This might be surprising if your concept of cartoon characters is based on American models. Sure, all kinds of improbable things exist in American cartoons that we don’t think twice about. Walking, talking animals – that’s so normal it’s boring. Sponges that wear pants, whatever. But not usually a fillet of fish that gets on Twitter and says “Please eat me, I’m delicious.”

But for the last few decades at least, cute characters that are live, walking, sometimes talking, foods, have been totally normal in Japan. And it turns out they have historical precedents that go WAY back.

Anpanman: The Granddaddy Of Modern Food Characters

Anpanman: He’s your classic superhero. He wears a cape, he fights for truth, justice and the Japanese way. And… he’s a bread roll with sweet bean paste inside.

His friends are other types of bread – plain sliced white bread, buns filled with melon or curry – as well as humans who apparently see nothing odd about the situation.

Anpanman apparently never gets stale. After starting as a manga in 1973 and as a TV show in 1988, it aired its 1,000th episode in 2009and its 25th movie in 2013.

Anpanman also set the stage for using these characters for merchandizing, having been used to promote almost every conceivable product including other foods (isn’t that kind of like cannibalism?). I’ve even seen him on boxes of okonomiyaki mix, which isn’t something I imagined was marketed to children.

Perhaps Anpanman’s most direct modern descendent is Kogepan – modernized in part by making him the emo version. Unlike the cheerful, pink-cheeked Anpanman, he’s full of existential angst: Having been left in the oven too long, till he’s burnt, Kogepan is depressed about no one wanting to buy him. Yes, instead of rejoicing that he’ll escape being eaten, he’s miserable that he can’t fulfill his life’s work as a bun. He drowns his sorrows in milk, which makes him drunk.

Like Anpanman, Kogepan’s friends are all different kinds of bread, but his relationships are far more conflicted. He’s jealous of the pretty, unburnt breads, the Kireipan, and I can’t blame him – the cheerful little strawberry breads annoy even me.

But bean paste buns are far from the only walking, talking foods, as we’ll see on the following brief journey through Japanese foods, characters and history.

Beyond the Bun

Traditional sweets like Anpanman have always been big in the food-character market. In another animation from the 1970s, a taiyaki, the fish-shaped pancake filled with beanpaste, comes to life and swims in the ocean:

およげたいやきくん

Later in the 90s, three dango brothers and their tango song had a huge hit:

だんご三兄弟

Nowadays though, almost any food can be made into a character. It’s easy to make fruits and vegetables come to life by giving them faces and arms and legs. From just one company, San-X, there are over a dozen, including Amagurichan, a chestnut who’s impatient to be eaten, Mikan Bouya, a mikan (a citrus fruit like a tangerine), Mamepyon, a family of peas, and Soreike Otamachan!, an onion.

Elsewhere we find an NHK character who is a bitter melon and the incredibly adorable Nameko mushrooms.

Prepared dishes can come alive too. In the picture book and anime Oden-Kun, all the different ingredients of oden are made into creatures: you’ve got your boiled egg, your various fish cakes, and your chunk of daikon radish:

Fusion Food

Food character designers often go beyond giving a fruit or bread a face and limbs, resulting in strange, unnatural chimeras combining food with other creatures. A simple example is Momobuta, who’s a cross between a peach and a pig:

Hokkaido, too, has been all aboard the hybrid food train. The northern prefecture is known for a few main things, one being a bear, the other being various types of food (salmon, melon, onions, to name a few). How do you combine those things? Oh, let me count the ways.

First, let’s start with this melon-higuma mascot mashup.

Okay, so maybe this one’s not as “kawaii”

From there it can go many different directions, including bear+salmon, bear+onion, bear+crab, bear+squid, so on and so forth. Koichi happened to have the bear+crab and bear+squid combinations on hand and took a picture:

My favorite food-creature combination, though, is the San-X characters Nyan Nyan Nyanko. These little cats were presented in various scenarios over the years where they were incorporated and/or transformed into every conceivable dish and type of cuisine.

Their first appearance was a festival theme, where they were various traditional foods you’d buy at festival stalls, like takoyaki:

Next came traditional sweets eaten with green tea, which of course also had a cat in the cup.

Over the years they appeared as dim sum, burgers, onigiri, bubble tea, school lunch, sushi, Western sweets like cream puffs,… just about everything you can think of.

If you think too hard about this, it ought to be incredibly gruesome. Instead, it’s adorable. With every limited edition iteration you could buy stationery, stickers, plushes and what have you, so it is sad but good for my personal budget that the cats appear to have been retired in 2010 after ten years of appearing as various foodstuffs.

Classical Characters

Anthropomorphic food turns out to have some pretty ancient precedents in Japanese art. What’s funny about the early examples is that they also seem to presage another Japanese invention: the TV show food battle.

In the 15th century, a fashion started of illustrated stories of battles between food characters. In the Shoujin Gyorui Monogatari, an army of vegetarian foods, Shoujun, led by the lord Natto, battled against the seafood army led by the lord Salmon. The vegetarian army won, killing the lord Salmon in Nabe Castle.

The picture above is a similar battle from 1859. Although these stories are humorous, this one is said to have a pretty serious historical context: a cholera epidemic. The vegetarian foods won the battle this time too, supposedly symbolizing the fact that they were less likely to spread cholera (presumably because cholera is a water-borne disease).

