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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The information available on Japanese animation before 1950, at least in English, is limited at best and conflicting at worst. The actual animated films themselves as well as records of who created what and when has mostly been destroyed. This is due to 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake and later the American invasion of the islands. Aside from that, animation was treated as disposable entertainment, as was most animation in the rest of the world at that time. Thus, little has survived.

Thankfully, most of the animated work that remains has been preserved digitally and is available online! It should be mentioned that most of the silent animation presented in this article is “incomplete” in that it lacks benshi narration. When film began to spread throughout Japan, rather than accepting it as an evolution of photography as the west did, it was viewed as an extension of theater. Since kabuki, noh, and bunraku theater traditions all had narrators, naturally film needed one as well. Enter the benshi, a narrator who not only read the aloud the onscreen intertitles, but also described the film’s events in real time and gave voice to each and every character. Two of the films embedded in this article benefit from recorded benshi narration. The rest are “incomplete”.

While I will be sprinkling bits of information I’ve uncovered regarding the roots of anime, make sure to give special attention to the cartoons themselves. What awaits you is a moving history of initially simplistic paper cut-outs giving way to experimental art, funny animal cartoons, sing along-songs, chalk animation, traditional folktales, and full-length feature films. And this is all before Tezuka. Welcome to an often overlooked world. Enjoy yourself.

The Three Fathers (1907-1923)

Film first hit Japan in 1896 and had flourished into burgeoning culture by the 1910s, complete with film criticism. Along with the initial wave of films from the west came Western animation. It was only a matter of time before Japan, with its rich visual culture, began experimenting with its own animated creations.

The earliest example (speculated to be the oldest surviving anime) is Katsudo Shashin (Moving Picture, 1907?-1918?).

The boy is writing the kanji for katsudo shashin which translates to “moving picture” in English. It seems that in these early years, both Japan and the west were amused enough with the novelty of an image in motion.

In the early 1900s, animators experimented with inexpensive ways to bring their visions to life. Katsudo Shashin and many others were drawn directly onto the strips of film from which they were projected, making these animations one of a kind. This and other early animation techniques were pioneered by Oten Shimokawa, a political cartoonist for Tokyo Puck magazine. His first animated work, Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki (The Story of the Concierge Mukuzo Imokawa, 1917) was long believed to be the first animated short made in Japan, though it is likely still the first short ever screened for a wide audience.

After creating only five shorts, chronic health problems forced Shimokawa into early retirement. His contribution, however, gives him the honor as one of the three fathers of early anime.

The second of the three fathers is Junichi Kouichi, who holds the honor of the oldest confirmed anime in existence (Katsudo Shashin could have been made as early as 1907, but there is no real proof as to its age). Namakura Gatana (Dull Sword, 1917) is a two minute short about a samurai attempting to test his newly purchased katana on innocent townspeople and failing miserably.

This film was thought to be lost until a copy was found in an Osaka antique shop in 2008. Kouichi animated this short using paper cut-outs laid out on a table which he moved and changed to create the characters’ movements. This was a technique that would later be taken to a level of artistic excellence by the Japanese animation directors of the 1930s.

Junichi Kouichi began creating political propaganda in 1924 and retired from animation in 1930.

The third father of this generation had arguably the most impact on the generation that followed him, mostly because he had the largest body of work and many animators of the 1930s were his students. Seitarou Kitayama created shorts focusing on Japanese folktales like Sarukani Gassen (Monkey-Crab Battle), Urashima Taro, and Momotarou. Aside from creating anime’s first commercials and documentary, Kitayama stood apart from his contemporaries as the only animator to found his own studio.

Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo opened in 1921 and gave jobs to a slew of talented individuals including Sanae Yamamoto. Sadly after only two years, most of Kitayama’s studio was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. He left Tokyo for a fresh start in Osaka the next year, but eventually abandoned animation completely for a career shooting newsreels.

Experimental Artists (1923-1939)

With the destruction of Kitayama’s studio, his team of animators struck out on their own to seek prosperity in personal ventures. But success did not come easily. Throughout the 20s, animation directors faced stiff foreign competition from larger, richer, and more impressive studios overseas. The imported cartoons had already made money in their home countries, so they were sold cheaply to theaters in Japan. Animation artists could not implement the expensive techniques used by Disney and still sell their cartoons at a competitive price. This made the paper cut-out methods introduced by Junichi Kouichi an absolute must. This limitation, however, led to some extremely innovative cut-out films by two men, Yasuji Murata and Noburo Ofuji.

