When I was a child, toys from Japan were kept in the cheapest bins of Woolworth's and Newberry's. Sparkler-wheels made of tin and sandpaper, little cardboard cars, shells that opened up to display paper flowers. After World War II, there was a like migration of childish gadgets -- a jeep made out of SCAP ration tin stamped: "Made in Occupied Japan."
This was, it turned out, the first shin-deep ripple of the present tsunami as Japanese toys -- Walkmen, iPods, cell phones, as well as mighty cartoon figures -- engulf the international market.
One of the reasons for this success is that the aim is for the real customer. New Japanese products are nondidactic, non-"educational," and not aimed at parents but at the kid still alive in all of us. Particularly in Japan where adults read comic books in public places, where pin-ball pachinko is the national sport, and where colorful and popular manga figures adorn serious endeavor.
At one end are the Pokemon people, decorating an entire All Nippon Airways' jumbo. At the other is the Kitty-chan dildo. And in between are the chortling hordes of cartoon characters spreading overseas on the wings of cute.
Cute is pressed into service as company logos. Banks use cartoon characters even on bankbooks, cell phones feature manga folk for the strap, and there is enshrined a real jizo statue in the shape of the cartoon character Doraemon. It is this big, blue cat, it will be remembered, who is doorman at "the door that goes anywhere" and this is his role as one of the "millennial monsters," holding open the portal for the hordes to follow.
As Disneyfication erodes, it is succeeded by Pokemonization, but there are differences. One is that Mickey Mouse is the real American ambassador, but the Poke-people come from no place and belong just anywhere. Like "Shall We Dance," the U.S.-hit movie that in none of its advertisements mentioned that the original story was made in Japan, Japanese manga has never held onto national identity as a part of its message.
Abroad, to be sure, it is still known that Godzilla and Atom Boy (that Pinocchio for our times) were born in Japan but this is so lightly observed that it is not held against them. They are welcomed joyfully into the international juvenile fold. (As would be, indeed, almost any other contender. We should not be misled by "popularity" -- kids (like the rest of us) take whatever they can get.)
Also, unlike the sparkler wheels and the paper flowers, the new products are only occasionally "Japanese." One such, however, was the Tamagotchi whom the elder among us will remember as a robotized egg that had to be attended to. It squealed, squawked and pooped and was supposed to appeal to the maternal/paternal instincts of the young.
It also, however, not only included a "discipline" button to punish it but "died" if not cared for properly. Here at last the young had something they could fully control put into their otherwise powerless hands. So, after the last native Tamagotchi finally died, the "campaign" to export it also faltered.
Maybe it was a product before its time in foreign climes. Perhaps other young in other lands are not yet so starved for friendship that they are reduced to robots. In any event the new local Tamagotchi model is a dual set in which one "plays well with others."
And "it is not Japan in some literal or material sense that is captured and transmitted in the new global craze of Japanese cool, but rather a particular style. And it is as trademark and producer of this distinctive style that Japan has acquired new notoriety in the global marketplace of popular culture today."
This is among the conclusions of anthropologist Anne Allison in this study of the invasion of the "millennial monsters," its origins and consequences. Carefully researched and clearly written, it evenhandedly offers evidence for the commercial success abroad of Japanese gadgetry.
Author of the excellent "Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity," published in 1994, Allison is equally at home in the slippery alleys of media exportation under the capitalistic conditions of the playtime involved, where price and novelty reign. We are, commercially, far from the days of Woolworth's and Newberry's, but in another sense we never left them.
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