Other Edo-period anthropomorphized food includes this lovely dancing ear of corn:

There are also precedents to the food-creature chimeras. The famous folktale of Momotaro, the Peach Boy, is about a boy who was born from a large peach floating in a stream. There’s at least one illustration where he is half peach, half boy

Maybe that version didn’t stick because it was too hard to believe that anyone was desperate enough for an heir to raise that creepy creature as their own.

Modern Battle of the Food Characters

With all this as background, it no doubt seemed totally normal for Sanrio to decide to have a new character contest where all twenty of the candidates were some kind of food, or something combined with some kind of food.

Fairly standard sorts of contestants included dog-mochi sweets, panda rice balls, an egg, and my favorite, a long negi onion.

Others were really stretching it, if you ask me, especially some of the food-animal fusions. Yeah, a giraffe’s horns do look a little like mushrooms, but if you have a whole bunch of mushrooms growing out of a giraffe’s head, it just gets creepy:

And I love tanuki like nothing else, but I cannot accept the combination of a tanuki and kiritanpo, a cylinder of pounded rice that a specialty of Akita and Aomori prefectures:

And the public seemed to agree with me that those were overdoing it, because the winner is the one that’s the foodiest of all. Kirimi-chan the salmon fillet has nothing added but tiny dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, and a tiny body. Simple, like Hello Kitty’s expressionless face. In fact, she might not look all that out of place in one of those fifteenth-century battles of the anthropomorphic seafoods.

So although she is brand new, she’s way more old school than anyone probably imagined.

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That’s what happened to me when I started taking photos of my stuffed Kogepan toys on my vacations. I took them with me to California, to New York City, and around the monuments and museums of Washington DC. I thought I was original and maybe a little bit odd. Then I went to post the photos online and discovered there was more than one Flickr group devoted to traveling stuffed toys.

And now, I’m kicking myself for not realizing that this was actually evidence of a huge under-served market. Sadly, I was not as brilliant as Sonoe Azuma, who three years ago opened a travel agency for stuffed toys in Japan.

It’s called Unagi Travel, and it started out because Sonoe Azuma had the same hobby I did: she took photos of her stuffed eel Unasha and blogged about it. Now Unasha serves as stuffed animal tour guide and together they’ve taken about 450 stuffed toys from all over the world on trips around Tokyo as well as excursions to other areas. Her customers are so satisfied that more than half come back for another trip, and one, a hippo named Kaba-san from Osaka, has been on six trips.

Customers can choose from various options: a tour around Tokyo including Asakusa, Meiji Jingu Shrine and Tokyo Tower, a one-day tour to an onsen, a weekend in Kyoto, and special tours that are sometimes offered, including to the Tohoku region. While you follow along via social media, your stuffed animal will see the sights and learn about Japanese culture, like calligraphy:

…and have Japanese meals that you will envy:

If your toy is a real free spirit, you can surprise it with a Mystery Tour. The Mystery Tour may visit other parts of Tokyo, Azuma told us, such as Shibuya, Ginza, or Roppongi, or places in nearby prefectures such as Kawagoe or Odawara. Or it may have a cultural theme, and your toy may come home knowing more than you do about architecture of the Meiji period or bronze statues.

Tours are limited to ten so everyone gets enough personal attention. You’re assured that your animal will never be placed directly on the ground, and asked whether your toy has any food allergies, whether it gets seasick or carsick, and if there’s anything in particular your creature wants to see or do on the tour.

The form that customers fill out also asks how long you’ve been together and has you tell something about the toy’s character. Along with the photos, the answers to these questions often show up on Unagi’s Facebook page, so it’s fun to follow even if you’re not sending a toy on a trip yourself. People have all sorts of creative stories about their toys, and there’s often the hint of interesting human stories behind them as well.

One toy from France on a recent trip was said to have been with its thirty year old owner since she was one day old, and loves chocolate and knitting. A pair of handmade cats from Nara Prefecture called Custard-san and Hana-san from Nara Prefecture were said to be on a mother-daughter trip together. They’re supportive of each other, and the mom loves to listen to enka. And a toy called Little Brother Bear was returning to Tokyo where he had lived sixty years ago.

All sorts of creatures are allowed, as long as they weigh under 250 grams, and you need to mail your toy to Tokyo. The Tokyo tour is $45; special tours cost more, like $95 for two days in Kyoto.

Do you have more questions about this? So did we. Azuma was kind enough to answer a few questions for Tofugu:

Tofugu: What kinds of toys do foreigners send? Are they different from Japanese, or does everyone like the same kind of stuffed animal?

Unagi: Foreigners tend to send us realistic animal toys, whereas Japanese tend to send us cute toys. Regardless of whether it’s from Japan or overseas, the teddy bear accounts for a large percentage.

Tofugu: What’s the most unusual toy you have taken on a tour?

Unagi: It was a Japanese spiny lobster.

Tofugu: When you go on overnight trips, how do the innkeepers feel about having stuffed animals as customers?

Unagi: Once the business understands the concept, we are very welcome.

Tofugu: Your job sounds like so much fun. What do you like about it?