Yasuji Murata began working at the Yokohama Cinema Shokai in 1923 creating the Japanese intertitle cards for imported western films. After seeing various western cartoons, he was inspired to create his own in 1927. He worked almost exclusively for the Yokohama Cinema Shokai throughout his career. His first work to get attention was Doubutsu Orimupikku Taikai (Animal Olympics, 1928) a cartoon about funny animals playing sports. However, one of the best examples of his range and artistic skill is Kobu Tori (The Stolen Lump, 1929).

Kobu Tori

Consider that Disney made Skeleton Dance this same year, and, though technically impressive, it is horrendously boring compared to Kobu Tori. In Kobu Tori, the contrast is moody, the characters are vibrant, the attention to detail more than makes up for the slightly limited movements, and most importantly it’s a story well told! Kobu Tori is a perfect example of what wonders Japanese animators could produce despite their lack of funding and resources.

Because foreign cartoons dominated movie theaters of the time, Japanese animation had difficulty finding a venue in which to be screened. A lot of anime from this period was screened in public shopping areas to generate interest. The Ministry of Education also encouraged Japanese animators to produce films that were educational or socially uplifting, thus allowing them to be screened in schools. This was the case with Yasuji Murata’s Taro-san no Kisha (Taro’s Train, 1929).

Taro’s Train

Taro-san no Kisha (Taro’s Train) is an interesting mix of live action and animation as well as a neat peek into the fashion and homes in 1920s Japan. Also, it teaches kids to not act like insane animals in public, which is a good lesson for children all over the world.

Murata’s film, Oira No Yakyu (Our Baseball, 1930) is a return to the sports setting he first utilized in Animal Olympics. This cartoon mixes the Western funny animal cartoon with Japanese elements, in this case the folktale Kachi Kachi Yama, a story of a fight between a tanuki and a rabbit. This particular YouTube video is a restoration of Oira no Yakyu by Digital Meme which includes benshi narration.

Oira no Yakyu

Oira no Sukii (Our Skiing Trip, 1930) is either a sequel or prequel to Oira no Yakyu, as they were both produced in 1930 and we don’t have exact dates for either. This film has a distinct advantage over its counterpart due to extensive magical transformations utilized by the tanuki and rabbits. Or at least, that’s what I think. This video also benefits from benshi narration.

Oira no Sukii

Murata was a master of cut-out animation with strengths in skill, quality, and consistency. Murata’s opposite was cut-out master, Noburo Ofuji, whose strengths were in innovation and the willingness to take creative risks.

Ofuji became the apprentice of Junichi Kouichi at age 18 and made his first film at age 24. His films are characterized by the use of chiyogami paper. Though this gives his films a distinct Japanese look, the choice to use chiyogami was more practical than artistic. Chiyogami was cheaper by far than drawing on expensive celluloid and made inexpensive paper cut-out animation even more affordable. Even after gaining success and resources, Ofuji continued to use chiyogami as his medium of choice.

Ofuji’s achievements went beyond his aesthetic superiority. He was also an innovator. Though films with synchronous soundtracks had been introduced in the United States and Europe in 1927, they had not yet reached Japan by 1929. This was largely due to opposition from benshi narrators who wanted to hold onto their star status. Though he lacked the resources to create a true “talkie”, Ofuji created the first “record talkie”, in which he put to film an animation that synced up perfectly with an existing jazz record. The venue simply had start the film and the record at the same time and the audience would see Japan’s first sound cartoon, Kuro Nyago (Black Cat, 1929).

Kuro Nyago

One of Ofuji’s most famous shorts is a prime example of the fun-loving spirit his chiyogami animations could create. Mura Matsuri (Village Festival, 1930) is a real treat. It takes the “follow the bouncing ball” sing-along motif and spins it in new directions. This idea was relatively new at the time, having only been introduced five years earlier by Fleischer studios. Ofuji makes his bouncing ball interact with the scenery, transform words into objects, and transform itself into character heads. The song in this film is one I gladly get stuck in my head on a regular basis.

Mura Matsuri

The following year, Ofuji released another sing-along, this time tinted pink and intended to teach children the importance of national symbols, namely sakura. It’s interesting to note that though Haru no Uta (Song of Spring, 1931) is very nationally-focused, the music is undeniably Western. The singer, Kikuko Inoue, was a singer from the Asakusa Opera, which was one of the major channels through which western music was introduced to Japan.

Song of Spring

Noburo Ofuji begins to stray a bit from happy sing-alongs and into more serious territory with Kokka Kimigayo (The National Anthem: Kimigayo, 1931). Made to play along with a record of the national anthem, this film begins to more closely mimic silhouette animation of German animator Lotte Reiniger. The silhouettes in Kokka Kimigayo are cut with amazing detail and the backgrounds are beautifully complex.

