Big Japanese art show

"Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture," currently wedged into Japan Society, is a fast-moving visual spectacle with a mission, orchestrated by the Japanese artist-impresario Takashi Murakami - he of Vuitton bag fame. "Little Boy" displays works by 10 contemporary Japanese artists amid a veritable cavalcade of greatest hits from postwar Japanese popular culture. Among the latter are examples from five decades of almost identical Godzilla toys and a truckload of paraphernalia - stuffed toys, purses, clocks, music boxes - of the ever-cute Hello Kitty franchise.' More here. Little Boy was the code name of the nuke dropped on Hiroshima. 'This show proves once more that pop culture provides an especially direct view of the repressed unconscious of creator, consumer and society alike. In Mr. Murakami's eyes, the collective unconscious has worked overtime to absorb the largely unexamined trauma of Japan's role in the war, the atomic-bombing of two of its cities and the prolonged American occupation. Mr. Murakami holds that these traumas have created a lot of displaced emotions--anxiety, shame and a pervasive sense of impotence--that have found their outlets in popular culture. These feelings are reflected in two opposing tendencies. One is a fascination with violence and power, visible in the building-crunching monsters and mushroom-cloud explosions frequently used in Japanese animation. The opposite pole is an infantalizing sense of powerlessness that is played out in the obsession with what is called kawaii, or cute, as exemplified by Hello Kitty and other irresistible characters.'