Unagi: I’m happy that I can make my customers happy and energetic. For example, there was a man who applied for our trip in order to make his wife happy, who was very busy raising their child. After the trip, he gave us the feedback that our trip became a good pastime for her and she really enjoyed it. Although this is a small business, it’s very satisfying for me because I can do something for someone else. This job also requires imagination, creativity, and interpersonal skills. That part of it is also fun for me.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “What is the matter with these people? What normal adult would pay good money to send a stuffed animal on vacation?” If you don’t get the fun of this, maybe what you need are some of the heartwarming tales: One customer who was in a wheelchair wanted her toy to go down narrow alleys that she was unable to navigate. Or you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by Connor the Chemo Duck from Tennessee, a stuffed therapy animal for children with cancer, especially when he went to Senso-ji temple to fan himself with the healing smoke.

And if you’re thinking this is one of those uniquely weird Japanese things, not so fast: right now, Azuma says that half of her customers are from overseas.

There was actually once a similar business in Prague – the owner was half-Japanese, and it eventually failed, and one in Berlin seems to be hanging on, although they seem to do tours far less often. But I think there’s global potential here. I’m thinking maybe I need to open a company like this of my own. Don’t you think Japanese stuffed animals would love to come see the cherry blossoms in Washington DC?

If you’d like to send your stuffed animal on a tour of Japan, be sure to visit Unagi Travel’s website to get more information.

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Links:

• http://unagi-travel.net/
• https://www.facebook.com/unagitravel
• https://twitter.com/unagitravel

References:

• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20…
• http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/japan…
• http://kotaku.com/a-japanese-trav…
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/communi…

Japan’s special take on cute is unique enough that we even borrow the word “kawaii” in English to talk about it. But although there is some cultural variation in the details, cute is very much a universal concept, and you might be surprised at the fundamental role it plays in human psychology.

What is Cute, Exactly?

What makes something cute? Think about how characters and toys based on animals look compared to their real-life counterparts. Compare the bear above to this teddy bear:

Or take our friend the ubiquitous tanuki statue and his wild cousin:

…versus…

What are the differences? The snouts are shorter (in some teddy bears it’s gone, or close to it). The head and eyes are big and round. The legs are stubby and rounder and generally, everything is softer and more rounded than in real life.

But why are these the particular features that turn a dangerous animal that could bite your head off, like a bear, into something that makes us go “awwwwwww”? Scientists have actually thought about this subject, starting with the zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1940s.

Lorenz proposed that the features that make up “cute” are all characteristic of human infants. We coo and squeal at the sight of heads that are large for their bodies, little button noses, and chubby, soft bodies. It also doesn’t hurt if the critter has a floppy, clumsy gait like a human toddler.

Basically, the more a a cartoon character or animal is like a human baby, the cuter it is. One interesting thing that shows this is the importance of round forward-facing eyes like humans have. An animal with eyes on the front of its face, like a panda, looks cuter to us than one with eyes on the sides of its head, like a horse. (If you don’t believe it, check out the next photo, which shows that if you want to turn a a horse into something absolutely horrifyingly cute, you move its eyes to the front of its face.)

Why The Short Face?

Lorenz theorized that there’s an evolutionary reason that these characteristics make you want to grab something and cuddle it. Human babies need a lot of care. If you’re a giraffe, your baby can stand up and run within moments of birth. If you’re a frog, you dump a whole bunch of eggs somewhere and get on with your life, figuring at least one of your hundreds of offspring will manage to survive on its own. But if you’re a human, your baby needs constant attention for months.

So the reason we go “awwww” in response to babies has an obvious evolutionary explanation: the people who reacted that way to round, soft creatures with big heads had babies that survived better. Those babies grew up to have more babies, and passed on the genes for wanting to cuddle things that look that way. On the other hand, the people who didn’t react that way to cute features would be more likely to leave their babies lying around in dangerous places, forget to feed them, etc. So resistance to cuteness would tend to eliminate itself from the gene pool.

This response is now so ingrained in our brains that we react the same way even when it has no evolutionary advantage to our species. We’re just as smitten by pandas as by human infants, despite the fact that they have no benefit to the survival of the human race whatsover. And we even create stuff that has those features, like Hello Kitty, sewage-treatment-plant mascots, and teddy bears. So if you’re one of those people who thinks all that cute stuff is stupid? Blame it on the babies.

This Is Your Brain On Cute

Psychologists have actually experimentally tested Lorenz’s theory that those specific features of “cute” result in a care-giving impulse. One study, for example, manipulated photos of real babies to make their heads more or less round, etc, and found that photos with more of those characteristics were rated as cuter, and made subjects feel more strongly that they wanted to care for them.

But research has also shown that cuteness has other effects – both positive and negative.

There’s one recent study out of Japan that’s probably going to be good news for everyone reading this. You’re on the Internet, so the odds are high that you spend some of your time at work looking at photos and videos of cats – or, if you’re not a cat fan, of whatever other cute animal floats your boat.

No doubt you try to hide this apparently time-wasting behavior, but instead, maybe you should send your boss a link to this article titled The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. The research reported shows that looking at pictures of cute animals might actually help you to do your work better.

Two different kinds of tasks were used in the experiment. One was a game called Bilibili Dr. Game which is like the American game Operation. If you’ve never played, it’s a game where you have to remove very tiny body parts from very small openings on a “patient”, using very tiny tweezers.