Kokka Kimigayo

HOORAY! Now we get into Ofuji’s cartoony stuff! Tengu Taiji (Tengu Extermination, 1934) is a great example of Noburo Ofuji’s foray into cel animation. It’s fascinating to see such familiar cartoon imagery repurposed for Japanese storytelling. This one is similar to a lot of 1930s cartoons, but has samurai, geisha, a cute doggy, and TENGU! I could say more, but you’re better off just watching it.

Tengu Extermination

Our final look at the work of Noburo Ofuji is the film that cemented him as a master of animation in the art world. Kujira (Whale, 1952) is a remake of his 1927 silent black-and-white film, Kujira (Whale, 1927). The 1952 version features cut-outs of colored cellophane arranged on a backlit multi-plane animation table. This allowed him to create intricate backgrounds and transitions. The story explores themes of greed, female suffering, forces of nature, and transformation. It’s a truly beautiful experience.

NOTE: The only upload of this film to the web at the time of writing is by a composer named Ufjar who has replaced the original soundtrack with his own score.

Kujira

Kujira was shown at Cannes in 1953 and gained significant praise from jury president Jean Cocteau and a certain member of the audience named Pablo Picasso. This began Ofuji’s wide acceptance in the international art world.

After Noburo Ofuji passed away in 1961, the Mainichi Film Awards named their prize for animation excellence the “Ofuji Noburo Award” in 1962. The first winner of the Ofuji Noburo Award was none other than Osamu Tezuka.

More From The Thirties!

The 30s produced a wide array of Japanese animation ranging from impressive works of art to weird crumminess. This section presents samples from all parts of that spectrum. In 1931, the first war cartoon Sora no Momotarou (Aerial Momotarou, 1931) was released, marking the beginning of a steady increase in war propaganda until it was serious propaganda time in 1939.

Chameko no Ichinichi (A Day in the Life of Chameko, 1931) was a record-talkie intended to play simultaneously with a phonograph of the same name. Chameko no Ichinichi was a popular song a year before it was animated. The animation is stiffer than Murata’s and much less charming than Ofuji’s, but it does feature the earliest example of product placement in anime. Watch for Chameko’s endorsement of Lion Toothpaste in the tooth brushing scene.

Chameko no Ichinichi

Kori no Tatehiki (Raccoon and Fox Trick Each Other, 1933) is another fun little romp. Certainly one of the best looking Japanese cartoons of the time, it borrows heavily from the style of Fleischer cartoons. It’s a tad more polished than Tengu Taiji and offers some fun gags as the tanuki and fox one-up each other with magic tricks and transformation.

Kori no Tatehiki

Yasuji Murata offers up another folktale in the same style as Kobu Tori with his film, Umi no Mizu wa Naze Karai (Why is Sea Water Salty?, 1935). Though this film hasn’t been preserved as well as Kobu Tori, you can clearly see how much more skillful Murata became in just a few years. The animation is incredibly refined and it’s nearly impossible to tell that it’s made using paper cut-outs. The entire film shines as a story clearly told by someone who has mastered the elements of visual storytelling.

Umi no Mizu wa Naze Karai

One of the first manga characters to gain widespread popularity was Norakuro. Created by Suihou Tagawa in 1931, the manga focused on a stray dog who joined the dog army, clearly an allusion to the Imperial Japanese Army. He began his army career as a bumbling private and eventually rose through the ranks to become a less-interesting sergeant. The manga, and the cartoons it spawned, did not start out as propaganda, but as the the war began and escalated, Norakuro became an obvious choice for propaganda-tainment. This particular anime adaptation, Norakuro Nitohei (Norakuro, Private Second Class, 1935) was directed by Mitsuyo Seo.

Norakuro Nitohei

Hecks yeah! Ninjustu Hinotama Kozo: Edo no Maki (Ninja Fireball Boy: An Episode in Edo, 1935) is a one minute adventure of ninja silliness. One source claims that it is a longer cartoon truncated for personal viewing, but we’ll never know for sure because this is the only copy in existence. Everything happens so fast, it’s hard to tell what’s taking place. It definitely involves a lot of ninja magic. Please leave your idea of what the heck is going on in the comments below.

Ninjutsu Hinotama Kozo: Edo no Maki

Obake no Taiji (Monster Hunt, 1936) is another dose of serious fun. It’s a tad crummier than Kori no Tatehiki, but what it lacks in technical presentation it makes up for in creativity. It’s rather reminiscent of Fleischer Studios’ 1930 Bimbo cartoon Swing You Sinners! in that it shows a lot of imagination in its setups, character transformations, and villains.

