaki’s mother Rieko also worked, but tried to compensate by buying Tsutomu gifts, such as the Nissan Langley sedan in which two of his victims died. “If I tried to talk to my parents about my problems, they’d just brush me off,” Miyazaki confessed to police. “I even thought about suicide,” he said.
Miyazaki’s two younger sisters, Setsuko and Haruko, merely found him repulsive. Only his grandfather Shokichi, a widely regarded man who had served on the city council, seemed to take a genuine interest in the boy.

Miyazaki avoided women his own age, perhaps because he was physically immature. “His penis is no thicker than a pencil and no longer than a toothpick,” a high-school classmate remarked. Yet his sex drive was stronger than average. At college, he took his still and video cameras to the tennis courts to take crotch shots of female players. He also soon tired of adult porn magazines. “They black out the most important part,” he complained. So, by 1984, he had turned to child porn, which shows everything, since obscenity laws ban the showing of pubic hair, not sex organs.

“As a boy, he made no close friends and therefore gained no information about sex in the real world,” said Oda. “Instead, he turned to videos, comics, and pornography for his thrills.” Oda also believes that Miyazaki thought himself important because of his small penis and deformed hands.

How then did Miyazaki’s unnatural vices lead him to kill? As Prof. Ishii at Aoyama Gakuin University pointed out, “People grow up in similar environments yet never become murderers.”

The trigger seems to have been the death of his grandfather in May 1988, three months before the first murder. His grandfather had been his only warm adult relationship, and the death marked the breaking of Miyazaki’s last bonds with society. Miyazaki later said that he even ate some of his grandfather’s cremated bones–a claim that Shunsuke Serizawa, a literary critic and witness for Miyazaki’s defense, believes. “He wanted to reincarnate his grandfather, and believed that this reincarnation would not be complete if any of his grandfather’s body remained,” Serizawa said.

His grandfather’s demise also complemented Miyazaki’s estrangement from his family. Once, when his youngest sister yelled at him for peeking at her in the bath, he burst in and smashed her head against the bathtub. Later, when his mother suggested he spend more time at work and less with his videos, Miyazaki exploded and beat her. Miyazaki’s father had long since given up trying to talk to him.

“I felt all alone,” Miyazaki explained later. “And whenever I saw a little girl playing on her own, it was almost like seeing myself.”
The first of those little girls to die from Miyazaki’s attentions was Mari Konno. After her disappearance, police squad cars with loudspeakers patrolled the streets warning parents to keep their children in sight at all times. Although it was officially tagged as a missing person case, “the police started the investigation as a murder right from the beginning,” said a journalist who followed the Miyazaki case.

Eventually, the police spent 2,930 man-days interviewing people around Mari’s home and sent 50,000 posters with Mari’s picture to police, train, subway, and bus stations across the nation. Nothing came of these efforts. Not even police dogs could pick up the girl’s scent.

Two boys said they had seen Mari walking behind a man toward the nearby Iruna River, and the _Asahi Shimbun_ interviewed a 38-year-old housewife who had spotted Mari with a stranger. Apart from the age, the description was accurate: late thirties, about 170 cm tall; face: round and pudgy with curly hair; clothes: white slacks and a white summer sweater. There was only one other potential clue. A few days after Mari disappeared, Yukie Konno, Mari’s mother, received a postcard with a haunting message after she had expressed hope in a news bulletin that her daughter was still alive. “There are devils about,” it read. The police dismissed the note as the act of a crank.

The fruitless hunt for Mari Konno eventually dwindled after four weeks. In September, Sayama Hikari Gakuen Kindergarten began its new term without her. Since the police had received no demands from a kidnapper and found no body, her file, categorized under _missing persons_, lay dormant. But many parents in the area were taking no risks. “From the time Mari disappeared until Miyazaki was caught, parents led their children to kindergarten every day,” recalled one mother.

Six weeks after Mari’s disappearance, Miyazaki struck again. Driving through Hanno, Saitama Prefecture, on the afternoon of October 3, 1988, he spotted Masami Yoshizawa, a seven-year-old first-grader, walking along the roadside. He coaxed her into his car, drove to the hills above Komine Pass–the scene of his first murder–and strangled her to death. Then he stripped her–quickly, before rigor mortis set in–and sexually abused the corpse.
When the little body shuddered involuntarily, Miyazaki, frightened, ran back to his car and drove off. He left her remains less than 100 meters from where the bones of Mari Konno lay whitening in the sun.

After she was reported missing later that night, local search parties fanned out across the area. Soon Masami’s face stared down from hundreds of posters issued by the police, who subsequently spent over 2,300 man-days interviewing local residents. Again, no clues to the girl’s whereabouts were found. Masami’s home is only 13 km from Mari’s. The police were suspicious enough to compare the two cases, but had neither leads nor bodies. Masami, too, was declared a missing person.

Killing Masami had upset Miyazaki, but he would kill again before 1988 was over. The December 12 murder of a four-year-old from Kawagoe, however, would be different. First, Miyazaki would nearly be caught. Second, the body would be discovered soon after the act, setting off a murder hunt that would compel police to reassess the disappearance of Mari and Masami, and confirm the worst fears of many Saitama residents: that there was a serial child killer on the loose.

Miyazaki never displayed much concern for life. “I’ve killed cats,” he later said casually. “Threw one in the river. Did another in with boiling water.” He also throttled his own dog to death with a strand of wire. His absorption in a video world, explains Oda, “removed his consciousness from reality. Everything became an item to him, including people. The little girls he killed were no more than characters from his comic-book life.”

Erika Namba was returning from a friend’s house when Miyazaki lured her into his sedan. She was crying by the time he pulled into the parking area at the Youth Nature House in Naguri. He told Erika to undress in the back seat, then began to photograph her, the strobe flashing in the dark.

A car drove by, its headlights sweeping momentarily across Miyazaki’s face. Erika began sobbing again. Miyazaki grabbed her by the throat and straddled her, holding her kicking body down with his weight as he strangled her. By 7 pm, his third victim was dead. Miyazaki carefully wrapped the body in a sheet and put it in the trunk. Then he disposed of her clothes in the woods behind the parking area and drove off. Miyazaki’s mind clearly wasn’t on the road. As he turned a corner, one of the Langley’s front wheels slipped into the gutter; the car was stuck. So he switched on the hazard lights, and disappeared into the dark woods with the sheet-wrapped body in his arms. He returned with the crumpled sheet to find two men standing by his car. Casually opening the trunk to put the sheet away, he explained his problem to the men, who then helped lift the car out of the rut. Miyazaki got in, and without a word of thanks, sped away.

This time, the Kawagoe police immediately connected Erika Namba’s disappearance with that of Mari Konno and Masami Yoshizawa, and the Saitama prefectural office set up a special operations center to solve the three _missing persons_ cases. The next day, a worker at the Naguri Youth Nature House found some of Erika’s clothes, and hundreds of police began combing the area. Meanwhile, the PTA at Erika’s kindergarten pasted handbills around the apartment complex where the Namba family lived.
Police found Erika’s corpse the next day, its hands and feet bound with nylon cord. The murder scene was 50 km from Erika’s home, a journey of about an hour and forty-five minutes. Five hundred riot police explored the woods for more clues, but found nothing.

The two men who had helped Miyazaki with his car on the night of the murder came forward to identify it. They correctly recalled that the car had Hachioji plates, but misidentified the model as a Toyota Corolla II–an error the police realized only after they had checked out more than 6,000 Corolla IIs. This blunder deprived investigators of what could have been their strongest lead.

Seen in the macabre light of the recovery of Erika’s body, the disappearance of Mari and Masami pointed strongly toward a more serious crime. All the girls were from Saitama Prefecture; all lived within 30 km of each other. “As soon as they found the body of the third girl, they began to treat it as a serial murder case,” said a police journalist.

Police found that the families had something else in common: they had all be bothered by strange phone calls. The phone would ring, but when answered, the person on the other end would say nothing; if they didn’t pick up it up, the phone would ring for up to 20 minutes.

And, less than a week after his daughter’s murder, Shin’ichi Namba, like the Konnos, received a postcard. It was formed from kanji characters cut from magazines and newspapers, then photocopied and enlarged to conceal their origin. It read: “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.”

The hunt for Mari and Masami led nowhere. No clues were unearthed that shed light on Erika’s murder. Hardly a day passed when television reports didn’t cover the cases. AFter the discovery of Erika’s body, the atmosphere of apprehension among Saitama’s parents and teachers turned to alarm. An _Asahi Shimbun_ editorial at the end of 1988 caught the mood of subdued panic. “In the end,” it read, “we must depend on the police . . . . So se add our plea: investigators, redouble your efforts.”

Miyazaki would not kill again until the following summer. But he was still busy. At about 6 am, on his way to work on February 6, Shigeo Konno, Mari’s father, found a box on his doorstep and called the police. Along with ashes, dirt, fragments of charred bones, and 10 baby teeth, it also contained photos of a child’s shorts, underwear, and sandals–and a single sheet of copier paper with five words on it: “Mari. Bones. Cremated. Investigate. Prove.” Miyazaki had returned to the death site, as he had done several times, and removed the remains.

The 10 small teeth found among the ashes were immediately turned over to the legal division of the Tokyo Dental University for examination, where Dr. Kazuo Suzuki concluded the probably did not belong to Mari. After a police press conference announced this finding, Suzuki changed his mind, to the agony of the Konno family. His examination was mistaken, he said; the remains might be Mari’s after all. Then a police forensic expert gave his verdict on the 220 grams of bone fragments: they were not only human, they were Mari Konno’s.

Miyazaki, avidly following news reports, heard only the original verdict–that the teeth were not Mari’s–and immediately sat down to write. On February 11, a three-page letter arrived at the Konno home. The society desk of the _Asahi Shimbun_ also received a copy, along with a Polaroid-type photo of Mari. The letter was entitled “Crime Confession” and signed “Yuko Imada,” a pun on “Now I’ll tell.”