The subjects played the game, and then they were shown photos: Either of dogs and cats, or of cute puppies and kittens. Then they played the game again, and the people who saw puppies and kittens got better scores the second time around. They also took longer to play the game, so the researchers concluded that seeing cute animals made them do their work more deliberately and carefully.

If your job doesn’t involve the same kind of fine motor control as the game of Operation, you may think this study won’t convince your boss to count looking at Cute Overload as work. Never fear! The experimenters also used another task, which involved looking for certain numbers in a large matrix.

Subjects also did better on this task after looking at photos of puppies and kittens, so the researchers concluded that cute animals made people more attentive. And there’s no job that doesn’t benefit from careful attention, right? So surf away for the those cute kitties.

Cute: The Dark Side

Other research has shown that the effect of cuteness isn’t always so benign. If you’ve ever told a baby that it was so cute you wanted to eat it up, you’ve experienced the effect studied in another recent study: cute animals actually make people feel more aggressive.

Subjects were shown a slideshow including cute baby animals, animals in silly situations, and “neutral” adult animals. One group was asked to rate how much the photos made them want to squeeze something or give an aggressive “want to eat it up” sort of response. The cute pictures made them feel that way more often. Then, another group actually put their money where their mouth was: they were popping bubble wrap while watching the slideshow. They popped an average of 120 bubbles when looking at the cute photos, compared to 100 for neutral ones and 80 for the silly ones.

Cute Clouds The Mind

Maybe being more aggressive at popping bubble wrap seems like no big risk, but there are lots of real-life situations where our uncontrollable response to cuteness affects our judgement about important matters.

For example, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to walk right up to a cute little Chihuahua and pet it, while you might cross the street to avoid a big dog. Turns out you’ve got it exactly backwards. There are fashions in what breeds are considered dangerous, but from German shepherds in the 1960s through Rottweilers and Dobermans to pit bulls nowadays, the breeds considered dangerous are always large ones. But the truth is, as this study showed, the dogs that are most aggressive towards humans are cute little guys: Dachshunds, Chihuahuas and Jack Russell Terriers.

Even professionals who work with animals are not immune to the bad influence of cuteness. A paper in the journal Conservation Biology showed that cute animals are much more likely to be studied by scientists and to get funding for their conservation. Apparently even scientists aren’t attracted to animals because they’re important to their ecosystems or more endangered: it’s more important that they be fuzzy, with 500 times more published studies on large furry mammals than on slimy little amphibians.

Cute animals also cloud our judgment about our fellow humans. An experiment in France found that women were three times more likely to give a guy their phone number if he was walking a cute dog, and another showed that a panhandler more than doubled his income when he had a dog.

So if you always considered “cute” to practically equal “harmless,” maybe you better think again. I have to wonder, how many other ways is cute messing with our minds that science hasn’t found out about yet? How is this affecting the psychology Japan, the “Kingdom of Cute”? Will they all just one day snap and eat each other up?

You know, that Hello Kitty…. I always thought there was something a little sinister about her. Now I know why.

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Additional Reference:

• New York Times: The Cute Factor

But quite on the contrary, what bothers me is this: We’re falling behind Japan. I’ve seen way too many things for dogs in Japan that we don’t have that I want. Yeah, there’s some wacky stuff I could live without, but mostly, I feel like we have some catching up to do.

Dogs Everywhere

If you’ve ever met a friend in Shibuya by the famous statue of Hachiko – a dog who died in the 1930s – you know the Japanese love of dogs is nothing new. But in the last couple of decades, pet ownership has increased to new heights. It’s estimated that in 2012, one out of four Japanese households had a cat or a dog, and one estimate of the number of pet dogs is 11,530,000.

In fact, it’s often noted that there are more pets than children. Figures are tossed around like, the number of dogs and cats combined has outnumbered children since 2003, or that in 2006, there were more pet dogs than children under 12.

I guess some people like children more than I do, because when I read articles like that, my reaction is, “You say this like it’s a problem?” And it’s true that with increased popularity come some new issues. But like in any good capitalist society, those increased numbers also mean new business opportunities, which result in awesome stuff for dog owners to take advantage of.

Going Places

The Japanese innovation that I’m most jealous of is the dog cafe. Dog cafes aren’t to be confused with cat cafes, where you go to pet cats that live at the cafe. A dog cafe is a place for you to go together with your own dog. There are fancy dishes you can order for your pet, and there’s human food, some dog-themed, like this pancake from the cafe pictured above in Odaiba:

It’s a good thing my two pugs can’t read this article, or they’d be demanding we immediately move to Tokyo. They’re not interested in playing ball or going for walks in the woods. Their taste in entertainment is the same as mine: they like to go out to eat. But since health rules ban dogs from restaurants in the US, our opportunities to do this are incredibly restricted. We have to find a restaurant with a patio or sidewalk table, they have to let us sit at it (many places don’t want dogs even outside, and it’s often strictly speaking illegal there also), and, of course, the weather has to be suitable, which it hardly ever is. To me and my dogs, these cafes would be heaven on earth.