Obake no Taiji

Forgotten Artists

Toward the end of the 1930s, most cartoons began to lean in the direction of war propaganda. That, in itself, is an interesting study, especially since the quality of Japanese animation began to approach that of Disney. Furthermore, most all the anime from this period was directed by one man, Mitsuyo Seo. He directed the first feature-length anime, Momotarou Umi no Shimpei (Momotarou: Divine Sea Warriors, 1945), which was financed by the Japanese Navy.

In 1948, the Toei Animation studio was founded and began situating itself to become the Disney of the east. It produced a good number of interesting shorts and features which had a predominant Disney aesthetic. The 1950s were an interesting decade for Japanese animation because several creative forces were taking anime in different directions, and it’s fun to imagine what anime would look like today if something other than Tezuka had succeeded in capturing Japan’s collective consciousness. However, destiny chose Osamu Tezuka as the god of manga (and by extension, anime) and no one can say he doesn’t deserve that title. Anime’s characteristic big eyes came from Tezuka’s fascination with Disney’s Bambi, and its signature character movements came from Tezuka’s plan to temporarily limit animation to cut costs, a plan that eventually became permanent and was adopted by the entire industry.

There is a good reason that most retellings of anime’s history begin with Tezuka. What we know today as “anime” started with him. However, a history of Japanese animation is not complete without Kouichi, Kitayama, Murata, Ofuji, and many others. These artists are seldom remembered though they worked exceptionally hard to compete with well-funded foreign animation. All of them succeeded in creating Japanese art in an imported foreign medium, and a few of them succeeded in turning their practical limitations into artistic assets. These artists are mostly forgotten because the influence they have on our present is much less than the ongoing influence of Osamu Tezuka. But when you watch these early anime, try to imagine the affect it had on the people in the time it was made and how important it was for them to see samurai and tengu in the same medium as Mickey Mouse. Most entertainment and art we consume today will not be remembered in a hundred years, because people in that future time won’t understand our context. But that doesn’t make our art any less important. Nothing can devalue it for us. And nothing can change how important any piece of art was for people who saw it in days gone by.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• The Anime Encyclopedia by Jonathan Clements & Helen McCarthy
• Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics by Frederik L. Schodt
• A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie
• Nishikata Film Review by Cathy Munroe Hotes
• AnimeVice.com Encyclopedia
• Antti Alanen: Film Diary
• Pioneer of Japanese Animation at PIFan by Jasper Sharp [Part 1] and [Part 2]
• Japanese Animation Filmography Project by Cathy Munroe Hotes

2013. Yasufumi Ono made comments about the state of Japanese gaming at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto. Currently, Japan controls a mere 30% of the market share in North America and only 13% worldwide. The horn of plenty has become a trombone of self-doubt. Why isn’t the world buying Japanese games anymore? Has Japan lost its touch?

There are several factors at play here. When Japan swooped in to grasp the field mouse that was U.S. gaming, that mouse was dead. Thankfully Japan brought the mouse back to life and became the sole devourer of its innards. Today there is more than one falcon-country eyeing those rodent intestines, namely the U.S., South Korea, and Finland.

Also, Japan doesn’t make the games that western countries presently want to play, games in the “Call of Battlefield: Ghost Ops II” category. Japan makes games more along the lines of Dungeon Monster DX: The Fire! Time was, you could take your Dungeon Monster games and package them so your average Todds and Brandons would buy them. That’s been a challenge Japan has yet to surmount in this modern era. But why is this such a challenge if it wasn’t before?

Instant Connection

When we hear a story, our mind does its best to connect us to the story’s main character. We want to get to know that character so we can become the hero and experience the tale explicitly. In traditional storytelling, this is no easy task. It takes a witch’s brew of situation, exposition, and time to make a character connection with an audience. And few writers ever know what’s going to work in a given story.

Video games don’t have this problem. It’s a unique storytelling medium. The connection a game character has to the player is almost immediate. My go-to storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, best explains why, by summarizing philosophy first put forth by Marshall McLuhan:

When driving, for example, we experience much more than our five senses report. The whole car—not just the parts we can see, feel and hear—is very much on our minds at all times. The vehicle becomes an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity. We become the car. If one car hits another, the driver of the vehicle being struck is much more likely to say: “Hey! He hit me!!” than “he hit my car!” or “his car hit my car,” for that matter.

So, in touching and controlling the car, your mind makes the car an extension of yourself. The same happens when playing a game. That touch of the controller and your control over the avatar gives your mind the same connection. The hero is a virtual extension of you. You become the hero as soon as you start the game.

