Let's Look at Japan this Halloween (and forever after)!

I take some of the world's worst photographs and now I'm going to share them with you.  Japan is a wonderful place to look at and everyone interested should do so.  To help make this possible, I've started a terrible new photo blog on Tumblr and I call it "Let's Look at Japan!" 

The first few entries will celebrate Halloween in Japan with a lot of shots from our recent visit to USJ in Osaka (if you've never been, I highly recommend you go during October), but after that I'll be posting whatever catches my eye.  And I'll share some of it here instead of just commenting on Japan Today stories the way I've been doing lately.  Although I'll do that, too.

Here's a sample of the kind of visual torture you can expect (I don't mean what's in the image... these three characters are adorable and I love their Halloween costumes... I mean my crappy photog skills):

It's not just Hello Kitty: Japan's character craze

It's not just Hello Kitty: Japan's character craze

Well, I like 'em.  People tend to love their cute characters here and there are some artists who really know how to bring it.  The cute, that is. 

Hello Kitty, or Kitty White if you prefer, is the undisputed Empress of Kawaii.  I never imagined when a Sanrio shop opened in the mall in my hometown I'd ever learn to love Kitty.  Eventually, I had to surrender to her charms.  I blame a close friend who spent the happiest portion of her professional art life working for the company and handling their North American website.  If you sent a Hello Kitty themed e-card during the 2000s, chances are she created it.  She even did some of their product design.  She has internalized kawaii and I've picked up an appreciation of it from her, I suppose.  Also some stationery.

Our local cute character is a version of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a person I think is a bizarre choice for kawaii-ification, but the kids are really into his round head.  We call him Ieyasu-kun.  Kumamon is a particular favorite of mine.  I find the simple design very appealing.  Funashi is freaky fun.  There are even Funashi impersonators on TV from time to time.  That's impact.

More fuel for my love for these cute characters comes from having designed hundreds or even thousands of characters in my life, and not having a single one of them gain any sort of popularity.  Not even within my circle of friends.  To do something that gains broad popularity takes talent and skill that has eluded me.  But I recognize it in others and bow to their winning ways!

Ceci n'est pas une chat: Hello Kitty not a cat, has never been: Sanrio

Hello Kitty not a cat, has never been: Sanrio

I find it bizarre the way this concept has been stretched and pretzeled the last couple of days.  It's not a difficult concept to understand, but I suppose that's what the Internet is for these days-- discovering some idea that should have been obvious all along and then acting incredulous about it. 

All Sanrio is saying is Kitty is not a cat in the sense that Mickey is not a mouse and Goofy is not a dog.  They wear these familiar animal shapes not because they're animals, but because animal shapes are appealing, the visual vocabulary of cute cartoony works.  Kitty is an anthropomorphic character and we've had those for as long as we've had pop culture.  Way back when I was a kid, thousands of years before your grandparents were even introduced via OK Cupid, Aesop did this kind of thing all the time, using animals to illustrate human foibles.  I don't remember any of us running around screaming, "Oh my god, a lazy cricket and an industrious ant!  A fox who sneers at the grapes he can't reach!  I've been lied to!"  Eventually, our animal-shaped avatars began wearing clothes and selling merchandise but they've always been us.

Ultimately, what Kitty is... is her own unique self.

A good friend of mine was Sanrio's North American web designer for years so this is big news for her, but only because she also doesn't get the furor over something that should have been obvious all along and really isn't difficult to understand at all.  Still, I'm pretty sure she's happy so many people are talking about Hello Kitty.

Sometimes you're just in the mood to ride a Hello Kitty bus

I think this was in Shinjuku.  It was last year.  The bus dazzled my eyes and did something to my mind.