If they were normal dogs that like to play outside, Tokyo would also be a great place to live, because I also came across the best off-leash dog park I’ve ever seen. Yoyogi Park is more famous for, say, synchronized rockabilly dancers and other wacky human activities, but it also has an amazing, huge dog park. As you can see from the sign above, it’s divided into sections for different size dogs, which is important for safety, but something there’s rarely room for in the dog parks in my neck of the woods.

But you’re not restricted to fun near home. Maybe the most amazing dog-related business that we don’t have is a chain of hotels called Wan Wan Paradise that are especially for people to stay with their dogs. There are services like groomers, trainers and photographers, activities like group hikes, and facilities for swimming and dog sports. Here’s a bulletin board of photos of happy guests at their hotel in Toba:

If you’re a very well informed American dog owner, you may say “But wait! We can do this. There are dog camps.” Yes, there are dog camps where you can stay for a week with your pup and do all kinds of canine activities. But Wan Wan Paradise is no campground. For the humans, there are all the facilities of a hot spring resort, including the fancy food (check out the photo galleries here and here)

It’s hard enough to find a hotel in the US that will simply tolerate letting you bring your dog along. A resort that actually catered to them would be paradise indeed.

Canine Cuisine

Dog cafes – like the one at Tokyo SkyTree that has the menu pictured above – are far from the only place where you can get fancy dog food in Japan. If you’re driving to one of those special dog hotels, apparently you can even get special dog bento at some highway rest stops

What’s a dog bento, you may ask? They’re probably a lot like this one, from a pet shop in the same mall in Odaiba that I mentioned above:

The shop also had amazing and creative treats that imitate both Japanese and Western style human food:

And if those aren’t fancy enough for you, you can order a special New Year’s dog bento:

OK, now that is over the top. But I admit it: if I lived there, I’d be first in line to pick mine up.

Fashion

Photo by Aaron Olaf

I’m totally on board with dog restaurants and hotels, but here’s where things start to seem crazy to me: Japanese dog fashion.

Yes, there’s a lot more dog clothing in the US than there used to be. But the majority of it is practical, to keep your dog dry or warm. And the clothes that are purely decorative are usually no fancier than t-shirts. There is more elaborate stuff, but it’s fairly rare.

In Japan, it’s a lot more common to dress your dog, and there’s a lot more fancy fashion. There are also particular categories of garments that are nearly unheard of here. Yes, we have dresses, although they have a lot more of them. And I can almost understand, for a special occasion, a dog manicure, if you have the sort of dog (unlike mine) that will let you touch its precious paws.

What they have that I can’t get my head around are the pajamas, and the pants:

Photo by Stéfan

Why would a dog need to sleep any way but naked? And why would one need to wear pants? But to be honest, I don’t understand most of Japanese human fashion either, so maybe I’m missing something.

Not All Roses

image by Lachlan Hardy

Not everything is perfect for the dog owner in Japan. Before I drop everything and move myself and my pugs to Tokyo, I’d need to deal with the fact that it’s still quite hard to find a rental that allows pets.

I also saw a video of a Japanese trainer suggesting that the polite dog owner should carry an absorbent pad for her pup to pee on – even OUTDOORS. Picking up poop has become standard in most of the developed world, but picking up pee is just plain nuts.

The rapid rise of the pet dog in Japan also has some dark sides. Like the US, Japan has a problem with puppy mills, businesses that churn out dogs with little concern for the welfare of either the parents or the puppies. And there’s not much of a culture of adopting from shelters, so most abandoned pets are euthanized.

But I feel pretty confident that a dog in a loving home in Japan has it as good as anywhere in the world. When I was at that cafe in Odaiba, there was a couple with a pug, and of course I had to show them all the pictures of my own pugs on my phone. The woman asked how old they were, and when I told her that the older one was 14, she reacted exactly the way I would have: She wanted to know how I did it. How did I care for my dog that she lived to be that old? My Japanese is minimal and her English was only a little better, but we managed to have the same conversation I’d have had back at home about the ingredients in dog food. It convinced me that Japanese dog lovers are the same deep down, even if some of them they do dress their pups in pants.

All images not credited are by Linda Lombardi

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This means that I’ve spent years having to explain, over and over and over again, what a capybara is. I wouldn’t have this problem if I lived in Japan, where the capybara is as famous and beloved as it truly deserves.

What The Heck Is That Thing?

The capybara is the world’s largest rodent. The minute you mention this, people immediately think “giant rat.” Then it’s an uphill battle to convince them of what an adorable and awesome animal it is.

If the capybara were a giant rat, actually there’d be nothing wrong with that. Rats are pretty awesome animals also – they’re intelligent and sociable and make great pets. But in fact, capybaras are more closely related to a different pet rodent: the guinea pig. Look at the nice square shape of both of them and you’ll see the family resemblance.

However, capybaras are MUCH larger: on average about a hundred pounds, two feet tall, and four feet long. Yeah. Stop and think about that for a moment. Awesome, right?

And unlike most familiar rodents, capybaras are semi-aquatic. They’ve got a number of interesting adaptations for this lifestyle. Their feet are slightly webbed, which helps with swimming and walking on waterlogged ground. Their ears, eyes and nostrils are set on the top of their head, so they can swim almost totally submerged (for a more familiar example, think of how a hippo swims with just the top of its hear showing above the water.) They can also hold their breath to stay underwater for up to five minutes.