This explains why games with subpar stories can still be great games. Your connection to the experience is immediate and doesn’t require a fantastic story to draw you in. If the game is enjoyable, you keep playing because you like your role as the hero. But what happens when you don’t like the hero you become?

Different Heroes For Different Hemispheres

Back to the Inifinity Ventures Summit (we were talking about that, right?). Some interesting statements were made by Sega/Sammy president, Hajime Satomi. Read below his hypothesis on why Japanese games fail to make an impact in the U.S. And Europe:

Europeans and North Americans like strong people, so the main character has to be a fully-grown, middle-aged man. On the other hand, in Asia, people like stories about middle or high school students growing up or becoming stronger. As you make games for more dedicated players, I think you have to be aware of those differences.

This makes sense when you consider characters from best-selling games in the U.S. from the past ten years: Kratos, Nathan Drake, Master Chief, Niko Bellic, Marcus Fenix, and that hooded guy from Assassin’s Creed. All severely grizzled, middle-aged combat types.

Compare that with some of Japan’s top character picks, plucked from a Famitsu poll of readers’ favorite characters: Link, Sora, Yuri Lowell, Sakura Shinguji, and Cloud Strife. All very ungrizzled and full of youthful optimism for the adventures of life (until they enter the job market).

There is some crossover, of course. Both east and west love Chris Redfield, Solid Snake, Link and Cloud. But there is something to Satomi’s ideas. There is clearly a difference in hero preference between hemispheres.

So if Japan once ruled the western gaming market, they must have created games with middle-aged heroes. Not necessarily.

Let’s Compare Some Box Art!

This is a simple exercise. I will present three games released both in Japan and the U.S. We will observe the in-game pixelated sprites that represent the main character(s) and the art on the boxes for the Japanese and U.S. releases of the game. Let’s begin.

DOWNTOWN NEKKETSU MONOGATARI vs. RIVER CITY RANSOM

The in-game character looks pretty cartoony. Could be any age.

Japanese Box Art:

The Japanese release of the game suggests the characters are young high school students.

US Box Art:

But the U.S. release suggests they are weird 36-year-old dudes! Despite that “River City High School” sign behind them, these two are clearly just there to pick up their kids from baseball practice.

ROCKMAN 2 vs. MEGA MAN 2

The age-neutral Mega Man sprite we know and love.

Japanese Box Art:

Japan gets some great art that actually looks a good deal like our robot friend on the screen.

U.S. Box Art:

America gets a welder with a broken foot and ray gun. He’s a weirdo, but he’s a grown-up combat weirdo!

DRAGON QUEST II vs. DRAGON WARRIOR II

Here’s the in-Game Characters – Japan & U.S.

These in-game characters could be impetuous teens or seasoned adventurers.

Japanese Box Art:

The art for Dragon Quest II features Akira Toriyama’s youthful depictions of the heroes, which have become a staple of the series.

U.S. Box Art:

The American release of Dragon Warrior II is, again, a band of fully-grown adults. These heroes promised each other in college that when they turned 40, they would reunite for a quest to Las Vegas.

Finding Ourselves

So what does this box art comparison mean, exactly? I’ll get to that in a second.

The heroes on our TV screens during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras were less defined and more iconic, and thus more easily interpreted. I touched on this in my article about Hello Kitty, so for a more detailed and Tom Hanks-oriented explanation of icons.

But there was another force at play, helping us interpret our pixel friends. That force is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the psychological effect of your mind to favor information that coincides with your preconceptions. Traditionally, confirmation bias is used to describe how we gather information to make rational (or irrational) decisions. Recently, however, a young philosophy blogger named Sam McNerney introduced this idea:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making…With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments… Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Since the pixelated hero images transmit so little information as to what they are, players needed the box art to confirm their bias of what they wanted to see, in this case, their bias of what they think, aesthetically, a hero should look like. Japanese gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is a youngling,” and the box art confirmed their bias. Western gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is muscular manbeast,” and their different box art confirmed their different bias.

Since video games, as we said earlier, offer an instant connection for the player, it is imperative that the player like that connection. Giving players the chance to connect to the heroes they wanted to be helped to ensure they would not put down the controller and, furthermore, keep buying games.

The Beginning Of The End

So that’s it. Everyone was happy, and all it took was paying two artists to do the same job. It’s easier to sell people what they expect than to challenge their perceptions. Unfortunately, this box art trick got harder to pull off as console gaming entered the world of polygons in 1995. Keeping the hero’s in-game appearance ambiguous got a little trickier.