“I put the cardboard box with Mari’s remains in it in front of her home,” it began. “I did everything. From the start of the Mari incident to the finish. I saw the police press conference where they said the remains were not Mari’s. On camera, her mother said the report gave her new hope that Mari might still be alive. I knew then that I had to write this confession so Mari’s mother would not continue to hope in vain. I say again: the remains are Mari’s.”
The confession caused an uproar. The next day, the Saitama police finally classified the Mari Konno case as a homicide, and set up a special center to investigate her abduction and murder. Handwriting experts examined the confession note but could not establish the author’s sex. Over a half million police leaflets quoting the confession were delivered to houses in the areas where the girls lived. The police did, however, correctly identify the snapshot of Mari as one taken with a Mamiya 6x7 camera “like those used by printers”–another clue that was perhaps inadequately followed up; they also rightly concluded that the box was the double-walled corrugated kind often used to ship camera lenses. The typeface on the postcards was determined to have come from a phototypesetter, and copied on an industrial copier. Police later refused to comment on whether or not they launched an investigation of printing shops in the area.

The Konnos waited three weeks before the police officially announced that the box contained the remains of their daughter.

The box contained almost an entire skeleton of a four- or five-year-old girl; and two of the teeth matched perfectly with X-rays of her dental work. On March 11, 1989–over seven months after she was declared missing–Mari was laid to rest. “Her hands and feet didn’t seem to be with the remains,” said Shigeo Konno at the funeral. “When she gets to heaven, she won’t be able to walk or eat. Please return the rest of her remains.”

The nightmare wasn’t over.

The Konnos returned home from the funeral to find another letter from “Yuko Imada.” This one, labeled simply “Confession,” chronicled the changes Miyazaki had observed in Mari’s dead body: “Before I knew it, the child’s corpse had gone rigid. I wanted to cross her hands over her breast but they wouldn’t budge. . . . Pretty soon, the body gets red spots all over it . . . . Big red spots. Like the _Hinomaru_ flag. Or like you’d covered her whole body with red _hanko_ seals. . . . After a while, the body is covered with stretch marks. It was so rigid before, but now it feels like its full of water. And it smells. How it smells. Like nothing you’ve ever smelled in this whole wide world.”

In spite of hints offered by “Yuko Imada,” the police were unable to pick up Miyazaki’s trail. Some observers have interpreted the letters as Miyazaki’s gloating at the society that he felt had shunned him. Prof. Akira Ishii disagrees: “None of it had any social meaning for him. It was just like playing a video game–you know, ‘plus one point for causing a sensation.’ He wasn’t trying to gain society’s recognition. He had a society in his mind, of which he was the nucleus.”

By the summer of 1989, Miyazaki was growing restless. He skipped work more often to spend hours sitting crosslegged in his room, editing his precious videotapes. On the first day of June, he saw girls playing near the Akishima Elementary School, and coaxed one of them to take her panties off. As he began to photograph her, some neighbors spotted him and chased him off. Despite this close call, Miyazaki butchered his fourth victim five days later.

On June 6, he left his bungalow for the tennis courts at Ariake, near Tokyo Bay, but the courts were closed. In a nearby park, he found five-year-old Ayako Nomoto playing alone. Casually removing the lens cap from his camera, Miyazaki approached Ayako and asked her to pose for pictures. He then took several shots until Ayako got used to him. “Let’s take some shots inside the car,” he coaxed, leading her to his Langley.

Miyazaki parked some 800 meters away as Ayako bounced in the back seat. As he handed her a stick of gum, the young girl commented on his deformed hands. Enraged, Miyazaki pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves. “Here’s what happens to kids who say things like that,” he growled, seizing her by the throat. “She kicked and kicked, but went limp in four or five minutes,” he later confessed. To make sure she was dead, he taped her mouth and tied her hands with vinyl rope, then wrapped the body in a sheet and put it in the trunk of the car.

This time, he took the body home, stopping at a video shop in Koenji to rent a camera. The house was dark when he parked next to the two-room bungalow. He waited two hours, then carried the tiny corpse inside, where he stripped off the clothes and wiped it with a towel. He laid it on the low _kotatsu_ table, spread the legs and taped the vagina apart. He then took photographs and videos while he masturbated. Afterwards, he bound up the hands and feet again with nylon cord and covered the body with three sheets.

Two days later, the odor of the decomposing corpse became unbearable. Although he was right in believing that police were nowhere near identifying him as the “Little Girl Murderer,” Miyazaki knew he had to dispose of the body. With a knife and a saw, he hacked off the cadaver’s head, hands, and feet to hamper identification. Then he hid the torso near the public toilet at Hanno’s Miyazawa-ko cemetery at midnight, four days after the murder. He roasted Ayako’s hands in his back yard, ate some of her flesh, and tossed what remained, including the skull, into the woods of Mitakeyama, a 230-meter hill in front of his house.

Realizing the risk of having the remains so near his home, he retrieved and hid them two weeks later in a bag in the storeroom behind his bedroom. Later, he scattered the bones in the woods, then burned the hair, the clothes, and the blood-stained plastic bags and sheets.

Five days later, after police had distributed 10,000 handbills with Ayako’s description and picture, the little girl’s mutilated torso was discovered at the cemetery. Despite Miyazaki’s butchery, the remains were quickly identified. The blood type and chest size matched those of Ayako Nomoto, reported missing by her mother at 8:40 pm on June 6. The stomach contents matched Ayako’s last meal.

In the end, Miyazaki’s gruesome career was cut short by a citizen, despite the massive police forces pitted against him.

On Sunday, July 23, 1989, two sisters were playing near a public washstand in Hachioji, when a young man stopped his car and got out. “You stay here,” he told the elder nine-year-old, cajoling the younger child toward a nearby river. But the older sister ran home for her father, who sprinted back to find his daughter naked, with a young man focusing a camera between her legs. He grabbed him and knocked him down. The man twisted away and ran to the swampy edge of the river to escape. Then, incredibly, he returned to his car where the Hachioji police, who had already been called, apprehended Tsutomu Miyazaki on the charge of “forcing a minor to commit indecent acts.”

The police clearly believed they had found their serial killer. One Saitama housewife remembers how house-to-house police questioning in her apartment complex ended abruptly on the day the news broke, though nothing was officially revealed of the suspect’s involvement in other crimes. “Even then, television reports were saying he was the serial killer,” she recalled. The news media were so convinced that Miyazaki was the man that they beat the police to the Miyazaki home, where they filmed Tsutomu’s room.

Seventeen days later, Miyazaki confessed to murdering Ayako nomoto, whose skull was found the next day in the hills of Okutama. The other confessions followed swiftly: first, the murder of Erika Namba; then Mari Konno, of whom video clips were discovered among the 6,000 tapes in Miyazaki’s lair. By mid-September, after a preliminary psychological test by NPA psychiatrists concluded that Miyazaki showed “No immediately apparent disorders,” he confessed to the fourth of the “Little Girl Murders.”

On September 6, Masami Yoshizawa’s remains were found in the forest near Komine Pass, Itsukaichi. The half-chewed bones of Mari Konno’s hands and feet were discovered nearby a week later. Her father’s plea for the return of his daughter’s hands and feet had finally been answered.

Could the police have tracked down Miyazaki sooner?
Until Miyazaki’s arrest and subsequent confessions, the police were far from identifying the murderer, despite an intense and costly investigation. “It’s almost impossible to catch a murderer when there’s no relationship between them and the victims,” a police journalist explained. “It becomes just a matter of luck.” In Erika’s case alone, more than 600 calls from the citizens of Hanno kept the police occupied for days.

What if the National Police Agency had got involved sooner?
Then, as when the FBI moves in, all information would have been immediately relayed from local police to a national center; the NPA would have also helped foot the mammoth bill for the manhunt. But the NPA’s sphere of influence dictated that it could not get involved until an incident occurred in Tokyo. The NPA did set up a missing persons team after Ayako went missing in Tokyo, but this, according to an NPA source, does not constitute an investigation. The NPA’s real involvement began only when Miyazaki started confessing.
Miyazaki’s father refused to hire a lawyer for his son. “It wouldn’t be fair to the victims,” he said. The public defender’s office looked long and hard before finding two lawyers, Junji Suzuki and Keiji Iwakura, who were willing to take the case. Suzuki agreed because of his vehement opposition to the death penalty.

The defense team’s case revolves around the claim that Miyazaki has only limited sense of responsibility for his crimes, that he is unable to choose between right and wrong. “We want to build enough of a case for the judge to sentence Miyazaki to life in prison,” said Suzuki. The court’s first action was to assign a team of six psychology professors from Keio University to examine Miyazaki. Last year, they filed their report: Miyazaki was fully capable of taking responsibility for his actions. Attorney Suzuki disagrees.

“The more we see of him, the more we think he lives in a different world,” said Suzuki. “We felt the report did not establish Miyazaki’s mental capabilities beyond reasonable doubt, so we asked for a second evaluation. Fortunately, the judge agreed.” Late last year, a team of three Tokyo University professors began the evaluation of Miyazaki that is due this autumn. “It is very unusual for a team to evaluate a defendant,” Suzuki added. “Usually, a single psychologist is used.” This will be the defense team’s last appeal. The prosecution can appeal for another evaluation if it disagrees with the upcoming report: the defense cannot.

There are three possible outcomes to the psychological evaluation. If the second report agrees that Miyazaki is mentally incompetent, he will be sent to a mental institution where, if precedent is followed, he’ll be released in 12 or 13 years. However, public prosecutors, who have over 750 items of physical evidence, have no intention of letting Miyazaki loose. They will surely petition the court for a third testing, and a fourth, until–in theory–Miyazaki is as dead as his victims.

The second possibility–the result Suzuki seeks–is that Miyazaki will be judged to have a limited sense of responsibility for his crimes. “He may not have an incapacitating personality disorder such as paranoia or schizophrenia, but I think he may be borderline,” said Suzuki. “We hope the psychological team agrees.” This result, thinks this result will earn Miyazaki a life sentence without parole. Prof. Ishii expects the same psychological outcome, but believes Miyazaki’s life sentence will, in effect, last about 12 to 15 years. “It is impossible to say whether he will still be dangerous by then,” said Ishii. “However, keeping him in prison for the rest of his life raises other questions of human rights.”