Another significant fact for our purposes here: they are definitely not native to Japan. They’re found in the southern parts of Central America and northern South America.

(Just to throw in a couple more important rodent facts while I’ve got your attention: There are more species of rodents than any other order of mammals (over 1,800), and, rabbits and bats are NOT rodents.)

The Capybara Enjoys Japanese Culture

Why are the Japanese mad about capybaras? I could just attribute it to the fact that they’re the world’s experts in kawaii, and capybaras are so totally obviously adorable. But still, to think they’re cute, people have to know about them in the first place. There weren’t even any capybaras in Japanese zoos before 1970, when the Ueno Zoo got some from Uruguay. So it’s curious that people are familiar with them when we in the US, though much closer to its native habitat, aren’t.

A lot of the credit should probably go to two places that were early leaders in the field of capybara appreciation in Japan. Each started a uniquely Japanese capybara tradition that has spread across the country.

Back in the 1980s, keepers at Izu Shaboten Park, a botanical garden and zoo located in Shizuoka, were inspired to combine the semi-aquatic nature of the capybara with the semi-aquatic part of Japanese culture: they gave them an onsen.

It was actually sort of the animals’ own idea, as explained by a keeper.:

“In the winter of 1982, we were washing the capybara’s exhibit area with hot water when one of the staff noticed the capybara relaxing in a puddle that had formed. From that we got the idea of making an onsen for the capybara so they could bathe in it.”

You can see a photo of the original and current capybara onsen here on their website.

This is such an obviously brilliant idea that it’s since been widely imitated, as we’ve seen on Tofugu before. They even get the traditional yuzu bobbing in their baths in the winter.

Another center of Japanese capybara devotion opened in the 1980s: Nagasaki Bio Park, which one blog calls “the Holy Land of capybaras.”

Nagasaki Bio Park was designed specifically for close-up encounters with animals. Here, visitors can enter the enclosure with the capybaras, hand-feed them, and pet them.

We’d never have capybara onsen in the US because we don’t have onsen, but we’d also never have capybara petting pens, for a couple of reasons. One is that petting animals has become more or less politically incorrect in the zoo business here. Wild animals are supposed to be kept wild, even if there’s no chance they’ll ever be released into their natural habitats, and in my jobs at zoos, what was technically called “animal contact” was frowned upon and strictly regulated.

This attitude doesn’t seem to be shared in Japan, luckily for the capybaras, who from the look of videos like this one seem to enjoy the scratching and belly rubs.

The other reason that we don’t get to know capybaras up close at US zoos is that we’ve got lots of lawyers, and capybaras have lots of large teeth. Even at the BioPark, parents with small children have to listen to a keeper give them a warning talk before entering the enclosure – but if they decide it’s OK, they can go ahead in.

BioPark doesn’t seem to be fearful of lawsuits from people being injured by animals – in fact, you can get personal with much larger critters there, according to their website:

“Especially exciting is hand-feeding large animals such as rhinos and hippos. It’s an experience you cannot expect in every day life.”

Yeah, that’s for sure… But thanks to the exhibit at Bio-Park, petting capybaras has become so popular in Japan that it’s almost getting to be something you can expect in everyday life. It’s now possible in quite a number of other places, such as Nasu Animal Kingdom in Tochigi prefecture, and a friend recently made me very jealous by sending me a photo of her son petting and hand-feeding a baby capybara at Elephant Kingdom (Ichihara Zou no Kuni) in Chiba (more about this later).

So despite the fact that Americans are much nearer to the capybara’s homeland, the Japanese have had much more opportunity to get to know capybaras, and thus to learn to appreciate their somewhat unconventional but undeniable charm.

Capybara becomes a Cartoon Character

Capybaras have really taken off in the last ten years or so, since the real animal merged with another major Japanese cultural tradition: the cute anime character.

Kapibara-san was first introduced as a prize in game arcades in 2003. It became popular enough that after a couple of years the company that created it, called Tryworks, started selling products with the character including books and stuffed toys.

Kapibara-san is far from an anatomically correct scientific illustration of a capybara. The company’s explanation is that when the designer randomly drew a capybara for a presentation, she didn’t remember exactly what one looked like. This strikes me as a sort of implausible and unnecessary origin legend. All you need to do to explain Kapibara-san is to take the basically rectangular shape of a capybara and put it through the universal animal kawaii-processor that softens all the rough edges of a critter. It’s basically the same way we got our not-very-realistic teddy bears (or, taken to an extreme, a cartoon aardvark with no snout at all.) But that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

In 2006 Tryworks introduced a website and additional characters in the Kapibara-san world, which include another South American animal, a llama, and some very round birds. You can buy a full range of Kapibara-san products, including – just looking around my own house now – calendars, towels and washrags, stationery, candy, refrigerator magnets, cell phone charms, and quite a number of other things that I decided I couldn’t fit in my suitcase on my last trip.

If you want to shop efficiently for Kapibara-san goods, head for the Tokyo Station Character Street shopping area, where Kapibara-san has its own store, right alongside world-famous, iconic Japanese characters like Hello Kitty.

