Armageddon, Japan style

We met up in the morning with our nephew, Danny—an actor who keeps body and soul together by teaching and evening work as a waiter—and started out on another New York art day. A joy to see Danny, and have hom join us for a part of our tour. Our first stop was the Japan Society, and its extraordinary, deeply unsettling show on the otaku culture curated by one of its chief proponents, Takashi Murakami. I’ve never been a great fan of this phenomenon, which embraces everything from the cuteness of Hello Kitty to the monstrous charms of Godzilla and the high-speed slickness of anime film and television productions, and I guess I’m still not, but at least I’ve come to understand it a whole lot better as a result of seeing this show.

In case you haven’t read about it yet, Bush, you’ll find it not only at the Japan Society, but at locations all over New York. We encountered it first Sunday, on our return from Egypt, in the form of a big, green fiberglass elephant, its body patterned with images of cute little girls’ panties, installed at the south east corner of Central Park with a little baby green elephant at its side. It had attracted crowds of families with delighted small children, whose parents hoisted them to sit on the curve of its trunk for photos. The darker side of this presence—and of its evocation of the dark side of the child’s imagination—was subliminated in the general atmosphere of excitement and joy.

But the dark side is there, Bush. It’s there, most obviously, in the more military, violent manifestations of okatu—the heavily armored sci-fi vehicles and warriors, inheriting, as they surely do, from the samurai culture of Japan’s past, and their invincible, phallic, futuristic weaponry. And in the often quite overt sexuality of those cute little bishojo girl figures with their skimpy skirts and provocative postures and yuru chara stuffed animals. Even the culture’s insistence on its own “product” values strikes me as subliminally—and therefore intentionally—obscene.

It’s all about zappy, readily saleable items, from comic books to children’s toys, and what Murakami calls the “superflat” image—that is, as I understand it, an image without depth or substance. It’s all about surface appeal. It’s the context the curator establishes for this culture, though, that gives it the significance I myself had not fully realized until now. He calls the show “Little Boy”, a reference to that first American atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945 and by extension to the “Fat Man” that followed it. It’s also a reference to the infanitilism of the culture, not only its apparently innocent charm, but also its exploitation and perversion of the child’s imagination as a form of denial of the reality of that lasting nuclear trauma.

What makes this all of particular interest to me today, Bush, is its evocation, from a quite different perspective, of that same Armageddon much bandied about by your friends in the Christian evangelist movement--that vision of the violent destruction of the world. The difference, of course, is that the Japanese actually experienced a real version of it—-at our hands. The culture of otaku, as Murakami presents it to us, at once emerges from that event, and envisions its recurrence. One of its strategies is to imagine the monstrous, the mutant, the perverse. The other is to sublimate the fear into cuteness. Our homegrown end-of-the-world visionaries proceed not from real experience but from a moralistic base; the Armageddon they foretell is something they embrace as the fulfillment of God’s wrath against human depravity and his willful destruction of the whole rotten species-—with the exception of their good selves, who are destined to be saved.

For me-—and I consider myself a realist, Bush-—the Japanese vision, with all its superficiality and its deep inner despair, is far more compelling than the self-righteous and self-serving moralism of your evangelical friends. It has far more to tell us about our human predicament, our history, and our journey into the future.

I have more to tell you about our art day in New York, Bush. I think it will interest you. But we have a plane to catch, back to California. The rest will have to wait.