The third possible outcome is that Miyazaki is deemed mentally competent enough to take full responsibility for his crimes. In this case, the judge would have no choice but to condemn him to death. Although Suzuki cannot appeal the psychological evaluation, he can–and would–appeal a death sentence.

Nobody involved in the case doubts that Tsutomu Miyazaki is a very, very disturbed young man. Dr. Oda lists a grab bag of obsessions: pedophilia, necrophilia, sadism, fetishism, and cannibalism. Prof. Ishii believes Miyazaki was a pedophile first, a murderer second. “Killing was an extension of his interest in little girls, a way of possessing them,” he said.

But is Miyazaki insane? “I don’t see how Miyazaki could be judged responsible for his actions,” said Shunsuke Serizawa. “He shows no signs of being aware of being aware of the gravity of his crimes. He has no sense of guilt. Even the judge seems to agree that his first psychological testing was very inadequate, which is why a second testing was ordered.” But, although he strongly believes that Miyazaki should not be held criminally responsible for his deeds, Serizawa stresses that “it still would not do to let him loose in society.” Miyazaki’s lawyer echoes this sentiment. “The defense team will do its best to see that he gets life,” Suzuki said.
Next month Tsutomu Miyazaki will celebrate his 31st birthday in prison. “He’s perfectly happy,” said Suzuki. “He is allowed to read comic books all day.” As they near a decision, the Tokyo University psychologists observe their subject every day. Yet, Suzuki claimed, Miyazaki barely registers the fact that people are staring at him. “He hates that,” said Suzuki. “He’s very self-conscious.”

All that remains of the Itsukaichi house and printing plant complex is an open lot and the small two-room annex where Miyazaki slept among his teetering stacks of gruesome video tapes. Miyazaki’s parents, who visit once a week to replenish his supply of comics, shut down the _Akikawa Shimbun_, and went into hiding soon after their son’s confessions were made public. In a 1989 interview with the _Tokyo Shimbun_, Katsumi Miyazaki regretted that “I didn’t pay more attention to the feelings of my son.” After his arrest, Miyazaki had written a furious letter to his father, blaming him for everything.

To his mother, however, Miyazaki was more conciliatory. “Mother, I’ve caused you much heartache,” he wrote once. Then he added, “Don’t forget to change the oil in my car, or it will get so you can’t drive it.

AFTERWORD

Miyazaki was judged to have multiple personalities at the least and schizophrenia at the worst by the Tokyo University psychologists. He is still in prison. His father committed suicide.

POSTS COMO ESTE APARECERAN HASTA QUE SE ESTABLEZCAN LOS VUELOS DIRECTOS MEXICALI-TOKYO CON DESCUENTO O HASTA QUE ALGUN EJEMPLAR EMO O DARKIE NOS HACKEE ESTE BLOG.

On March 11, a 26-year-old salaryman in Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, was arrested on suspicion of having murdered a neighbor’s daughter. The girl was in her first year of primary school.

Commenting on the slaying, the “Focus on Topics” column in Nikon Gendai (March 19) notes that when police searched the man’s apartment, they carried off enough comic books, videos, figurines and other assorted paraphernalia appealing to “Rorikon” (as Lolita complex is abbreviated in Japanese) to fill 25 cardboard boxes.

The Rorikon phenomenon is not especially new; but crimes by geeks who entertain such fantasies appear to be in the process of becoming increasingly fetid and violent.

The center of activities for geeky males with a predilection for pubescent females is the Akihabara electronics district, where shops openly display a variety of goods catering to the Rorikon trade.

“Most of our customers are in their 20s and 30s,” says a clerk at one such store. “A lot of them appear to be ordinary white-collar workers. One of the most popular items has been unpainted female figurines, which sell for between 5,000 to 8,000 yen. The customers paint the figurines themselves. One that’s life-size will cost about 100,000 yen. These come with options, like school uniforms or ballet tights, and even wigs. It’s rare to hear anyone grumbling over the high prices.”

One of the items displayed at the store is a highly realistic figurine of a primary school girl clad only in underwear. In the hands of males who, increasingly, seem to lack the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality, it goes without saying that such products give cause for concern.

“Around 1990, the scale of the market related to ‘enjo kosai’ (juvenile prostitution) was estimated at about 30 billion yen,” says Takashi Kadokura, an analyst at the Daiichi Research Institute and perhaps Japan’s best known specialist in the underground economy.

“Our survey in 2003 indicates it’s now around 60 billion yen, so the figure has doubled in a little over a decade. I believe this is due largely to such influences as the Internet and animated films, which have exacerbated geek-like behavior among adult males, growing numbers of whom are not able to get along well with women of their own age group. I suppose this phenomenon will probably continue to increase.”

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Sexuality is a commodity within any entertainment industry, and marketers and image makers have taken advantage of this for centuries. The rise in popularity of virtual idols within Japanese popular culture is an indication that sexuality has been packaged to the point that the focus of attraction no longer needs to be a human being, or perhaps it never did. We are capable of creating seductive beings just as we would produce any other cultural product. The heroines of Japanese animation (or anime), the proliferation of kisekae dolls on the internet, and the debut of virtual pop-stars such as Kyoko Date exemplify the spirit of a movement that does not discredit the sensual value of simulated beings. In fact, the distance that these images have from perceived reality is central to creating an atmosphere within which sexuality may be explored.

It has often been observed (either positively or negatively) that the images of female sexuality in the media are highly artificial. Whether it be silicone implants, eyelid surgery or stereotypical portrayals that are being commented upon, the images that we consume in both Western and Asian cultures are highly manipulated. Much social criticism of this scenario stems from the assumption that viewers gain some form of comfort from the fact that what they are looking at is a real person, therefore a deception is at work.

However, the increasingly artificial nature of sexual icons within Japanese culture would tend to indicate that there is an astute awareness of the artifice surrounding these images for both producers and consumers. Images are being produced that are overtly artificial. Artifice becomes part of the charm and much of the reason that these images are appealing to their audience.

Furthermore, the extreme separation from reality hinders (although doesn’t necessarily prevent) any normative social function that these images may have.

I am not attempting to discredit claims that negative or unrealistic portrayals of females in media are damaging to social practices and attitudes. There is much writing on both sides of that issue, and most of it will be able to deal with the subject matter in a more comprehensive manner than I can. That is not the focus of this work. I am instead attempting to explore the appeal that such imagery holds for the audience that is consuming it, and the manner in which this form of imagery functions within a fantasmatic diegetic space. My interest in the removal of image from reality has to do with the psychological impact that it has on the viewer and the viewer’s interaction with that image, as opposed to how the consumer’s relationships with other (human)beings is affected by that interaction.

Throughout this paper, I will be referring to the consumption and enjoyment of products within a Japanese market, by a Japanese audience. I am not implying by this that there is a marked difference in the appeal that virtual idols would have from the Japanese context to a North American one. Rather, many of these products are only commercially available in Japan. Therefore, that is the only large audience that I have to use as an example at this point. For similar reasons, I will be focusing on a male audience.

While readers of manga (Japanese comic books) and viewers of anime are both male and female, virtual idols such as Shiori Fujusaki and Kyoko Date are almost exclusively consumed by males. Since this is the group that actively consumes the product, they will be the primary focus of this paper.

The proliferation of internet sites devoted to anime and manga heroines can give us a fair idea of how many North American and Japanese males find these images attractive. There are innumerable devotional pages and virtual shrines in honour of individual characters, and of course they all sport a few pictures for the viewers to admire. These pictures will often cause the uninitiated to take pause, for the stylized nature of the females is grossly exaggerated in a manner that has only recently been exposed to a widespread North American audience. While the success of the television program Sailor Moon (and its extensive merchandising campaign) has spread the show’s images across the continent, the exaggerated forms are often perceived as an anomaly to television animation as opposed to being a good example of a far larger art form anime in general. The heroines in Sailor Moon have quite a bit in common with their anime contemporaries. Characters such as “Mamono Hunter Yohko” share the exaggeration of form that make these images incongruous with human anatomy. The legs account for approximately two thirds of the character’s height and the eyes are extremely large. In fact, if we were to imagine the rest of the orb that makes up each eyeball, there is a slim chance that they would fit within the character’s skull…never mind leaving room for a brain.

So what is it that makes these images so attractive? They are physically deformed by human biological standards. They are depictions of persons that do not and cannot exist. So why are hundreds of thousands of young males drawn to them? I propose that it is precisely this impossibility that holds the most attraction.

These images are free of any material referent. There can be no flaw in a synthetic girl, and there can be no deception from a person who is overtly 100% artificial. There is a definite lineage within popular Japanese cultural products that stems from an understanding that artificiality and physical distortion can itself be sexual. An example of this are the woodblock prints that have been produced in Japan since the Edo period (17th century) that employ highly stylized and exaggerated human forms in the name of sexuality.

Before expanding on the qualities of sexuality in the virtual body, it will be useful to look at the psychology involved in an interaction between a living person and the representation of a sexual being. In 1979, Jean Baudrillard claimed that seduction is always in the realm of artifice. His example of the perfect artifice of seduction was the transvestite. In such a case sexuality becomes purely that which is signified through conscious construction — a male body, given female sexuality. Biologically, the transvestite does not possess the necessary parts to be female, but instead creates a hypersexual version of femininity though simulated physical features and exaggerated mannerisms. Baudrillard’s words are poignant when we think of them in relation to the female body in anime. In Seduction, he writes about the way a woman or man applies makeup in order to exaggerate her features: to turn them into more than a sign, by this use of, not the false as opposed to true, but the more false than false, to incarnate the peaks of sexuality while simultaneously being absorbed in their simulation.” Is this not also what happens within the process of stylization of an animated female? The sites of sexuality and implied innocence are amplified. It doesn’t matter to the viewer that these images do not closely approximate the human body. What matters is that the features that are deemed to be sexually appealing — legs, eyes, breasts — are exaggerated and brought together into a completely artificial, yet extremely seductive image.

