McSOUL

"A Tokyo subsidiary of Hello Kitty maker Sanrio, Kokoro -- which means heart or mind in Japanese -- has also produced advanced talking, life-size humanoids.

'Robots have hearts,' said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota.

'They don't look human unless we put souls in them.

'When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That's when we know our work is done.'

So even the soul is getting dumbed down. Seems they have pallets of souls in the parts department. Somehow it comes as no surprise that this is a Hello Kitty subsidiary...

THIS COULD BE THE START OF SOMETHIN' WEIRD

Hey, I love cute as much as the next guy. Well, maybe not THAT guy, he's registered, but you know what I mean. Cute has its place. Mainly in little kids, teddy bears, baby animals, tiny birdies and - in a tempered way - rational young men and women of higher school age. Cute is fine and good as long as it doesn't become manic, or malignant, or require exorcism. This seems as though it might be all three.

Internationally speaking, things could hardly get any weirder right now, but Japan is going to give it a try, in the ancient Japanese tradition of East-meets-Westness. There's no danger of things getting any shallower.

I doubt if there's a country in the world that hasn't had an ambassadorial embarrassment now and then - to say nothing of electoral disaster - but I don't recall any country actually risking so much on the face of it, other than when Japan tried Doraemon as its anime ambassador at about this time last year, or when a couple months later Hello Kitty gave it a treacly try, efforts that cutely vortexed into ambassadorial black holes from which no later information escaped, a blessing of sorts.

But now, in a continuing advance into whichever cultural depression we're entering at the moment, the Land of the [insert desired verb here] Sun is sending out as its envoys of cuteness three young women who patently do not wish to be other than obsessively formuletically derivativo-permutations of notness regarding whoever they actually are, or might once have been going to be... this gets confusing... Is, like, really cute Japan going, like, anywhere cute?

"We want people abroad to know these kinds of people exist in Japan and to feel close to them."

Damn. I'm beginning to feel cute again. I thought I was over that.

--Some thoughts on the shifting perception
of female beauty in Japanese art
(w/thanks to Delwyn)

AMBASSADORIAL HIGHLIGHTS

Recently, Japan as an anciently cultured nation has been taking firm steps forward onto the world stage, having named Doraemon its anime ambassador; now they've gone even further, and are teetering above the orchestra pit.

The monoexpressive Hello Kitty, who got her start on a plastic coin purse back in 1974 and brought the blissfully Hello-Kittyless world to a screeching halt, will soon be named the nation's newest Tourism Ambassador, presumably so as to demonstrate to all the world whatever it is about Japan that is cutely monotonous.

As a result (in case you want to head for the wilderness a bit early), HK will be even more ubiquitous than the everywhere we once knew, though why beholding this emotionless countenance would inspire anyone to visit Japan is beyond my Kitty-weakened powers of understanding (HK has a kryptonite-like effect on certain areas of perception).

But there is a plus here: unlike the other noisemakers representing Japan (Ishihara et al.), HK is mouthless. An ambassador who can't say a single word has gotta be a plus.

Wonder if a life-sized Hello Kitty with biometric scanner nose will scan tourists' faces and take their full set of fingerprints at the airport...

THE FLAVOR OF SHAPE

Now and then, like a butterfly on Mt. Everest, I've touched briefly on this subject in these crude musings, but I've never been quite able to fully grasp, any more than the butterfly the mountain, the fact that so much of Japan's taste delight is a matter of form.

In the West, form plays an important role in gourmet and lesser categories of dining - at this point I cannot help but visualize a forthright wedge of cherry pie with a stalwart scoop of Rocky Road by its side - but beneath the swirls of foody sauce and herbs and whatnot there is a rainbow, a bright rainbow, of flavor and savor is there not, a scrumptiousness, a lusciousness, an exquisiteness that begets deep ooohs and ahhhhs and mmmmms, so the merely visual aspect of Western food (consisting of something like "Boy, does that hot dog look good!") is ballpark maybe 10-15% of the overall experience wouldn't you say? Sorry to ask while your mouth is full...

Anyway, in Japanese cuisine it seems to me that the visual/taste ratio must at times be as much as 70-80%... Subtlety is the thing here, such subtlety as to at first be often indiscernible by the alien tongue, as for example when the newbie first tastes udon, or is dining with natives who are ecstasizing over the deliciousness of the plain white rice they're eagerly devouring, when to the newbie plain white rice has even less taste than white bread, though slightly more taste than air. Most Japanese simply LOVE white rice and cannot live without it. No matter how long I live here, though, I will never love white rice. I find it a pleasant, often essential accompaniment to a Japanese meal, but an accompaniment, not the star feature, nowhere near food hollywood.

