{Inter} Cultural Japan

Japan is “the country of cute.” “Cute” is the ideal image of women, “cute” are cars, clothes, cups, plates, bags, and even police boxes have been marked with cute characters. Kawaii, “cute” is a style and a taste, everything that is small and innocent. There are cute expressions, cute gestures and cute ways to move. It is much more than just a fashion, it is in fact a whole form of aesthetics.

Late 19th c. travelers from Europe or America saw Japan as a “doll’s country,” undoubtedly discriminating from their own so-called cultural superiority, but even modern Japan has a touch of “dolliness.” Is there any other country in the world where make-up for young man is a popular item? The cuteness is also a good export article to other Asian countries: from Hello Kitty, the now more than 30-years old kitten which is a 1 billion euro money machine for its owner Sanrio, to Doraemon, through children’s books, anime films and manga, in fashion and design, everywhere the Japanese ideal is being exported.

Cuteness is not only an ideal for children and young people, also middle aged women still try to look “cute.” Now this trend has even reached the elderly – good for industry as with the ongoing graying of Japan the future belongs to this age group. Japan already has 23,000 persons older than 100, but the birth rate has dropped to less than 1.2%.

Even the elderly can be depicted as “cute,” as was the case with the (now deceased) singing centenarians Gin-san and Kin-san. Ten years ago, these two broadly smiling grannies were at the slightest pretext pulled before the TV cameras. A CD with their songs even became a bestseller.

A new development is that today you can buy cute things especially made for the elderly. A good example is Yumel, a doll that has been developed for lonely grandmothers. The doll represents a five-year old boy, the ideal grandson. It can say cute sentences so that granny has someone to talk to in her quiet house. When she retires for the night with her doll, he even wishes her a polite “goodnight.”

Of course, the elderly in Japan are much lonelier than in, for example, my country the Netherlands. Like it or not, we are a country with close family ties, where every Sunday is “Granny Day” and where birthdays are celebrated with the whole family. That is also possible because we are such a small country, families can easily come together. In Japan, distances are much larger, the houses smaller. Family relations also seem more detached, one usually only meets grandma twice a year, at New Year and at the Buddhist Obon festival in August.

How distant family relations can be is demonstrated by a weird type of fraud, that as far as I know only exists in Japan. That is the “ore,ore” trick. “Ore” means “I” and is only used by men: suddenly granny is called by a man’s voice saying urgently “ore, ore,” “it’s me!” without mentioning his name. The speaker pretends to be the grandson who is in a terrible fix because he immediately needs money – for example, because he has to pay back a loan to the loan sharks or because he is involved in a traffic accident (when you cause an accident in Japan you have to present a gift of money to the victim). The voice mentions an amount and a bank account number and granny pushes her rollator to the bank to transfer her precious savings to her dear grandson, happy in the knowledge that she can finally do something for him.

Grandma in Japan is so lonely that she doesn’t even know the voices of her grandchildren. Although the police is clamping down now, this dirty trick has grown into a virtual epidemic, every year hundreds of millions are stolen from old folks and thousands of gullible grannies have been reduced to beggary.

Granny is so unpopular in Japan that she only receives phone calls from shady figures who are after her money. No wonder that she likes to have a doll who talks to her. Yumel, as this doll is named – “yume” means “dream” – costs about 70 euro and is sold by toymaker Takaratomy. The cute little boy has big eyes and a small nose and is dressed in a sweet playsuit with a hood, in pastel blue. There is also a cuddly granddaughter doll dressed in pink. It is possible to buy more clothes separately, so granny can dress her doll nicely up. Yumel has a vocabulary of 1,200 phrases in his chip. Via his sensors he recognizes the sleeping pattern of granny so that he “wakes” and “sleeps” in the same rhythm. Of course he constantly produces cute sounds and when he is sleepy his eyelids become heavy fro drowsiness. Yumel can also sing songs and ask for presents. There is one reassurance: this cuddly boy will not strip granny’s savings account.