The hypersexualizing of characters in anime is dependent on certain preconceived notions of feminine sexuality. The sites of sexual expression and the attributes that increase the implications of sexuality are quite often the result of a patriarchal image of what “feminine” should be. This may lead us to assume that, as in the case of the transvestite, the imagery in anime is a male construction of femininity for consumption by other males. Interestingly, a large proportion of the artists and writers that create manga and anime (including Sailor Moon) are female. In the context of this paper, that may seem odd, but manga cover a huge spectrum of genres that I do not have the space or inclination to describe here at length.

Unlike the North American comic book market, females in Japan consume manga in similar or even greater numbers than males do.

The stylized body and facial features are common across the different genres of the medium. This can be seen as akin to the portrayals of women that we would see in American fashion magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Vogue. These magazines are largely produced by, and marketed to, women. However, the women in such publications are portrayed and exploited in an overtly sexualized manner that cannot easily be differentiated from the images of females that we would see in men’s magazines. The point of this observation is not to implicate females in the process of exploitation, but to differentiate between the female imagery in manga and anime, and the portrayal of women in the form of virtual idols that I will be discussing soon. The manga/anime form being something that is produced and consumed by both genders (although often in different contexts or genres), and the latter being deliberately produced for and consumed by males.

Despite the sensual nature of anime images, there is a limited amount of interaction that is possible between a living being and an image. That is, the interaction between viewer and image is generally confined to viewing. This does not prevent fantasies around the characters from extending to more physical interactions. Turning once more to the internet as an example, there are numerous sites of “fan-art” and fiction (”fan-fic”) that depict the schoolgirls of anime in sexual situations, both with other characters and generic insert-yourself-here partners. Such fantasies are also depicted through manga or anime such as Video Girl Ai. Video Girl Ai is the story of a protagonist who rents a date on videocassette (such things do exist in Japan). She magically comes through the screen of his television in order to become a part of his lived experience (which generally doesn’t happen). The desire for interaction expressed through products such as Video Girl Ai forced the market to create something beyond the comic books and videos already available — something that can be toyed with.

Several attempts have been made to broaden the amount of interaction that is possible with anime images through the use of computer software. Kisekae is the name of a program that acts much like a conventional paper doll would. A character appears on a computer monitor and the user is able to drag any item of clothing on or off the body. Originally, these dolls were created for the amusement of young girls but it did not take long before opportunities for sexual manipulation presented themselves. Not that there is a great conceptual leap between the original dolls and the more adult oriented playthings that followed. All that needed to be changed were a few of the accessories. The sailor suits that are so popular in Japanese pornography and burusera (fetish) shops were already apparent in the girl’s toys — add a few leather items and some lacy panties and the sexual nature of Kisekae is made explicit.

Of course, many of the Kiss sets go much further than that, incorporating dildos, ropes, used maxi pads and other objects that can be used to restrain, violate or humiliate the body on the screen.

There is a certain amount of amusement being derived from the fact that these were originally created for relatively innocent play. The users of the program are largely aware of the irony involved in transforming a little girl’s toy into a sexual game. Perhaps this contains parallels with the Lolita genre of anime and manga that will be discussed later in this paper. Secondly, there is a liberation taking place because the figure depicted is not directly referencing a human body. The user has a sense of detachment while using this device.

The guilt and societal taboo involved in the actual abuse or humiliation of a female form is minimized in this context because it has been removed from reality by so many steps. Since the vast majority of these dolls are stylized after anime characters, the proportions of each are similarly distorted. Beyond that, the primary physical object that we think of when we see this game is not a person’s body — but a paper doll. To further detach the participant from signifiers of reality, the computer screen mediates the entire process. All of this allows the user to toy with the image with relative freedom. Where a user might normally attempt to avoid the objectification of women, Kisekae dolls are already objects — or at least they reference objects far more directly than they reference people.

In The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquere Rosanne Stone comments on sexual functions in virtual communities by postulating that a participant in cybersex gains a sense of fulfillment from the fact that there is a person on the other end of the line. Even though the interaction is often limited by text-based technology, the user knows that someone else is participating in the act with him or her — a virtual coupling. Stone goes on to describe how through time, the need for the other person becomes less important as the mode of communicating sexual messages becomes more familiar. I bring up Shaw’s analysis as a means of demonstrating how the sexual desire generated by images like the ones discussed here differ from interpersonal virtual sex.

First and foremost, the consumption of these images does not continue in spite of the fact that there is nobody on the other end. It thrives on the fact. Freedom from the social pressures involved in human interaction plays a major role in the popularity of these items. Secondly, the figure in a kisekae set does not acknowledge the presence of the user. There is no voice or agency present to implicate the user in the act of abuse or the act of playing with a doll (each one having the potential to be embarrassing or incriminating for the person involved).

A further step towards interaction with virtual characters (and the desire that drives it) is apparent in the phenomenal success of a video game called Toki-Meki. Within this game, the player needs to improve himself academically and physically in order to win the love of the beautiful heroine, Shiori Fujusaki. I intentionally refer to the player as himself, not only because the ‘he’ is positioned within the plot as male, but because the vast majority of the fan-base for this game is composed of men between the ages of 18 and 35. These are not young boys, but men in what is supposed to be the prime of their lives. They are most often university students and businessmen.

This is a significant shift in demographics when considered in relationship to the other images discussed so far. As mentioned earlier, both males and females enjoy anime and manga. Since kisekae originated as a small girl’s toy, there is a great cross-section of users for the software. This includes the young girls who were originally targeted with the software, older females that find irony and nostalgia in the game and the men that have already been discussed. However, games such as Toki-Meki and the virtual idol phenomenon have a relatively homogenous fan-base. There seems to be nothing in Shiori Fujusaki that would inspire any female to relate with the character. She is created as a prize that a person may aspire to win, but there is very little that would cause a person to aspire to be like her (besides her lucrative career). Where anime/manga girls are visually stylized, Shiori is further simplified as a character as well as visually.

The point of Toki-Meki is to take Shiori out on dates and carry on conversations with her in attempts to woo the anime-styled heroine.

The player must be a perfect gentleman, choose the correct responses and avoid the advances of the 12 other female characters in the game. If he can accomplish this, then he receives a confession of love from Shiori and the game is won. That is, if the player wants to win, which is only one way to enjoy the game. Apparently many players find the other characters more appealing, and actively pursue those females instead. This is evidenced by the fact that all the female characters in the game have large fan clubs of their own.
There are quite a few similar interactive video games on the market at the moment, with various alterations in theme, and levels of sexuality. Many of these games are openly pornographic, in which the player must sleep with, or torture the female characters in order to “score”. However, no other game has reached the status of Toki-Meki, which focuses on an innocent courtship. In the process of this courtship, Shiori has become an idol to scores of young Japanese males. To capitalize upon the success of this character, Konami (the company that owns Shiori) has produced several pop music CDs under Shiori’s name, and she has even performed “live” in concert via an on-stage video wall. The interactivity of the video game format is a natural progression from animated entertainment, while maintaining the blatantly artificial nature of the form.

One could argue that many earlier points in this discussion do not apply to Toki-Meki because Shiori does acknowledge the viewer.

There is a level of interaction that does not allow for the same implied anonymity that Kisekae dolls provide. However, that would imply some sort of natural discourse between the player and the character in the game and there is very little that is natural about Toki-Meki. The conversational interaction that exists between Shiori and the player is limited to multiple choice questions and answers. “Isn’t it a beautiful view?” Shiori asks as she rides the monorail. The player then has three options from which to chose a response, the most obvious being “I hadn’t noticed, I’ve been watching you the entire time.”

The form of conversation offered within Toki-Meki holds very few of the elements that MIT’s Andy Lipmann set forth as defining interactivity. These are: interuptability, which means that each participant must be able to interrupt the other, mutually and simultaneously; graceful degradation, which means that unanswerable questions must be handled in a way that doesn’t halt the conversation; “limited look-ahead, which means that since each party can be interrupted, there is a limit to how much the shape of the conversation can be anticipated by either party; no default, which means that the converstion must not have a pre-planned path [and] the impression of an infinite database”.

Toki-Meki falls short of almost all of these criteria except for the “no default” condition. The form of interaction that is possible between Shiori and the player is maintained as artificial, protecting the impression of autonomy in the player. This is compounded by the fact that Shiori refers to the player as a schoolmate, implying that she is seeing a persona other than the 18-35 year old male that generally plays the game.

The pop-idol success of Shiori has opened the door to the marketing of other virtual idols. This led directly to the creation of Kyoko Date. Within Japanese popular culture, the term “idol” refers to a genre of pop stars. They are generally pretty young girls or handsome young boys who perform concerts, make videos and often appear on television programs and magazine covers. Kyoko Date performs all of these tasks, but the major difference between Kyoko and her counterparts is that she was created using a computer program. Horipro is Japan’s top modeling agency, and they collaborated with software engineers to create the 18-year-old singer who was first introduced to the Japanese market last November. She has now graced the covers of several magazines and even played a small role in a soap opera.

Now, why would a company create a singer when they can simply hire a young girl to do the same job? Well, the idol market in Japan has steadily declined since the late seventies. Flesh-and-blood representations of female sexuality are apparently no longer as appealing to young Japanese males as they once were. Devotional magazines for young men have become increasingly filled with anime and video game characters. A figure like Kyoko Date has the advantage of being able to pose for commercial consumption without her personal life interfering with the process. A major reason that fans cite for preferring virtual idols over their predecessors is that virtual idols cannot become involved with scandals, and they don’t ever get married or grow old. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they don’t grow obsolete.

It is worth noting here that magazines geared towards young girls in Japan are still filled with young male pop-singers and television stars. Perhaps this is due to the fact that a greater number of males buy and play video games, and are therefore more heavily socialized to accept a computer generated image as a being in relation to themselves.

