Useless announcements are not, of course, unique to Japan. In New York City, public-address systems in the subway urge commuters not to make trains late by holding the doors open; taxis broadcast recorded warnings, spoken by celebrities, to fasten your seat belt and not to forget your belongings when getting in or out-something that even Tokyo's cabs haven't got around to doing. Nevertheless, the noise pollution in the West and in Southeast Asian countries (so far) is mostly limited to public transit – one would rarely expect to hear loud announcements on every escalator, in gardens, parks, and churches. And repeated not once but endlessly. In Japan, it's a case of excess, of announcements carried far beyond a reasonable limit. And uncontrollable excess is the defining quality of Japan's modern cultural crisis.
In a famous haiku, Basho wrote, «Silence / Into the rocks seep the voices of cicada.» Today, there would be no place for Basho to be alone with his thoughts, for seeping into the rocks would be an announcement from a chartered police-department Cessna overhead: «Let's remember to fasten our seat belts. When crossing the road, let's look left and right. This is Such-and-Such Police Department.» The writer Fukuda Kiichiro points out that public agencies spend tax money to broadcast this sort of message because they have misunderstood the concept of «public service.» Staffed with amakudari officials who have no idea how to benefit the public in any real way, agencies dream up these announcements so that «in the end it's a burlesque comedy put on by agencies such as the Transportation Safety Association as an alibi so they can say, 'Look! We're doing something!' » Another unstoppable tank of officialdom goes rumbling over the landscape. The same spirit of total dedication that has buried Japan's rivers takes over.
This, however, explains only the announcers, not the audience. The key question is why the Japanese public accepts and even craves all these commands and warnings. Fukuda writes:
One could say that social control in Japan has come to invade the private realm to an extreme degree. Of course «control» does not take place if we have only people who want to control. It's a necessary condition to also have a majority of people who wish to be controlled. It's the same mechanism that sociologists call «voluntary subjugation.» That is, people who wish to be controlled struggle to bring about control over themselves. It's related to the fact that chddren in high schools and students in universities never tire of having their teachers advise them what to do. Japanese college students are not adults who bear rights and responsibilities – they should all be called «children.»
The operative word in the above paragraph is «children.» Apart from the addiction to sound effects, the most remarkable aspect of Japan's public announcements is their sheer childishness. The level of nonsense in what Fukuda calls the Kindergarten State can strain credibility. Buses at Itami City urge riders to use soap. At Hayama, a beach south of Tokyo, a recorded voice tells bus passengers, «If you have come from a long way, please rest before entering the sea. If you are drowning, please shout for help.»
The long and the short of it is that Japan s postwar educational system is turning the Japanese into children. That the air everywhere rings with warnings of «Danger!» «Hazardous!» cries out for psychological study-it certainly gives insight into people's timidity in stepping out of line. Commentators in Japan have discussed the problem of this infantilization at length; the social critic Fukuda Kazuya wrote a book entitled Why Have the Japanese Become Such Infants? The effects of infantilization on Japan's modern culture are far-reaching. As we have seen, manga comics now account for nearly half of Japan's publishing business. The old words that defined Japanese culture – such as wabi (rough natural materials) or shibui (subdued elegance) – have been replaced by a new concept: kawaii (cute). Japan is awash in a sea of cute comic froggies, kitties, doggies, and bunnies with big, round, babyish eyes.
The big eyes are a favorite with young girls – the determining audience for modern Japanese design. One magazine editor claims that «the limit on eye size comes when they get so big the shape of the face is distorted.» You can hardly buy a household object – a bar of soap, a pencil, a blanket, a trash can, an electric fan, or a stereo set – without a big-eyed baby face printed somewhere on it. Gone are the days when the sleek Walkman defined Japanese industrial style. Today, while American and Taiwanese computer makers sweep the world with innovative and elegant designs, the main thrust in Japan is toasters in the shape of Hello Kitty.
The educational system has the effect, as Dr. Miyamoto has noted, of freezing children's emotional development at the level before they need to take adult responsibility for their lives; after decades of such a system, the end result is a massive national nostalgia for childhood. Comments Merry White, the 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 adolescent 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.»
In this there is a sobering reminder for those who expect that the new Japanese youth are going to cast off the trammels and bring revolutionary change to their country. If wild hairdos and tattoos meant wild and liberated people, then perhaps there might be some hope. But wild is not what it's about; it's about becoming a baby again.
If one were to look for the chief influence of Japanese modern culture on the outside world, it would definitely be in toys, games, comics, and fashion for children. In the United States and Europe, Japanese products such as Hello Kitty and Pokemon have been huge hits, but they appeal abroad almost exclusively to boys younger than twelve and girls younger than fifteen. As they mature, adolescent boys turn from Pokemon to games created by Americans and British designers, such as Myst or Doom, girls set aside Hello Kitty and start reading Seventeen or Elle. The same is true of anime (animated films), very few of which appeal to adults as did Disney's The Prince of Egypt; most series, such as Dragonball Z, beloved of nine-year-old boys, and Sailor Moon, a favorite of ten-to-fourteen-year-old girls, appeal to preadolescents.
It's a very different story inside Japan. Cute creations like Pokemon are targeted largely at adults, and the manufacturers of cute are among the few Japanese companies whose domestic profits actually grew during the 1990s stagnation. Sanrio, the maker of the Hello Kitty line (now expanded to more than fifty cute characters), grosses more than $1 billion a year through sales and licensing. Since the 1980s, animated films have taken first and second position in domestic cinemas almost every year, leaving films with real-life adult actors dead at the box office. Today, about half of all domestic film revenues come from anime.
The conquest of cute happened slowly, taking about thirty years to sweep all before it. The first step was when cute toys of the 1970s became cult objects for adult women in the 1980s; the next step was when, as Japan sank into recession in the 1990s, young male wage earners developed a taste for big-eyed cuddly creatures, and by the end of the century the conquest was near-complete. In 1999, a stuffed doll called Tare Panda with a round face, droopy eyes, and a soft body swept Japan, selling $250 million worth that year alone; most of the buyers were adult men. Takemono Katsunori, a thirty-four-year-old company worker in Tokyo, enthused, «A mere glance at it makes me melt.»