Move over everybody
else, this is Japanese movement!
Japan, the land of cool, has
always been innovative when it comes to entertainment, fashion, technology,
games, design... When talking about Japanese trends Japanophiles will list
things like Anime, karaoke, Fruits, Cosplay, pachinko, Dotmov festival, Gas
group, the subway... in one breath take. There’s more. Of course there’s more
but that’s the thing about Japan - it evolves constantly, it outdoes itself
perpetually. And this is exactly why people continue to be fascinated by it.
Take for example Anime. I remember being a kid and discovering these strange
cartoon girls with tiny mouths and giant eyes, cute and long-legged, fighting
evil or cuddling kittens or smooching with their boyfriends.
Years later, my little
sister sat in front of the television, day after day, religiously and absorbed Sailor
Moon which became a huge - and surprising - hit in North America. At that
time I recognized something about Anime that I failed to notice earlier - it
was actually quite crudely presented with characters looking sort of wooden,
with lots of still images and a poorly drawn 2-D backgrounds. Why would you be
interested in that when you had Disney people sweating their precious fingers
over five hundred different head turns of Little Mermaid, or better yet,
a fully computerized features like Toy Story whose characters seemed to,
practically, jumping out of the screen?
But my little sister loved
her Sailor Moon and despite the fact that at that time I thought of
myself as a serious teenager I started watching it with her and liking it and
not being sure what was wrong with me because I did. Then there was Pikachu – a hamster-like amazingly cute
creature with special powers to morph into other creatures -- and a huge
following of him and his bizarre cartoon friends started not only amongst kids
but adults as well.
The anime cartoons example
illustrate really well what it is about Japan that makes whatever happens there
– pop culture-wise – turn into a craze, a following or as I call it a
movement. I’ve mentioned Cosplay before.
Teenagers and adults dressing up in cartoon characters, making costumes,
meeting at conventions, hooking up through personals and on-line forums. They do this – on a large scale – in America
now too but the trend started in Japan of course and it infiltrated the States
the same way sushi, Japanese pop, Japanese fashion and, of course, cartoons
have infiltrated it.
A friend who just got back
from Japan (it is Wednesday now and she came back Monday) and yesterday at
dinner I asked her to tell me what new things were happening in Japan. She looked at me and opened her mouth and
didn’t say anything for some time. Then
she asked me if I was joking. No, I
wasn’t. She said she just didn’t know
where to begin. I left her alone but
for the rest of the evening admired her sweater and thought I would probably
maim a small puppy just to own the sweater.
It had sleeves that seemed that they could go down to her knees but you they
were actually folded over a number of times.
The sweater itself was sort of a shape of poncho but it had an uneven
neck and it had one button and a flap over the button, yet it didn’t look like
it was too much, in fact it looked very flattering draped like that over my
friend’s small frame. It was black, made
out of the softest wool that was entwined with golden threads.
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