Another reason for the popularity of virtual idols is the play between accessibility and denial that surrounds the figures. Anybody can buy a copy of Kyoko’s dance video or a CD-ROM of Toki-Meki for their PC, yet neither of these figures can actually be touched by the consumer. Of course, that means that other consumers cannot touch them either. Depriving access to the viewer acts to increase the allure of the figure while ensuring the player that the idol’s innocence remains intact. The psychological comfort that this product provides holds parallels with the proliferation of Rorikon (Lolita-style) manga and anime in the Japanese market. When a small girl (especially a small girl in a sailor-style high school suit) is portrayed in a comic, there is an assumption of innocence. This innocence is highly valued by the consumer, and it is no coincidence that Shiori spends most of her screen-time in just such an outfit. Of course, Lolita manga (as the name would imply) are infamous for portraying these girls in explicitly sexual situations. However, the age and wardrobe still act as signifiers that the character was innocent and virginal up until that point when the viewer gains the privilege of visually deflowering her by witnessing the event. As in Lolita manga, the youth of the idol singer is important to the naive appeal and innocent look of the genre. They are untouchable. It is a societal taboo for a grown man to violate a high school girl. This taboo increases the appeal of the figure because it automatically makes a relationship more naughty. In the case of virtual idols this logic is compounded by the fact that there is no feasible way to access the person. Desire is often more permissible when there is no way of attaining that which one desires. Not only do Kyoko and Shiori appear as young girls, but they also do not exist in our physical reality. Even if the social taboo is virtually transgressed, it remains physically uninterrupted.

Given the elements that have combined to create Kyoko Date, along with an intense marketing campaign, it would seem natural that she would be winning the hearts of millions of Japanese men. Not so.

The sales of Kyoko’s first CD have been sluggish when compared to the projected figures. There seems to have been a flaw in logic when creating this persona. If it is the artificiality of image that attracts young men to virtual idols, then perhaps the error was in Horipro’s intense efforts to make Kyoko appear and act human. Much of Shiori’s appeal lies in the fact that she is pure simulation in Baudrillard’s sense of the term. That is, Shiori was created through “the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Kyoko, on the other hand, is an amalgam of features that directly reference the real without necessarily being real. Her physical features are a combination of those seen in former idols from the Horipro agency, which have then been mapped onto a virtual body. Her singing voice belongs to one female and her talking voice belongs to another. Her dance routines are created by applying sensors to the body of a performer, and then mapping those sequences onto the virtual model. Where Shiori’s lineage comes from manga and video games, Kyoko owes her genetic make-up to human models: former idols from the Horipro agency — those same idols that young Japanese males have largely turned away from.

There is a phrase for this phenomenon, nijikon fetchi, that translates as “two-dimensional fetish”. The term applies here, although it is generally used in a negative context. It is seen as a negative social phenomenon that affects young males who are unable to cope with living females in a social environment. The assumption is that they turn to manga and anime versions of the female in order to compensate for their social ineptitude. Perhaps this is true. One way or another, it’s an unfortunate label, but it addresses the innate appeal that an image has when there is no physical signified for that image to correspond to. The term, although it implies that the image being fetishized must be flat, does not necessarily exclude three-dimensional idols such as Kyoko Date. It was after all coined before Kyoko had made her first appearance. In essence it implies the preference for a created body as opposed to a living body, the artificial nature of the latter being a primary draw.

Since Kyoko’s debut, Horipro has continued its efforts to create a three-dimensionally articulated virtual idol and other corporations have followed suit. Pink Lady X is a duo of virtual idols that sing and dance together. They are intended to pick-up where Kyoko left off. This time, choreography for the idols is not determined by the limitations of human movement. The two frequently perform impossible kicks and movements within their dance routines.

However, the physical bodies still conform to human standards.

Absent are the impossibly long legs and huge eyes that are so common in two-dimensional idols. The designers from Horipro have yet to take advantage of their ability to distort the body.

Furthermore, Pink Lady X references past idols even more directly than Kyoko Date does. If it is true that the “transubstantiation of sex into signs is the secret of all seduction,” then perhaps designers should keep that in mind. The seductive nature of imagery is more complete when the signs of sexuality are made explicit. Perhaps future prototypes will take proper advantage of these elements and produce a fully articulated computer generated idol with the exaggerated qualities and limited interactivity that make Shiori Fujisaki so successful.

From anime girls to Kyoko Date, virtual idols fulfill a “need” for many young males. A site for affection is provided that is completely risk free. The woman is created to the specifications of a selected audience. There is no risk of her character betraying the model that has been constructed because she does not exist as an entity outside of her function. Idol otaku (extremely devoted fans) feel free to add aspects of personality to the character, or even write fan-fiction or dojinshi (amateur comic books) with the character as central. If there is no material person, facts can be invented if they are not already available. While accessibility to each character is key to their success, these synthetic girls also share an elusive quality that adds to their appeal. There is no mechanism for satisfaction within these images, only the simultaneous perpetuity of sexual possibility and impossibility…and that’s what keeps us watching.

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For sci-fi author William Gibson, Japan has been a lifelong inspiration. Here, the writer who coined the phrase ‘cyberspace’, explains why no other country comes closer to the future… or makes better toothpaste

‘Why Japan?’ I’ve been asked for the past 20 years or so. Meaning: why has Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction? When I started writing about Japan, I’d answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a very central, very important place in terms of the global economy. And it did. (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn’t noticed yet.) A little later, asked the same question, I’d say that it was Japan’s turn to be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was where the money was and the deal was done. Today, with the glory years of the bubble long gone, I’m still asked the same question, in exactly the same quizzical tone: ‘Why Japan?’

Because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future.

The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behoves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They’ve been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call ‘future shock’ (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives).

Consider the Mobile Girl, that ubiquitous feature of contemporary Tokyo street life: a schoolgirl busily, constantly messaging on her mobile phone (which she never uses for voice communication if she can avoid it). The Mobile Girl can convert pad strokes to kanji faster than should be humanly possible, and rates her standing in her cellular community according to the amount of numbers in her phone’s memory. What is it that the Mobile Girls are so busily conveying to one another? Probably not much at all: the equivalent of a schoolgirl’s note, passed behind the teacher’s back. Content is not the issue here, but rather the speed, the weird unconscious surety, with which the schoolgirls of Tokyo took up a secondary feature (text messaging) of a new version of the cellular telephone, and generated, almost overnight, a micro-culture.

A little over 100 years ago, the equivalent personal, portable techno-marvel in Tokyo would have been a mechanical watch. The printmakers of the Meiji period made a very large watch the satiric symbol of the Westernised dandy, and for the Japanese, clock-time was an entirely new continuum, a new reality.

The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today, is the result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to England. These young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must have found as marvellous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk. These Modern Boys, as the techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known, somehow induced the nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution. The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably disorienting. The Japanese bought the entire train-set: clock-time, steam railroads, electric telegraphy, Western medical advances. Set it all up and yanked the lever to full on. Went mad. Hallucinated. Babbled wildly. Ran in circles. Were destroyed. Were reborn.

Were reborn, in fact, as the first industrialised nation in Asia. Which got them, not too many decades later, into empire-building expansionist mode, which eventually got them two of their larger cities vaporised, blown away by an enemy wielding a technology that might as well have come from a distant galaxy.

And then that enemy, their conquerors, the Americans, turned up in person, smilingly intent on an astonishingly ambitious programme of cultural re-engineering. The Americans, bent on restructuring the national psyche from the roots up, inadvertently plunged the Japanese several clicks further along the time line. And then left, their grand project hanging fire, and went off to fight Communism instead.

The result of this stupendous triple-whammy (catastrophic industrialisation, the war, the American occupation) is the Japan that delights, disturbs and fascinates us today: a mirror world, an alien planet we can actually do business with, a future.
But had this happened to any other Asian country, I doubt the result would have been the same. Japanese culture is ‘coded’, in some wonderfully peculiar way that finds its nearest equivalent, I think, in English culture. And that is why the Japanese are subject to various kinds of Anglophilia, and vice versa. It accounts for the totemic significance, to the Japanese, of Burberry plaid, and for the number of Paul Smith outlets in Japan, and for much else besides.

Both nations display a sort of fractal coherence of sign and symbol, all the way down into the weave of history. And Tokyo is very nearly, in its own way, as ‘echoic’ (to borrow Peter Ackroyd’s term) a city as London.

I’ve always felt that London is somehow the best place from which to observe Tokyo, perhaps because the British appreciation of things Japanese is the most entertaining. There is a certain tradition of ‘Orientalia’, of the faux-Oriental, that has been present here for a long time, and truly, there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original.

London, being London and whatever else, eminently assured of its ability to do whatever it is that London’s always done, can reflect Japan, distort it, enjoy it, in ways that Vancouver, where I live, never can. In Vancouver, we cater blandly to the Japanese, both to the tour-bus people with the ever-present cameras and to a delightful but utterly silent class of Japanese slackers. These latter seem to jump ship simply to be here, and can be seen daily about the city, in ones and twos, much as, I suspect, you or I might seem to the residents of Puerto Vallarta. ‘There they are again. I wonder what they might be thinking?’

But we don’t reflect them back. We don’t have any equivalent of the robot sushi bar in Harvey Nichols, which is as perfectly ‘Japanese’ a thing as I’ve seen anywhere, and which probably wouldn’t look nearly as cool if it had been built in Tokyo or Osaka.

We don’t have branches of Muji interspersed between our Starbucks (although I wish we did, because I’m running out of their excellent toothpaste). Muji is the perfect example of the sort of thing I’m thinking of, because it calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist. A Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard. My toiletries would pretend to be nothing more than what they are, and neither would I.

Because we don’t reflect them back, in Vancouver, they don’t market to us in the same way they market to you.

The trendy watch chains of London are the only places in the world, aside from Japan, where one can purchase the almost-very-latest Japan-only product from Casio and Seiko.

Because Japanese manufacturers know that you see them, in London. They know that you get it. They know that you are a market.