Such was the case with The Legend of Zelda‘s transition from 2D to 3D. For the most part, early polygonal models could still be interpreted by both cultures as the heroes they wanted to be. And so it was with 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64. EVERYONE loved this game. The main character, Link, started out as a kid but later grew into an adult. But what kind of adult? A grizzled one, probably.

How old is this adult Link? Fifteen or thirty-five?

When the first Zelda game for the 128-bit Gamecube was announced, Americans eagerly anticipated their powerful adult Link to appear in new, beautifully rendered 12 million polygons per second! It was at this point Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to have Link represented as a very cartoony boy child in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Americans went nuts. Angry nuts! Link had always been an elfin lad since the very beginning, according to the series’ story, but in pixel world and the American mind, he was nice and grizzled. For the first time, gamers were faced with a Link they could not interpret to their liking. Despite The Wind Waker being a gaming triumph, it sold a mere 3.07 million copies worldwide, compared to Ocarina of Time’s 7.6 million.

It was around this time, Japan’s control over the gaming industry began to wane. Of course, it was not solely due to the unambiguous heroes. The Xbox launched with incredible success in 2001, eating away at a large part of the North American market share previously held by Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. American video game companies, having learned from two decades of great Japanese games, started making games just as good or better. The spike in popularity that Japanese pop culture saw in 1999 was diminishing by the mid 2000’s, banishing anime from general acceptance back to the cavern of the nerds, which also meant the unmistakably Japanese video game heroes were banished as well (unless they were grizzled).

In our modern era, we have our two camps making games for themselves. American game companies churning out gritty power lunks and Japanese companies churning out sleek action teens. And we like it that way, apparently. Only a small fraction from each side is interested in games from the other.

The Sun Also Rises

2014. In a few months, the next Infinity Ventures Summit will be held in Sapporo and the Japanese gaming industry will gather once again to discuss the future, the past being a non-issue. The truth is, Japan will likely never again rule the video game world as it once did. The special circumstances of an evacuated market and technology that was easily localized is gone forever. Global competition and the advent of mobile/social gaming has changed the industry so nobody knows what to expect anymore. (BIRDS being angry at PIGS?! Nobody saw that one coming.)

But that’s okay. Industries change. When Georges Méliès and the Edison Trust dominated the film industry, it was only a matter of time before other artists from around the world said, “I want to do that, too!” Film expanded until people loved it so much that certain individuals began making films simply as artistic expression.

The Infinity Ventures Summit is a gathering of companies, so their primary concern should be how to sucker people out of money (using video games, hopefully). But games are made by artists, so I hope when these artists gather in May, they will talk, at least individually, about how to move video games forward as medium, how to push boundaries and make something people have never seen before. There will always be success in giving people what they expect. But there is a truer reward in creating something that changes peoples’ minds.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• Why doesn’t Japan like first-person shooters? Old characters and World War II, says Sega exec, by Casey Baseel
• Confirmation Bias and Art, by Samuel McNerney
• LVLs. Cultural Anxiety Features
• Famitsu’s Top 50 Video Game Characters

While my “you can’t learn Japanese from anime” words were meant for those people, there is a way to watch anime where you do actually learn something. In fact, you can learn quite a bit if you try really hard. That’s what language learning is, isn’t it? Whoever tries the hardest is the winner, and the method (while important) doesn’t dictate whether or not you make it to the end. So, in order to help those of you who are learning Japanese and just happen to have an anime addiction, this article is for you.

Step 1: Ditching (Then Unditching) The Subtitles

First thing is first. You gotta get rid of the subtitles. If there’s English (or any language you’re proficient in) anywhere on the video screen then you’re doing yourself a disservice. The human brain takes the easy way out 99.9% of the time. If the option is there and it doesn’t hurt all that much it will take that option. If the subtitles are there it will process the subtitles – the Japanese audio in the background will not be processed.

A lot of anime, whether it’s on Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, or *ahem* some other source, will have the option to remove the subtitles. With the first few sources, that ability is in the video options. With the “other” source, that option is usually under “video” in VLC (if that’s what you’re using to play these video files). If the option isn’t there, then you’re not going to be able to study using that video so I’d suggest trying something else.

After that, it’s time to get some subtitles.

“What?” asks the person living inside this article. “But I thought you told me to get rid of them!”

Well, good citizen, this time we’re adding in Japanese subtitles. Sometimes you’ll be able to turn on Japanese subtitles. Other times you’ll have to download them. There are various sites out there (Google it), but this is one of them. One way to go about it is to look through this list and find things you either like or are interested in. That will help you out in the future, because studying with anime actually takes most of the joy out of anime (warning you now). It is hard work, after all.