Capybara Capitalism

Many others have now seen the commercial potential in the capybara craze. A couple of years ago I checked into an onsen hotel in Toba in Mie Prefecture, and on the hotel desk there was a sign with a picture of a capybara. For a moment I thought this was an elaborate joke that my friend, knowing my obsession, had somehow convinced the hotel to play when she made our reservation. But the sign, which was there to announce that the local aquarium had recently acquired capybaras, had nothing to do with me. The aquarium apparently thought it was enough of a selling point to attract the average Japanese visitor.

Along with the live animals the aquarium had many capybara souvenirs, including sweets in a capybara-shaped box, quite a large number of stuffed toys, mugs, and t-shirts (which, disappointingly, only came in children’s sizes).

Other zoos, aquariums, and museums have taken up the challenge with ingenuity as well. Saitama Children’s Zoo sells ramen with a capybara on the package (don’t worry, no capybara were harmed in its manufacture – it’s yuzu flavored). I also stumbled across fantastic capybara souvenirs in places that only had the most marginal connection to the critters, like this fabulous fan from the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno Park.

And while this isn’t something you can buy, it’s worth noting that Izu Shaboten, originator of the capybara onsen, promotes them in what’s now a traditional Japanese fashion: with people in huge capybara mascot suits.

Capybara Chroniclers

Need to know more about Japanese capybaras? A lot more? There are a number of blogs written by serious capybara fans that know the names, personalities, and family histories of individual capybaras in various zoos and parks around the country. It’s another thing you’d never find in the US, where zoo visitors may know the names of individual elephants and pandas, but animals like the capybara rarely get that kind of detailed attention. Here are a few:

• Capybara Camera
• Capybara Engine
• Masaki Tokutomi’s capybara blog
• Capybara World (in English)

There’s also an incredibly detailed website where you can find out where to see capybaras in Japan. It’s in Japanese, but if you can’t read it, you can get enough of the gist via Google Translate to help get you started on your capybara pilgrimage.

You can even find out where you can pet capybaras – in addition to the places already mentioned, a couple more are at Izu Animal Kingdom in Shizuoka and Fuji Safari Park. There seems to be at least twenty, although it was hard to count, because I was so jealous and so sorry I don’t live in Japan that I couldn’t think straight. There are photos, links, and lot of details about the capybara contact situation for the places the blogger has visited.

Finally, the site also has a list of where you can go see capybara onsen. So what are you waiting for? Go! And send me pictures!

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Bonus Wallpapers!

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Additional Sources

• The history of Kapibara-san
• The first capybaras at Ueno Zoo
• The rules for kids at Nagasaki Bio Park
• Tryworks
• Kapibara-san

Images by Linda Lombardi unless otherwise credited.

While living in Japan, Hello Kitty was unavoidable. My fringe awareness became a full on, hyper-focused red alert of Hello Kitty presence. She was everywhere. And I mean everywhere like Christmas music the day after Halloween. She was on my student’s pen cases, my co-worker’s desk, my friend’s shoes, jewelry, cups, refrigerator magnets, smocks, spoons, hats, cars, everything! I was suffocating in Kitty-chan. But the suffocating wouldn’t have been so bad if everyone around me didn’t love the suffocation so much.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge a character just because it’s popular. But with Hello Kitty I couldn’t understand for the life of me why she was popular. And I had (at the time) two good reasons why she shouldn’t be.

1. Her design is too simple. White face, two dots, yellow nose. Boring! Great character designs like Bugs Bunny or Gundam Zaku have some complexity or originality to their form. They involve something substantial and imaginative you can hold onto.
2. She’s not _from_ anything. We western-types like our vacuous media characters to have a source, like how Mario is from a video game and Spider-man is from a comic book. A lot of characters I like are paper thin in their depth of character but at least I can say, “I really like the cereal they’re from!”

But despite having nothing to hold onto, a lot of people, many of whom I respected as individuals, held onto Hello Kitty for dear life. So what was I missing? Let’s address these gripes in order.

1. Her Design Is Too Simple

My first complaint was that Hello Kitty’s design was too simple. And therein lies the problem, right? Unless you consider what draws us to cartoon characters in the first place. When you strip an image of its details (shading, texture, etc.) down to its essential elements, it becomes less specific. It is no longer a picture of one thing but a representation of that thing.

This is clearly a picture of Tom Hanks. He may be mistaken for someone else, but generally, most people will know this picture represents Tom Hanks.

This still may be recognized as Tom Hanks, but if you look at it in a different way, maybe it looks like someone you work with. The realistic details have been stripped away and now the image may represent a wider range of types of people.

As we trim away the details, he becomes more ambiguous…

And more able to represent anyone.

Now we are about as nonspecific as you can get. A few dots, some lines and a circle. This is incredibly simple and anyone can draw it. But whose face is being depicted? Is it male or female? Old or young? Without the artist giving details about whose face has been drawn, it is up to the viewer to decide what is being seen.

The less specific the image, the more power the viewer has to interpret it. What do you see when you look at Hello Kitty? She is a simplification of a cat, but what kind of attitude or style is she emitting? Visual storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, has this to say about the cartoon form, of which Hello Kitty is a part:

“The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it!”

More than likely, what you’re seeing is you! What does Hello Kitty look like to you? Is she cute or sassy? Grown up or childish? Fun or chic? It mostly depends on who you are and what you want her to be. Her blankness draws you in and allows you to interpret her, and then wear or own her in the style you choose.