I like to watch the Japanese in Portobello market. Some are there for the crowd, sightseeing, but others are there on specific, narrow-bandwidth, obsessional missions, hunting British military watches or Victorian corkscrews or Dinky Toys or Bakelite napkin rings. The dealers’ eyes still brighten at the sight of a tight shoal of Japanese, significantly sans cameras, sweeping determinedly in with a translator in tow. A legacy from the affluent days of the bubble, perhaps, but still the Japanese are likely to buy, should they spot that one particular object of otaku desire. Not an impulse-buy, but the snapping of a trap set long ago, with great deliberation.
The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

The Japanese are great appreciators of what they call ’secret brands’, and in this too they share something with the British. There is a similar fascination with detail, with cataloguing, with distinguishing one thing from another. Both cultures are singularly adroit at re-conceptualising foreign product, at absorbing it and making it their own.

Why Japan, then? Because they live in the future, but neither yours nor mine, and somehow make it seem either interesting or comical or really interestingly dreadful. Because they are capable of naming an après-sport drink Your Water. Because they build museum-grade reproductions of the MA-1 flight jacket that require prospective owners to be on waiting lists for several years before one even has a chance of possibly, one day, owning the jacket.

Because they can say to you, with absolute seriousness, believing that it means something, ‘I like your lifestyle!’

Because they are Japanese, and you are British, and I am American (or possibly Canadian, by this point).

And I like both your lifestyles.

Enjoy one another!

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Shopping with precision and steeped in style, a typical teen shows why lords of commerce follow young ladies

It’s 10:50 on a Friday morning, but in the frantic world of teenage trendiness, time is almost running out for Norie Ono. With a fistful of yen from her boyfriend’s account at the post office, where nearly all Japanese keep their savings, Norie starts her search for a new face at a sunglasses rack in a crowded suburban shopping mall. What is she really looking for? What does Norie want?

At 17, entering her last year of high school and attached at the hip to her teenage boyfriend, Norie is the kind of girl who propels the fads that have swept across Japan and Asia. She fell for the Tamagotchi, the virtual pet that was once all the rage. She is addicted to her latest gadget, a sleek silver NTT DoCoMo cell phone; three of four Tokyo high-school girls own a mobile phone and spend an average of $100 a month to use it. She is absolutely gaga over Hello Kitty, the beribboned feline that’s popping up all over the region. Her vocabulary is heavily populated by the word kawaii. It means “cute” literally, but so much more than that figuratively. Something kawaii is infinitely desirable, something to make a young girl’s life complete. The Kawaii Culture is what has made girls like Norie–and Japan has 3 million of them between the ages of 15 and 18–pop-culture icons.

Their every whim and impulse-purchase is religiously observed and analyzed by the titans of advertising, marketing, fashion, publishing and the cute-little-gadgets industry. What does Norie want? That’s what everybody wants to know.

“It’s not how much they spend,” says Yoshiyuki Ogino, editor of a teen magazine called, naturally, Cawaii!, spelled with a “C” because the editor thought it was even more kawaii that way. “It’s that they all buy the same things. So if someone has a $10 product, they can sell lots of them.” He and his staff figured out in 1995, when the magazine started publishing, that the best way to sell copies to girls was to ask them what they want. The strategy worked: circulation is now 300,000. So every afternoon, dozens of teenagers stroll into his editorial offices to smoke, play videogames and chat with the editors. Some, like Norie, end up modeling makeup and clothes, because the magazine wants to feature regular girls in its pages, not pop stars or professional models. “We see 400 girls every month,” says Ogino, 39. “It’s a great way to do market research.” If an item is hot, like pagers–they’re called pocket bells in Japan–a manufacturer can get almost 100% market penetration, and fast. “If it is really powerful, it can take less than a week,” says Ogino. Once 5% of the teen girl population takes a liking to something, he says, 60% will join the bandwagon within a month. A few weeks later, everybody will be on board. The hard part is predicting what the famously fickle teenage girls will next anoint as kawaii.

Miyuki Miyagi, the teenage-girl expert–and thus perhaps the most valuable employee–at Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising agency, uses the pocket bell as an example. “These fads become a boom despite the intent of the manufacturers,” says Miyagi, who is in her 30s. “The pagers were supposed to be for emergencies.” Who knew girls would find them fun, indispensable, cute? “These girls come up with new ways of using products, totally separate from what the manufacturers intended.” Sure, Hello Kitty was meant to be a cute mass-merchandise image, and Tamagotchis were meant to be addictive toys. “But when people try to push an idea they think will be a hit, they usually fail,” Miyagi says. For example, fashion designers thought tailored suits would catch on with girls this past winter. “I asked the girls what color they liked,” says Ogino. Their response? Suits were decidedly non-kawaii. “These trends don’t usually get created,” says Miyagi. “They just happen.”

In the early 1990s, collegiate women were the arbiters of taste. Now, it’s high school girls. Some researchers think the age of influence will continue to decline, to junior-high-age girls. Which means Norie’s moment as a fashion arbiter could be fleeting. With boyfriend Shinichi Okubo at her side, Norie stops at a small shop selling sunglasses in a busy shopping mall. She tries on a pair. “Don’t you think the blue ones look cute?” she asks Shinichi. “They make your eyebrows look black,” he replies. Norie puts them aside. She moves on to a canary-yellow backpack. “Isn’t it cute?” Shinichi nods non-committally without saying anything. Norie puts it back on the shelf. The high school seniors, both 17, walk out hand in hand. From the back, it’s hard to tell one from the other, as both sport manes of shoulder length hair with frosted highlights, and Norie’s black suede platform boots elevate her to Shinichi’s height.

Norie wants new shoes, so she and Shinichi take their search to a shoe store. Norie asks the clerk which is better: sandals with chunky high heels or cork platforms? The clerk doesn’t know. Norie whips out her cell phone. “Akira,” she says to her friend on the other end of the phone, “which goes better with bell bottoms, sandals with heels or without?” There’s brief pause. Akira likes the heels. Norie tries on two pairs, can’t make up her mind and leaves. Thirteen minutes later, they’re back in the shoe store. She tries on the sandals with the chunky heel. Shinichi kneels down beside her to consult with her. She tries on a pair with cork platform soles. Then she tries sandals made with white khaki material. “Off white,” she announces. “Kawaii!” Roughly $75 later, Norie walks out with the shoes that will make her happy: the sandals with the chunky heels.

They move on to a boutique called The Love Boat, which sells accessories like seashell bracelets and beads. It’s the latest rage among Japan’s teens, a new fashion that combines cruise wear, Aloha casual, hippie counter-culture and, with an emphasis on pastels, the cute quotient girls crave. Norie now sports the kogyaru look–it translates roughly as “young trendy woman.” The fashion statement of the moment for kogyaru is the antithesis of anything naturally Japanese: hair streaked with gray, skin tanned to a deep shade of caramel, silver-speckled eye shadow, frosted lips with sparkles of silver, mini-skirts or bell-bottom jeans, high-heeled suede boots, a knee-length wool coat and a tiny Louis Vuitton backpack that holds a pink compact case decorated with Hello Kitty. But that look has been popular for, oh, several months now, an eternity in a culture where fashion winds shift with the blink of a blue-mascaraed eyelash.

Norie confides she has already decided to change her attire because too many other girls wear the same fashion armor. “I want to be different,” she says. She tries on some lipstick endorsed by pop sensation Namie Amuro. “Now selling well,” the advertising poster reads. Norie stops, inspects the lipstick tubes but moves on without buying any. She and Shinichi stop at McDonald’s for double cheeseburgers.

The two met in junior high school. They have been dating for two years, and Norie already wears two platinum bands (one from Cartier) given to her by Shinichi for her birthday on her left-hand ring finger. She intends to marry Shinichi, though not right away. “We don’t have any money,” she says. Shinichi works at a butcher shop; he is thinking of quitting high school. Norie recently started working part-time for the same butcher and earns about $675 a month. A week before her next monthly payday, she’s already out of cash. She spends a quarter of her income on dance lessons and dreams of going to New York to dance professionally. Her monthly phone bill is more than $80. She paid $67 to get her hair dyed with the streaks of gray. She spends $17 for an hour of tanning but doesn’t return as often as her friends do, two or three times a week, because her skin is a naturally darker tone. She lives at home with her parents, an older sister who is studying to be a nurse and a younger brother who has just entered high school, but she stayed the night at Shinichi’s house the night before they went shopping. Shinichi, whose parents are divorced, lives with his father, who Norie says doesn’t pay much attention to what he and Norie do.

At 7 p.m., Norie and her friend, 17-year-old Megumi, step into a purikura booth, a curtained stall where a camera pops and their picture is printed eight times on a sheet of stickers. They pay nearly $3.40 to take two sets of prints that are decorated with pink bubble borders; $2.50 to make prints that look as if they’re standing in a shower; $5 to make two sets featuring rainbows; and $3.40 to look as if they are in a rock band. “Kawaii!” Norie coos. She says she has “thousands” of purikura prints at home. Norie’s phone rings. It’s her mother. She wants Norie to bring home gyoza–dumplings–for dinner.

“I respect her very much,” Norie says. Her mother works at a computer design firm and, to make extra money, teaches lessons to computer students on weekends. Norie’s parents have separated but are not yet divorced. In a custom common to Japan, her father continues to live with the family, on the third floor of their home. But the children rarely see him. He doesn’t hold down a regular job, and works infrequently. Recently the family had a meeting and decided it was time for the father to move out. “We’re sick of watching him hang around doing nothing while my mother works so hard,” she says.

That isn’t the life Norie wants for herself. She thinks Shinichi will be a better husband than her father. But she’s envious of her older sister, who has chosen a vocation, nursing, and seems to know what she wants to do. Norie hasn’t figured out her life. She is still looking. She knows one thing, though: that her look, the currently popular kogyaru, has nearly run its course. “The kogyaru boom is over,” confirms Akiko Togawa, a director at Dentsu Group’s marketing arm. “I don’t think we’ll see many girls with tanned faces and wearing camisoles this coming summer. The straight-and-serious look is spreading now.” On the doorstep of adulthood, Norie finds her acquired identity to be wearing thin. “Ash brown,” she says, explaining the hue she has decided on for her hair once the gray streaks grow out. “Like gaijin. But not tea hair,” she insists, distinguishing “ash brown” from the reddish-brown hair that was popular a few years back.

