What is Cute?

[imomus]

The London Review of Books leads this month with Cute: Kitty Hauser on style in Japan. It's a workmanlike article, a review of Fruits by Shoichi Aoki (which I recently commented for Index magazine) and The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan by Donald Richie. Hauser writes:

'Acting and dressing like children represents their refusal of the adult world: as Kinsella writes, cute style 'idolises the pre-social'. Cute is a kind of rebellion, then, but its retreat to the imagery of childhood indicates that there is no alternative to the adult world except a deliberate regression to this one remaining realm of freedom. Seen in this way, cute style is bleak: it allows no looking forward to a future, either for individuals or for society. In this sense it is far darker than punk, which had an energy and rage that promised action, if not social change. Cute disguises its pessimism and political inertia as winsomeness. The curious thing about the outfits paraded in Fruits is that they seem to acknowledge both the idealism of youth and its commercialisation. Punk motifs, in particular, recur again and again, but only as hollow signifiers on pre-slashed and distressed clothing bought from boutiques. Hippy styles, too, are often assembled entirely from branded items. Coupled with cute, these motifs seem like the ghosts of idealism, clinging to the bodies of teenagers capable only of shopping and acting dumb.'

Hauser thinks that 'cute may not yet have its aesthetician'. A good start has been made, though, by Frances Richard, whose Fifteen Theses on the Cute appeared in Cabinet Magazine in Autumn 2001:

'Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject , the melancholic , the wicked , the childlike. Now in the zones between add the erotic , the ironic , the narcotic , and the kitsch . Intersperse the Romantic/Victorian , the Disney/ consumerist , and the biologically deterministic . At the center of this many-spoked wheel lies a connective empty space. Label it CUTE.'

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You raise some interesting points. Yes, the de-politicization of subcultural style by Japanese youth has something to do with the language barrier. But it's a mistake to see Japanese youth as zombies, ghosts or ciphers. It's a mistake to say 'Take the western meanings away and nothing is left'. If punk ties in, in our culture, with Protestant protest (getting back to basics, expressing political disgust, and so on), its transmuted relative on the streets of Tokyo ties in with Japanese traditions: etiquette, ceremony, dandyism, group display, even Samurai honour. Japan has always imported western goods and styles in a way which smashes their meanings and domesticates them.

'The Japanese indigenous worldview is basically sublunary and contains no transcendent values... The history of Japanese literature can be described as a history of the multiplex expression of a process of challenge by external and transcendental worldviews to this indigenous worldview, which internalises them and at the same time secularises and 'de-transcendentalises' them.'

Shuichi Kato, A History Of Japanese Literature (Kodansha)

I tend to think this 'misunderstanding' is not accidental on the part of the Japanese, but deliberate. It's not a simple 'lack', a failure to see the 'real' context of a style like punk, so much as a deliberate, though subtle, process of recontextualisation, defiance, even resistance. Japanese values are being expressed in the way the FRUiTS kids dress, and they happen to involve western styles from time to time. It would be a big mistake for western observers to think, just because they recognise fragments of their own styles in the kaleidoscope, that they know what's going on.

Sofia Coppola has the John Ribisi character in Lost In Translation say 'They're these nerdy guys, but they're trying to act like rockers. Why can't they just be themselves?' It's an incredibly naive comment, with its suggestion that there's some kind of trans-cultural authenticity just waiting for us, if we would only step outside the charade, the continuous (and often deliberate) recontextualisation of cultural appropriations and re-appropriations, snapshots of snapshots, Chinese Whispers. Perhaps it's meant to make Ribisi's character look dumb and culturally out of his depth, but I fear Coppola ma have written it 'from the heart', out of her depth herself.