[The bottom line] is that for the past sixty years Japan has been a testing ground for an American style capitalist economy, protected in a greenhouse, nurtured and bloated to the point of explosion. The results are so bizarre, they're perfect. Whatever true intentions underlie "Little Boy," the nickname for Hiroshima's atomic bomb, we Japanese are truly, deeply. pampered children . . . We throw constant tantrums while enthralled with our own cuteness.
From social mores, to art and culture, everything is two-dimensional . . . [Japan is] a place for people unable to comprehend the moral coordinates of right and wrong as anything other than a rebus for "I feel good." Those who inhabit this vacant crucible spin in endless, inarticulate circles.
Takashi Murakami, "Earth in My Window," in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (Yale UP, 2005).
Couldn't agree more, except with the cynical opportunism of the "they're perfect." Call me stick-in-the-mud in my pitiful efforts to preserve the ability "to comprehend the moral coordinates of right and wrong," but I find it the height of cynicism and self-promotion to lambast something when at the same time shamelessly profiting from it.
Hard as I try it, I can't possibly sense any meaning, hope or future in this all-pervasive Japanese "kawaii" shallowness - or superflatness, pardon me! - and doubt it if anyone in his/her right mind can...
Image: Superflat First Love, Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton.
Source: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com.au/news/2009-04-21/louis-vuitton-murakami-animate-superflat-first-love
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