Norie fusses with samples of foundation makeup in a department store. She smears some onto one cheek. Too dark. She wrinkles her nose. The second sample doesn’t look right, either. The saleswoman at the cosmetics counter cleans Norie’s face with a tissue and applies another tone. She turns to her friend Megumi, who shrugs. For the next 65 minutes, Norie fingers makeup boxes, dabs lip gloss and gazes at her tanned complexion in the mirror, searching for a new face that will give her a new identity.

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While paedophilia causes growing hysteria in the west, the Japanese, even in public, read comic books featuring schoolgirls in pornographic poses. Does it make any difference that its just ink and paper?

A visitor to Japan might be surprised to see a grown man sitting on the train flicking through a comic hook the size of a telephone directory. The visitor might be more surprised still to glance across and see violent pornographic scenes depicting young girls. Scenarios include rape, incest and murder. The girl is usually submissive, innocent and weak, and the man a bully. If the female character isnt actually wearing school uniform, she will look young: tiny nose, big wide eyes, long eyelashes — features designed to show her innocence. This is Loli-con (Lolita complex) porn and is a small but significant section of Japans manga (comic book) output.

There is a type of manga for every demographic group in Japan. In most, stories tell of adventure and romance. They can have emotional depth and a strong moral message, often to do with the importance of individual responsibility. The schoolgirl is a major archetype of manga stories, and part of its tradition. In comics written for young girls, she is an aspirational figure, perhaps fulfilling her dream of becoming a ballerina, perhaps discovering that she has secret powers to save the world. To some extent, the pornographic manga takes characters that already exist and makes them into fantasies for men. Perhaps the surprising thing, to the westerner, isnt that this stuff exists — the school uniform is a turn-on the world over, after all — but that the guy reading it doesnt seem remotely embarrassed to be doing so in public. There are protesters, but generally the fetishisation of the schoolgirl seems to be acknowledged and tolerated, or at least put up with, in Japan.

A man in Tokyo can go to a sex parlour and live out schoolgirl/teacher fantasies in a room made to look like a classroom or a gym. He can chat to young girls in telephone clubs. Men can even purchase the unwashed underwear of teenage girls (though the prevalence of this tends to be exaggerated in the western media).

Perhaps, in a society where women are gradually gaining more power and freedom, men are running scared — turning to images of younger and less threatening girls.

Yet it is not always fantasy, and it is not all new. In real schools, it is not uncommon for male teachers to enter into sexual relationships with girls, and this has been so for a long time. In the past, it wasnt unusual for a male teacher to marry his favourite pupil when she became old enough. Men will openly admit to fancying young girls in uniform and have no fear that their friends will call them perverts.

The boundaries are not clear. Despite the formality of many aspects of Japanese schools, they can be very touchy-feely places. When I taught in Japanese high schools, I was occasionally surprised to see a girl of 12 or 13 giving a male teacher a neck rub in the staff room. It may have been completely innocent, but to western eyes it seemed inappropriate.

In Japan, people are generally quite relaxed about nudity and children. Communal bathing is a part of Japanese culture and people are unselfconscious in front of one another (though at a mixed nude bathing spot youd be unlikely to see many young women). Western viewers of Hayao Miyazakis magical anime My Neighbour Totoro are often surprised and uncomfortable when watching the scene where the father takes a bath with his two daughters, aged 11 and four. We cant watch such a scene without an awareness of all the connotations of paedophilia. In Japan, sharing a bath with ones children is natural.

Culturally, much visual humour in Japan derives from nudity and bodily functions. One of Japans most popular TV anime programmes, Crayon Shin-chan, started out as a manga. The main character is a boy who speaks with sexual innuendo, gets up to vaguely lewd mischief and frequently drops his pants to flash at other characters. He is sometimes compared to Bart Simpson, but the humour is far more scatological than in The Simpsons, and Shin-chan is only five years old.

From a young age, boys are encouraged to be slightly etchi (mildly lecherous). In the UK, a small boy playing with himself at nursery school might warrant an uptight “George, dont do that” from his teacher. In Japan, hes more likely to be met with an indulgent smile. The lack of embarrassment regarding ones own sexuality carries through to teenage years and adulthood. In shonen manga (comics for teenage boys), there is nudity and some etchi behaviour, but in comics for girls of the same age, there is almost none. During the recent media storm over enjou kousai — a form of teenage prostitution where girls have sex with older men in return for expensive gifts rather than money — the spotlight was mostly on the girls. People wanted to know what was so wrong with society that a girl would sell herself for a Louis Vuitton purse. Less was said about the men.

Does anyone get hurt by Loli-con fantasies that are only drawn in pencil? Most schoolgirls in Japan will have had an experience with a chikan, a groper or flasher on the train or lurking on the edge of a lonely road, but so will many adult women. Schoolgirls are probably considered easy targets because theyre thought less likely to complain and make a fuss. But Japanese politicians are keen to point out that statistics show a far lower level of reported rape and child sex abuse in Japan than in most western countries.

The link between comics and paedophile crime has been made, however. Most notorious was the case of Tsutomu Miyazaki in 1989.

Convicted of murdering four pre-teen girls, his home was found to be full of disturbing manga, anime and slasher films. He tormented the parents of his victims with letters signed using a pseudonym — the name of an anime character. The murders caused a moral outrage at the time and much debate as to whether manga and anime could cause someone to commit such crimes. Parents called for laws to protect children from the sexual images in manga.

However, the focus of attention moved to the slasher films he had watched, and away from comics and cartoons.

As we are finding in the UK, the whole subject of paedophilia is both complicated and ambiguous. A person who looks at photographic child pornography is considered guilty because a child was abused in order for the picture to be made. The point at which a crime against a child is being committed isnt always clear, and this is true with Loli-con manga. While some of them depict girls who are very clearly supposed to be young children, often the girls actual age is unclear. She is young and wide-eyed as a small child, yet with breasts that would be large for an adult Japanese woman, never mind a schoolgirl. Shes an odd conglomerate fantasy creature, The manga schoolgirl is made out of ink and paper, but does that mean no one gets hurt in the making of it?

The Japanese man who wants to buy this material can find it in a convenience store, packaged in plastic, or if he prefers an element of privacy, from a vending machine. Even the man who reads a pornographic manga on the train will often leave it on the rack when he reaches his station. He may be unashamed to read of rape and child abuse in front of his fellow passengers, but he does, after all, know not to take it home to his wife and children.

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What can you say about a high-powered exec with an Elmo charm on his cell phone? He gets it.

Over the last year and a half, the Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways spent upwards of a million dollars in licensing fees and paint to decorate the exterior of three Boeing 747s with colorful, 20-foot-high Pocket Monsters from Pokémon, the Nintendo Game Boy phenomenon-slash-hit cartoon-slash-just released Warner Bros. movie-slash-merchandising blitz. The assumption is that Japanese men and women will line up for the opportunity to ride a jet whose fuselage, headrests, and beverage cups are decorated with the adorable yellow whatever-he-is, Pikachu.

To anyone who knows Japan, the assumption seems apt. There, the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force. The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up to save money with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), to have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey, a condom stretched over his body, entreating, “Would you protect me?”).

They see backhoes painted to look like giraffes and police kiosks fixed up like gingerbread houses. Each of Japan’s 47 prefectures has its own adorable mascot, as do the Tokyo police and the government television station. Home-run-swatting ball players are handed a plush stuffed animal when they cross the plate. Well-heeled city women are dropping yen by the millions on a Kansai Yamamoto couture line called Super Hello Kitty. Teenage boys tattoo themselves with Badtz-Maru, the Sanrio company’s mischievous, lumpy-headed penguin. Salarymen otherwise indistinguishable with their gray suits and cigarettes buy novelty cell phone straps adorned with plastic charms of their favorite cute characters: Thunder Bunny, Cookie Monster, Doraemon the robot cat. Cute is everywhere. They’re soaking in it.

At the intersection of Japan’s consumer-electronics powerhouses and its character-goods industry lie the rare examples of global cute - billion-dollar sellers like Tamagotchi and Pokémon, which combine appealing aesthetics with an addictive computer-game experience. Though in Japan you may be able to convince high-functioning, self-respecting adults that they can’t live without a toaster that browns an image of Barbapapa into their morning slice or that a Hello Kitty wedding is a swell idea, in the rest of the world, thus far, it takes a high tech hook.

This may change. Fueled by Internet subcultures, ecommerce (Hello Kitty alone has hundreds of entries on eBay), and the globalization of large corporations like Sanrio, cute is making planetary inroads. Hello Kitty and other Sanrio perennials are selling briskly in more than 30 countries, including Argentina, Bahrain, and Taiwan, where a recent merchandising tie-in with McDonald’s caused scuffles among diners waiting in line to buy Hello Kitty plush toys. A Nintendo press release titled “It’s a Pokémon Planet” informs us that worldwide revenues from the computer game and its merchandising peripherals are closing in on $5 billion - thanks in no small part to the Internet. US fans regularly visit Japanese Pokémon Web sites to download new Pocket Monsters, which typically appear Stateside a year after they debut in Japan.

The maiden voyage of ANA flight 007 leaves for Tokyo from San Francisco International Airport in one hour. On board the plane, a half-hour delay is atoned for with free terry-cloth Pikachu beanie-stuffies. The Japanese man in the seat beside me, who does something involving industrial drill bits, has unwrapped his Pikachu and set it in his lap, so it appears to be resting contentedly on his balls. From my seat I look out a window situated within the giant Pikachu that wraps around the plane’s nose. If you stood on the tarmac and looked up, it would appear as though I am inside the giant cute thing. That - kind of - is the plan.