But in essence, all cartoons can do this. This interpretation of representation is vital to the cartoon form. So what makes Hello Kitty different?

A Game of Cat and Mouth

Hello Kitty’s ability to be interpreted is taken one step further than, say, Betty Boop or Tintin. The advantage Kitty-chan holds is her lack of a mouth. The reason for this is summed up best by Yuko Yamaguchi, the current character designer (meaning “boss”) of Hello Kitty:

“[She doesn't have a mouth] so that people who look at her can project their own feelings onto her face, because she has an expressionless face. Kitty looks happy when people are happy. She looks sad when they are sad. For this psychological reason, we thought she shouldn’t be tied to any emotion – and that’s why she doesn’t have a mouth.”

The power of Hello Kitty’s interpretation now extends a layer deeper, beyond our idea of what she represents into our idea of what she is feeling. This gives her life in our minds, in a way that “mouthed” cartoons can’t. What Mickey Mouse is feeling at any given moment, not counting his situation or environment, can be clearly seen through his mouth. Hello Kitty, lacking this feature, could be feeling anything at any time! And thus whatever we may be feeling can and probably does get transferred onto her face.

2. She’s not from anything

What about my second gripe, the one where I say that Hello Kitty comes from “nothing”? Well, that too is remedied by her inane face. The same way in which she absorbs the interpretations and feelings of her viewer, she also absorbs the surroundings of the designs she inhabits. Put her in a pink dress surrounded by hearts and butterflies, and oh! She is so adorable! Put her in black and white on a designer wallet and how retro chic she becomes! Oh, and put her in a Godzilla costume. She looks right at home there, too.

No matter where you put her that’s where she belongs. And that’s why she can’t “be from” something. Her lack of definition works for her yet again. She’s from “nowhere” and “everywhere” at the same time.

INTRODUCING! Mr. Rounded-Edge Rectangle Head Man!

So there it is! I have unlocked the secret to the multimillion dollar success of Hello Kitty. Coincidentally, I am proud to announce my new character, Mr. Rounded-Edge Rectangle Head Man!

I’ll be putting him on cycling gloves and fanny-packs, so get ready to mail me all your money!

No dice?

Oh wait, I forgot. There is another pair of creations by Sanrio that are not nearly as popular as Hello Kitty:

Patty and Jimmy! Despite being simplified and having no mouth, these two are hideous and unpopular. But they got the formula down, so what’s the problem?

This Little Kitty Went to Market

Kitty-chan’s design, genius though it may be, was not enough to bring her billions right off the bat. Even though she had early success, there was a long process of good luck and good decision-making before she really started raking in the fanbucks.

Hello Kitty creator Yuko Shimizu was tasked with creating six characters for Sanrio in 1974. Among these was an unassuming white cat. Shimizu was keen enough to realize that simplicity was important for the characters she designed, but she didn’t understand the impact of removing Hello Kitty’s mouth.

“I couldn’t express the mouth in a cute way, so I decided not to use it.”

That was the genius move that set Kitty apart. A happy accident. The decision behind the defining feature of this iconic character was a lack of decision.

But Shimizu’s indecision was fruitful and her character was immediately successful among young girls. In the beginning, Hello Kitty was only printed on small gifts like stationery and watches, usually sitting on a couch or cutely flying a bi-plane. The following fifteen or so years saw a steady decline in popularity for Kitty-chan. She remained a mildly popular children’s commodity until the children began to grow up.

In 1994 Sanrio launched Hello Kitty’s “Face Series” to extend her appeal to an older audience. Sanrio had spent twenty years selling Kitty goods to children and had begun to grasp the power of her meaningless face. The attachment of kids to this character was strong and it would be foolish to let that attachment weaken as they grew older. The “Face Series” was Sanrio’s first attempt to market Hello Kitty products to teens and adults. Oh, and it worked. Big time. Biggly large time.

Sanrio continued its smartness in the early 2000s when it conducted research which concluded that one third of people shopping in the U.S. were over eighteen and shopping for themselves. Surprise! Five-year-olds have no money. This led to Kitty goods which encompassed more sophisticated items such as lingerie, guitars and designer watches.

At the present time, Hello Kitty has become empress of the merchandising world. Her malleable visage graces everything for everyone, from dollar bin tissue boxes to designer purses. She is bought by grown women with a sense for high fashion and young girls who “wike kitties.” This cat’s power is astounding.

The White Queen

Do I still hate Hello Kitty? Not at all. I’m not a fan in the traditional sense, but I find the unintentional genius of her design and the business acumen with which she was put to use utterly fascinating. The power of the consumer to mentally project whatever meaning they want onto your product means you lose control of your product, but gain control of the consumer. You basically have the power to sell consumer’s selves to themselves!

The concept of this kind of power inhabiting a modest white cat makes her seem so much more formidable. She has a great power to grant the comfort of her world built around one’s own wishes, but with it maintains the control of all who love her. She is no mere mascot, but a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love her, and despair!

Or perhaps that’s just how I choose to interpret her.

Sources:

• TIME Magazine
• Buying In by Rob Walker
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Wikipedia

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Bonus Wallpapers!

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