InLiquid Reviews - Little Boy at Japan Society, 2005

Takashi Murikami

Little Boy: The Arts of
Japan’s Exploding Subculture
at the Japan Society

April 8 - July 24, 2005

reviewed by
James Rosenthal

2005 is the 60th year since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs, and this exhibition looks at the long term cultural effects. Little Boy, the third part of curator Takashi Murikami’s Superflat trilogy, does this by searching the art and comics that come out of Japan rather than delving into it in an academic fashion. Suffice it to say, Armageddon and Science Fiction Fantasy abound. Obviously, Japan is the only country on Earth to have had two cities destroyed in this way and therefore has a unique relationship to things nuclear. This memory, and it may be that Westerners have their own role to deal with culturally, has turned it into a cultural currency that may underpin their collective unconscious or, at least, their popular culture.

The title of the exhibition, Little Boy, the code name for the Hiroshima bomb, gives some suggestion as to the fun or childlike aspects. The punning sub-title, Exploding Subculture, is a hint as to the secondary purpose. You might think this is heavy stuff, but Japanese culture has translated the nuclear angst into a creative drive similar to the way that Americans’ fear of the Reds in the fifties was translated into the alien invasion flicks. Though the Japanese had a real nightmare to ponder and internalize, they were also at a point where they had to completely reinvent themselves. Hence new myth and popular stories. This is where Godzilla comes from in 1954. This irradiated prehistoric creature seems to embody fears of the end of the world while simultaneously representing the destruction of the recent past. His destruction of Tokyo in the first film literally references the wartime bombings of that city. He proceeds to become a post- nuclear war icon.

But how does all this memory of devastation explain the Japanese penchant for animated creatures and several generations of Otaku (geeks) whose fascination is anime and manga? This is one of the questions raised by this exhibition that is never satisfactorily answered. Murakami uses a theory called “Superflat” to explain some of this. It refers specifically to the flatness of animation which has so much influence on new Japanese neo-pop, but one suspects that it represents an overall metaphor for the flattening of Japanese social structures and/or “exploding” subcultures.

Walking around the show is a little like visiting a toy shop or a movie studio. There are large collections of new and collectible creatures -- not exactly the same ones marketed to us -- and a vast array of intriguing illustrations which catalogue the long history of film monsters and tranformer-like superheroes and robots. I thought of my meager collection of Hello Kitty things and Pokemon figures stolen from my daughter. They are irresistible! But it is difficult to make the connection between these cute creatures and nuclear bombs. It occurred to me that I may qualify as Otaku myself, since I also have a collection of model ship kits (many of them Japanese) with great cover art. The classic box art paintings in the exhibition by Shigeru Komatsuzaki may not function as fine art by our definition but they certainly illustrate the theory. Especially since the war ambiance and detail pervades much of the newer anime film styles and content. Most works in the show are there for the purpose of describing the development of this phenomenon and, in the process, completely disregard the Western time-line of modern art. That is wholly refreshing but again doesn’t explain the nature of these obsessions.

I¹m not sure how our subcultural geeks differ from theirs. Ours may tend to grow up eventually. In Japan, Otaku is formalized and accepted in a big way. I see three main aspects; the “cute” thing, which includes numerous varieties of futuristic pets like Pokemon. The second, still cute, includes smiling nubile teen characters and is officially termed Lolicom because of the obvious Lolita-slant. Not sure where that comes from either. The third element is the Science Fiction/Fantasy thing which makes up an umbrella that includes everything else. This is packed with monsters and spaceships.

Another constant attribute running through Japanese subculture is the adapting of industrial age machines from two previous world wars. All these tropes are then interwoven. The cartoon film Space Battleship Yamato from 1977 is a perfect example of this. Resurrecting the sunken WW2 battleship to fight aliens is an excuse to merge time-periods and genres, and creates new myths out of old. This is exciting stuff and must surely get a rise out of deflated office workers. It also makes George Lucas’ big budget myths seem a little over-blown by comparison. This Japanese plateau of cultural blending may indicate what Murakami calls “Superflat,” a sort of building up culture from a “ground zero.”

A show called Last Exile, which has invaded this reviewer’s house, is another cool example. It is full of spaceships that resemble aircraft carriers and vintage tat-a-tat gunfire. The heroes are young animated girls and boys that fly around in hybrid flying machines with a quirky 1940s look. This combination of time-genres reminds me of the late ‘80s/’90s filmic tendency that mixed historic periods. Melded without explication is present day stuff, the past, and the future. The first film I remember doing this was Terry Gilliam’s Brazil from 1985, but Blade Runner (1980) mixed SF with the Hard Boiled Detective genre. Does this phenomenon have a name? It continues in current children’s films like Harry Potter, Stewart Little, and the Borrowers which are full of vintage Morris Minors. This mixed history overlaps with the “post-apocalyptic” worlds of many science fiction and horror films; think Terminator, Alien, or Robocop. Akira, the anime classic from 1989, has the same feel. But who was influencing who? Earlier, the Star Wars films did it to a degree by fusing the medieval action pic with the war movie. So the phenomenon is not restricted to Japan.

But the significance of Little Boy and the previous two exhibitions is not to simply show us this, but to indicate how fine art and subculture have become indistinguishable. Artist Yamashita Nara and other artists utilize these Otaku images verbatim and add a fine art twist in the delivery. The show skims over the significance in the differences between illustrators and fine artists, and that may be the point exactly: Westerners get stuck on that distinction. The show provides a wide array of historical background for Otaku but also leaves open why the contemporary artists making “neo-pop” are so influenced by cartoons be it anime, manga, or decades of Astro-Boy/Mothra type characters. Taken together, the art and the merchandising combine into an unapologetic branding of Japanese style. The Superflat theory is more complicated than it seems, but its suggestion that there is a cultural oneness to a “creative class” may be an exaggeration. In the West, we are not quite ready to admit to a blurring of social and qualitative barriers (in art) even though our current low-tech brigade of artists mine a similar vein. Alas, we are compelled to appreciate Godzilla with a grain of salt.

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