This is all purely cultural of course, and as close as I'll ever get to straddling the gap where I had hoped there would one day be a bridge, but I just can't get my mind around the fact that, for example, someone in the office returns from a vacation trip to a locale famed for its, say, pagoda, and for family and office workers brings back treats in the shape of a -- pagoda, formed of rice or wheat flour baked in a mold and filled with white or brown sweet bean paste about the consistency of soft chalk, and everyone oohs and ahhs over the deliciousness of it, every time. True, it is tasty, mostly with curiosity, the first time or even the first two times...

Then another colleague comes back from a trip to another place, this one famed for its lanterns, or its birds, or its roof tiles, and brings back treats for everyone, created right there in the visited locale, made in the shape of a -- lantern, a bird, or a roof tile, all laid out in a nice box for tasty travel souvenirs, all baked in a mold and filled with white or brown sweet bean paste as above, with a shelf life of about 10 years, and everyone oohs and ahhs over the deliciousness of it, every time.

But for me, long before the 150th time, a series of little mental bubble-clouds pop up, asking: do I like the taste of the shape of a bird better than the taste of the shape of a lantern? Can I taste the difference between shapes? What does shape taste like, anyway? Is it a Japanese taste? Can Americans taste shape if they live long enough in Japan? It seems not... Though it does my heart good to see Hello Kitty fried...

After hundreds of these food objects (I have a desk drawer full of these things, they make great paperweights), I just don't get it. I always begin to wonder: isn't anybody asking for maybe a change? Maybe a little chocolate inside, or strawberry jam or, oh, anything? For a change? Hello? This isn't the first time I've asked.

I know I'm missing something here as the outsider, but no matter where I look, I just can't find it, because it's outside me, a guy who grew up with jelly (raspberry, strawberry etc.)/chocolate/cream donuts, as just one example, in a land like a cultural carnival where every foody souvenir is really different, and generally eaten on the spot, like the coconut creme pie at that little roadside restaurant in Vermont in 1971... I don't remember the taste of the shape, but I'll never forget the taste of the pie.

Photos via

IT'S OFFICIAL...

Hello Kitty is now a Shinto deity.

Spotted these Hello Kitty general-purpose omamori at Tarobo (one of Japan's top 10 most beautiful shrines, especially on a day like yesterday; will post of it anon) and they were selling like treacle-covered hotcakes for about twice the price of omamori bearing the conventional blessings of the standard old gods of no brand name, who never made it in show biz or hung around Cameron Diaz...

As I took some pictures in light of my disbelief, one of the shrine clerks said Look! The foreigner is taking pictures of the Hello Kitty omamori! (No one takes pictures of such everyday items as omamori.) Another clerk responded Of course! Because Hello Kitty is so cute! Little did they know my true reason or my opinion of Hello Kitty, the embodiment of cuteness as vapor in a desert. To say nothing of sacrosanctity.

Is nothing sacred? I mean is everything sacred? Sure, you could say, after a few hits of whatever, that everything is sacred, but... EVERYTHING? Then nothing is. The older gods, with millennia of experience under their obi, must be very upset. Look for problems ahead in Japan-- big problems, of oddly indefinite origin, emanating - sort of - from a sacred mountain... If anything is sacred...

HELLO KITTY cat

You mean I'm not enough?

Though the dressing up of pets is certainly nothing new - the ancient Egyptians gave them golden earrings - sometimes you can't help but feel that manipulations of a certain kind may this time be going too far. Though that feeling certainly isn't new either.

By now, no doubt there are virtual cats serving as virtual pets for virtual people somewhere virtual; but here in what we are still generally pleased to call reality you have an actual cat being 'enhanced' (at considerable expense!) so as to vaguely resemble the generic figment of a purely brand-name creature that really doesn't have much in common with a genuine cat. Surely the cat is diminished thereby...?

Sometimes you have to wonder how these animals that have accepted being our pets look upon us two-legged, mostly hairless, mastercreatures... Is that a look of wistfulness in the cat's eyes, for the good old days when just being a cat was the most pleasant and fulfilling thing in life?

with thanks to who-sucks.com, where there are more refashioned cat photos...