The Japanese word for cute is kawaii. You often hear it spoken alone, a sentence and a sentiment unto itself. I heard it first in a Tokyo train station in a small shop devoted almost entirely to a penguin named Pingu, a superstar of cute who began life as a Swiss clay animated figure and in Japan exploded into a diversified line that includes pens, washcloths, and toilet-paper covers.
“Kawaiiiiiiii!” The sound came from a girl of perhaps 14, a plaintive, drawn-out keening, equal parts joy (”Look how cute!”) and desire (”I want him!”). Minutes later, I heard it again, from a twentysomething OL (”office lady,” a uniformed corporate secretary/beverage server). This time it was more of a low groan, as though the longing to possess was causing a tangible ache.

The Japanese teen magazine CREA called kawaii “the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese.”

According to Sharon Kinsella, a Cambridge University researcher who has written on the subject, the cute craze began around 1970, when a fad for writing notes and letters in rounded, childish characters began to catch on among teenage Japanese girls. Scholars who studied the phenomenon dubbed it Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting. Kids called it burikko-ji, translated as “kitten-writing” or “fake-child writing.” At one point in the mid-’80s, some 55 percent of 12- to 18-year-old girls were using it.

Magazines, ads, even computer software picked up the style, which soon broadened into a general fashion for talking, dressing, and acting like a child, a practice that spawned a new verb: burikko suru, “to fake-child-it.”

Sanrio’s Hello Kitty character, which first appeared on accessories for kitten-writing, has grown into a 50-creature line of in-house characters and goods grossing more than $1 billion a year from sales and licensing. Though the company faces competition from firms that crank out Japanese goods bearing foreign cutesters (Mickey, Pingu, the Teletubbies) and from a handful of smaller character-design houses like San-X and Super Planning Company, it continues to hold its place as top dog in the empire of cute.
The most obvious appeal of cute to the Japanese is, in large part, the appeal of childhood. “There seems to be this feeling of always wanting to be at that level, of never wanting to move on, to grow up and leave it behind,” says Yuuko Yamaguchi, assistant general manager of Sanrio’s character-design department. Small wonder. Japanese adulthood is, perhaps more so than in most cultures, a time of onerous responsibility and pressure to conform.

“Childhood, in Japan, is a time when you were given indulgences of all kinds - mostly by your mother, but by society too,” says Boston University anthropology professor Merry White, author of The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America. “We in the US are said to be a youth society, but what we really are is an adolescence society. That’s what everyone wants to go back to. In Japan, it’s childhood, mother, home that is yearned for, not the wildness of youth.”

Japanese men, on whom the pressure is strongest, also feel the cuteness tug. Takeshi Ochi, vice president of planning, products, and licensing at Sony Creative Products in Tokyo, spoke of the tendency of Japanese men to suffer from Peter Pan syndrome and referred to the common practice among businessmen of reading manga on the subway. There is, he told me, a common Japlish expression for arrested-development grown-ups: adaluto chiluduren. Ochi did not exclude himself from this category, and made no attempt to hide the Elmo on his cell phone strap or his passion for the national broadcasting company’s new fuzzy TV-head character, Mr. Hi!
Some Japanese men are drawn more to the typical owner of cute merchandise than to the merchandise itself. The cuteness of a giggling girl clad in a Hello Kitty jumper isn’t entirely innocent. It ties in to what is well known in Japan as Lolicom, the Lolita complex. The phenomenon of the little girl as sexual object abounds in Tokyo: Vending machines sell schoolgirls’ used panties, which the girls sell to middlemen. “Image bars” specialize in escorts dressed in school uniforms. Telephone clubs feature bored adolescent girls earning spending money by talking dirty. Sex shops sell a porn magazine called Anatomical Illustrations of Junior High School Girls.

The cute characters themselves often display elements of passivity and little-girl helplessness. They frequently lack a mouth, for example, and have tiny, rounded stumps for limbs. According to Sharon Kinsella, the connotative meanings of kawaii include helplessness and vulnerability.

In Japan, even self-respecting adults will consider a Hello Kitty wedding. Now kawaii (cute) is making planetary inroads. At a Taiwan McDonald’s, scuffles broke out among diners buying Sanrio plush toys.

This is not to say that cute is an elaborate front for girlie porn - an estimated 90 percent of Tokyo’s character designers are women, so a lot of it is about cute for cute’s sake - but designers of cute seem to have an innate sense of the titillation factor. “It’s not just being cute.

There is something different - a relaxed look, powerless,” says Hikaru Suemasa, head designer at the Tokyo character-goods company San-X. Suemasa is the creator of Tarepanda (”droopy panda”), a genderless sandbag of a bear so weak that it cannot walk, but has to roll slowly from place to place (at 2.75 meters per hour, according to company literature).

“At first we worried because it doesn’t look like it’s alive,” Suemasa recalls. “But this turned out to be one of the elements that made it sell.” Earnings from Tarepanda will likely top $3 million by the end of the year. And one of San-X’s latest designs is a huddled, visibly quivering puppy with the slogan “Anoko dakewa nigatenano” (”That kid is hard to deal with”).

Cute appeals to product manufacturers as a form of window dressing for the uncute. Children’s prescription-drug bags and dentists’ offices usually have a cute character somewhere in evidence. Sanrio licensed rights to make Hello Kitty children’s fireproof evacuation gear and first-aid kits. In a similar vein, Hello Kitty miniwieners have the appealing little cat head branded into the casings. Cuting up the icky and the scary seems to work equally well with Japanese adults. I bought yogurt one day that had drawings on the label depicting adorable acidophilus-bacteria guys (in white) chasing evil, horned-but-still-adorable fecal germs (in black) out the end of a winding Chutes and Ladders colon.

Japanese companies will also resort to cuteness when they can’t otherwise gain an edge over the competition. This is perhaps the reason ANA painted Pocket Monsters on its 747s. ANA’s prices and service closely match those of Japan Airlines, and JAL has Mickey. Banks are another good example, because interest rates - in other countries a bank’s main selling point - are controlled by the Japanese government. “If there were a difference in rates, no one would go to a bank just because it has Snoopy on the bank statements,” says Takeshi Ochi of Sony Creative Products. Or maybe they would. When Taiwan’s Makoto Bank put Hello Kitty on its checkbooks and ATM cards, lines of new depositors outside the bank grew so long that other customers panicked, fearing the bank was about to fold.

Many of the stubby little figures that wind up megalicensed got their start not on the sketch pads of hired character designers but in the heads of Japanese anime artists. They come from comic books, television cartoons, animated films - art that appeals aesthetically to a broad demographic. All age groups in Japan watch anime.

Animated shows air not only on Saturday morning but also during prime time. The appetite for manga also spans generations. Tokyo bookstores typically have three separate sections for manga: men’s (sex and violence), women’s (romance and sex), and children’s.
While the normal life span of a designer-drafted Sanrio or San-X character runs only a few years - 15 or so core characters have hung on much longer than average - some anime-spawned characters endure for decades. Hayao Miyazaki’s animated classic My Neighbor Totoro came out 12 years ago, but the character Totoro still appears in character-goods shops, adorning chopstick cases and socks. In some cases, the character endures because its TV show endures.

Doraemon has been a weekly cartoon since the days of black-and-white TV. Loopy superhero Anpanman, so named for the breakfast bun that is his head, stars in a children’s cartoon that counts hundreds of episodes. Though Pokémon began as a Game Boy title, it was the weekly TV cartoon that powered its hydraulic surge in popularity. Even the mighty Hello Kitty was juiced by recent appearances on the popular Tokyo TV series The Love Generation.

Sanrio Company Ltd. occupies the top nine floors of an uncute office tower five minutes from the Osaki train station in central Tokyo. Things don’t start to get cute until the 18th floor, where the design department is. To get to their desks, Sanrio’s staff designers must walk through “Kitty’s Room,” a mock-up of a studio apartment furnished with Hello Kitty appliances, foods, and toiletries - almost all of them pink.

At the moment, Kitty’s Room is sublet to a pair of live, caged hamsters. These arrived last year, when hamsters were very big. After hamsters came butterflies; next year dragons and possibly fish will be big again. Character designers follow trends in movies, fashions, news events. Tarepanda, for instance, came after the Tokyo Zoo’s panda acquisition brought on a nationwide craze a couple years back.

Each of Sanrio’s 50 staff artists is expected to come up with one or two new characters per year. Odds are they won’t be used, though, for only a couple of new product lines are introduced each season. Designers spend the bulk of their time making products to showcase existing characters. With the exception of some of the original sketches and drawings, almost all of this work is done on computers - Apple G3s. Designers sit at desks, not drafting tables. At all three of the biggest firms I visited - Sanrio, Sony Creative Products, and San-X - the look is that of a (cluttered) high tech office, not a design studio.

“Six hundred new items go out the door every month,” Doug Parkes, a manager in Sanrio’s international-licensing department, told me. About two-thirds of Sanrio’s profit comes from the products it designs and then subcontracts to a factory to produce (Sanrio owns no manufacturing plants). The remaining third comes from royalties paid by licensees who manufacture their own products with Sanrio characters on them. The design staff also spends time working with licensees. As Parkes puts it, “They may know how to build a bicycle, but they have no idea how to put Hello Kitty on it

Sanrio’s main competitors in the Japanese character industry - Walt Disney Enterprises Japan and Sony Creative Products - differ from Sanrio in that they don’t design their own characters, but rather act as brokers for existing imps, managing the licensing of dozens of US and European characters. Sony Creative handles Sesame Street’s denizens (who enjoy phenomenal popularity among Japanese adults), Pingu, Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit, and Thunder Bunny and other characters by New York illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat, as well as a couple of domestic designs - most notably (for now, anyway) Sony’s Momo the PostPet.

Momo the PostPet - a sort of hypercute version of the Eudora rooster - is the first Net-spawned character success story.

The naughty-sweet pink bear - a sort of hypercute version of the Eudora rooster - is the first Internet-spawned character-licensing success story. He has of late made the leap to fax memos, mousepads, and, of course, cell phone straps. Sanrio used to handle Japanese licensing of Betty Boop and the Pink Panther, among others, and if Hello Kitty hadn’t proved to be the juggernaut she is, no doubt Sanrio would have continued doing so.

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