You’ll want to download the subtitles and add them to your video. Usually this just involves putting the subtitle file in the same folder as the video it belongs to. Other times you can load the subtitle file via the media player you use. If you’re not familiar, you may have to do some searching around to get it working. It will also depend on the subtitle file type too.

Step 2: Laying The Groundwork

This is where things get… study-y. Certain subtitle types will have trouble with this. Others will work a-ok. Using a text editor (or often cases an application you’d use to program with, like Sublime Text) open up the subtitle file. You may need to change the encoding of the file to Japanese as well. Just something else to look out for.

If you’re on the intermediate-to-advanced side of your Japanese learning journey, you can stop right here. If you’re on the more-like-a-beginner side, keep reading this section.

For you, this is going to be really hard. It’s not going to help you to just look at things and read them, as it will probably take forever and you could be using your time much more effectively somewhere else (like by learning kanji, or really most anything). If you’re at a more intermediate level, but perhaps a lower one, it might be helpful to download the English subtitles of the same anime and episode as well. You can open them like the Japanese ones and then use the timestamps to compare the Japanese with the English meaning. Don’t use this as a crutch, but use it to make sure you’re not completely off with any translations (and to help you when you get stuck). In addition to intermediate level learners, this can be helpful for advanced learners as well. Just use this crutch less and less the less you need it. Remember, our brains just take the easy way out whenever they are able so don’t trust it!

Step 3: Break Out The Vocab

Go through each word and make sure you know the meaning of it. If you’re having trouble figuring out what word something is, plop it into the search field in beta Jisho (or regular Jisho if you’re reading this in the future), which will take words in sentences then break them down into usable, more easily definable pieces. I’d recommend writing down all the words you don’t know or putting them in a spreadsheet. This isn’t so much for study but for keeping track of what you’re learning. The more you treat learning like a science with data the faster you’ll be learning in the long run. Plus, it’s nice to come back and see what you know and don’t know later on when you’ve been doing this a while. It will also make it easier to make sure you’re not doubling up words.

After you have them in a spreadsheet, put them into your SRS of choice. Some of these applications will let you import via a spreadsheet (how convenient!). You’ll want to use your own vocab studying method here, as there are many (and people like doing their own thing). The most important thing is you learn all these items before moving on to the “watch the episode” step.

Continue pulling out vocab and learning them until you’ve finished a “scene” in the anime. This is going to depend on the anime. This might take a long time for you or it might be fairly quick. Just know that the more you do this the faster it will go. Each time will be better than the last but the first 10-20 times is really, really painful.

When you know all the words in a scene, it’s time to take a look at the scene itself.

Step 4: Can You Read It?

Make sure you can read everything on the Japanese subtitles. Read it out loud, because this is a lot more telling than reading it in your head. You don’t have to be able to read it at the speed of the anime (yet), but you do need to be able to read it at a moderate speed. Once you are able to read it it’s time to fire up the video file.

Step 5: Shadowing

Now we’re going to do something called “language shadowing.” This involves reading the text along with the speaker, in this case the anime character, narrator, or whatever. This is a lot like singing along with a song. You learn the tones and intonation of a song when you do this, until you can sing the song somewhat in tune (your friends will disagree). Shadowing and reading along with someone speaking is a lot like this and will help you develop pronunciation abilities. That being said, be careful to not mimic people who don’t sound like people… In anime this is much more prevalent, so if you don’t know what you’re doing you could be training yourself to sound like a weirdo.

Various video players will have various options, but VLC has a “jump back X seconds” shortcut. Look it up for your operating system and use that to jump back over and over to the same sentence or two until you’ve perfected it and can speak up to speed. Once you’re able, move on to the next one until you’ve finished the whole section. Now go back to the beginning of the section for one big hurrah of a speak through. Do you feel like you’ve learned something?

Improving Over Time

The good things about this method of study are that it teaches you a lot of vocab over a long period of time, it helps with pronunciation, and is hopefully fun for you. The bad things? It’s hard. Damn hard. Especially if you’re not an advanced learner. That being said, I’d recommend this for advanced learners and maybe some motivated upper-intermediate ones. After doing this for a while (months, probably) you’ll start to really see an improvement. It will feel like you’re beating your head against a wall for a long time and then suddenly *bam!* you get better. That’s because getting better at a language is more like climbing up a giant set of stairs. You can’t see where you’re going until you reach the top of the step you’re working on.

I hope this article helps you to turn your anime addiction into something a little more studious. If not, well, at least you’re having a good time I suppose.

