From Anne Frank to Hello Kitty - Norihiro Kato

NYT - The Opinion Pages 

MARCH 12, 2014

TOKYO — In late February, officials from city libraries contacted the police after discovering that hundreds of copies of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” had been defaced. Media reports included an awful picture: a torn photograph of the girl smiling in a mutilated book. No culprit has been identified, but the rash of vandalism seemed to begin around the time, in January, that a member of the ultranationalist group Zaitokukai marched in a rally with a Nazi flag over his shoulders.

The invocation of Nazi symbols by Japanese right-wingers is a new phenomenon. During the Cold War they focused their hatred on the U.S.S.R. and communism; now, they have shifted their attention to China, South Korea and, increasingly, the United States. Brandishing the flag of Japan’s wartime ally is a roundabout way for right-wingers to laud Japan’s imperialist past. Presumably, the defacement of those copies of Anne Frank’s diary was an expression of the same sentiment.

In my view, it was also a symptom of something broader. Over the past few decades, Japan has developed a mechanism to avoid facing up to its wartime history: It has neutralized issues that are too painful to deal with by rendering them purely aesthetic, and harmless — by making them “cute.” But that strategy no longer seems to be working.

The word kawaii, meaning cute or adorable, became central to a certain strand of Japanese culture in the 1980s, as changes in the social and political climate stripped conventional father figures of the authority they had possessed until the 1960s. Cuteifying something was a way of making oneself its protector, rendering it powerless in a nonadversarial manner. One famous example took place in 1988, when high-school girls reportedly remarked that the dying Hirohito was kawaii, making a nonissue of his responsibility for the war. Hello Kitty, the white cat with a pink bow on her ear, is the ultimate embodiment of Japan’s cute culture: She has no background and no mouth. She represents the impulse to escape history and to stop talking about it.

A few years ago, I published an essay called “Goodbye Godzilla, Hello Kitty” in which I argued that Godzilla was a symbol of Japan’s war dead who were returning to vent their rage at having been forgotten. When he was first created in 1954, Godzilla was frightening: He rose from the sea and, following roughly the same path as the B-29s that had firebombed the city in 1945, destroyed a Tokyo that was only just being rebuilt. But over the course of 50 years and 28 films, Godzilla first became just another monster and then he was domesticated — cast as a comical, doting father. In a word, he was cuteified.

Japan has also cuteified Anne Frank.

In January, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran an article exploring Anne Frank’s popularity in Japan. It drew on an interview with Alain Lewkowicz, a French journalist and the creator of an interactive iPad app called “Anne Frank in the Land of Manga,” a comic strip laden with photographs and interviews. Anne Frank’s story is unusually popular in Japan. But instead of being known for her denunciation of the Holocaust or the warning she offers against racism, Mr. Lewkowicz argues that, in Japan, Anne Frank “symbolizes the ultimate World War II victim” and that most Japanese see themselves that way, too, because of the American atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a victim, he contends, “never a perpetrator.”

Mr. Lewkowicz suggests that the Japanese can share this “kinship of victims” with European Jews because so many people, especially the young, are astonishingly ignorant of Japan’s actions during World War II. As Mr. Lewkowicz put it to Haaretz, they “don’t think of the countless Anne Franks their troops created in Korea and China during the same years.”

I find this argument persuasive. But there’s more going on here. Anne Frank’s reception in Japan is another instance of the cuteification of unresolved issues from the war. As the Haaretz article noted, Anne Frank’s diary became unusually popular in Japan not only through translations of the book itself but also through at least four manga versions and three animated films that tell the story of a girl every bit as cute as Hello Kitty.

Thus the recent defacement of all those copies of Anne Frank’s diary in Tokyo libraries may indicate that Japan’s culture of cuteness has reached the limits of its effectiveness.

The contradictions Japanese society has harbored since its defeat in World War II have grown too deep to ignore. A sense of nihilism is spreading as people finally realize that Japan’s dependence on the United States may never end and that reasonable political solutions to the country’s problems are not forthcoming. The reactionary policies of the administration of Shinzo Abe have exacerbated the sense that Japan’s democracy isn’t functioning. All the things we don’t want to see are suddenly forcing themselves into view.

If there is anything good to be said about that ugly bit of vandalism against Anne Frank’s diary, it’s that it might push Japanese society to say goodbye to all that cuteness and hello to the real history of Anne Frank and her countless sisters.

Norihiro Kato is a literary scholar and a professor at Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.