Since studying this way involves a lot of kanji knowledge, one way to make this type of study more effective and time-efficient would be to learn more kanji. Of course, we do WaniKani for doing that, but there are of course other methods as well.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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But even though Japan is rocking the Casbah when it comes to the number of newspapers people are reading each day, there’s some serious work to be done with the reporting in those papers. According to Reporters Without Borders, Japan dropped 31 places in the World Press Freedom Index in 2013. Kind of strange for a liberal democracy, right? Welcome to the secret world of “kisha clubs.”

Kisha Clubs: What They Do And How They Do It

Kisha (記者) or “reporter” clubs are exclusive groups of reporters from major Japanese newspapers, like the Yomiuri Shinbun and the Asahi Shinbun, who set up camp in government and political party offices. The clubs receive press releases from whatever agency or business they’re assigned to cover. (Usually the agency’s PR offices are right down the hall from the kisha club – so convenient!)

The reporters in the club then edit or paraphrase those press releases to publish in their respective newspapers. Besides reading and revising a whole lot of press releases, kisha clubs also organize press conferences. (The life of a kisha club member: So excite; much report.)

And if you ask the Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association), there are super duper awesome reasons for keeping kisha clubs around. For one thing, they sort through gobs of boring political information, for which everyone is grateful. And although it leads to some pretty homogenous news articles – sometimes quite literally, with identical articles being printed in competing newspapers – kisha clubs receive news incredibly fast. After all, they’re in the same building as their sources.

They’re also a united front: plucky reporters against shifty politicians. Who would dare withhold political information when you have an entire kisha club staring you down? Kisha clubs run on the Wildcats principle…

We’re all in this together.

Majorly Bad Business

The problem is, well, journalism doesn’t really work that way. A journalist’s role is to hold feet to the fire, not give foot massages. (Okay, that metaphor got a little weird.) What I’m trying to say is that journalism works best when it works for the people and not for politicians. Kisha clubs, by their very nature, go against journalistic principles of working independently and maintaining an objective distance from news sources – not acting as a mouthpiece for them. And when these ideals get thrown out the window, all sorts of sketchy things start to occur.

We don’t even need to look very far for one particularly glaring example: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011. (To catch everyone up to speed: A terrible domino effect occurred in March 2011 when the Tohoku earthquake hit Japan, which triggered a tsunami, which resulted in a catastrophic failure at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, releasing all sorts of radiation into the surrounding area.)

There was not much investigative reporting following the disaster and very little transparency from the government about subsequent radiation levels, evacuees, and how this disaster could have been averted.

The company in charge of these Fukushima power plants, TEPCO, has its own kisha club, but funnily enough, those kisha club reporters never quite got around to asking the questions the Japanese public most wanted and needed to know. Independent and foreign journalists also reported on the disaster. But, because they aren’t part of any kisha clubs, they were often barred from press conferences – one of the many kisha club rules – making reporting that much harder. Those independent journalists who did make it into these press conferences were often shouted down by kisha club members if they dared to ask any off-script questions.

Blackboard Agreements

Whether it’s your 1998 kid detective club devoted to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (cough) or your standard, government lapdog kisha club, clubs gotta have rules. (Insert your own Fight Club joke here.)

Besides not often allowing journalists from independent and foreign newspapers to participate in press conferences (let alone join a kisha club), there are also these things called blackboard agreements. Sometimes literally written on a blackboard, these are news items and topics that the club has agreed not to report on until a specific later date. The kisha club golden rule? You don’t “scoop” your fellow club member, even if he’s from a competing newspaper. (This is completely counter to how journalism normally works, where reporting a news story first is how many news media survive.)

Following blackboard agreements means having to maintain friendly relations with your sources as well as rival journalists. As with any club, you can get kicked out for not heeding club rules. Some kisha club members do break the rules on rare occasions, because sometimes it’s totally worth it. If a story is huge enough to be worth temporary club banishment because of all the papers it would sell, a kisha club member might just break the story anyway. Of course, there are ways to have your mochi and eat it too.

Weekly Magazines

Japan’s weekly magazines provide an outlet for news stories that may be stuck in blackboard agreement purgatory. A kisha club member will sometimes sell a blackboarded scoop to a weekly magazine, occasionally even writing the magazine article himself. (Club members have been known to sell news stories to foreign presses as well.)

The problem with having your news bombshell break in a weekly magazine as opposed to a newspaper is that Japan’s weeklies aren’t the most respected game in town. Weekly magazines are usually printed on cheap paper and are a whirlwind mix of news, sports, manga, celebrity gossip and porn. Sort of like if The New Yorker and The National Enquirer had a baby.

But, in the most roundabout way ever, once a story breaks in a weekly magazine and gains enough traction, the blackboard agreement becomes null and void and everyone can cover the story in their own newspapers.

But The Internet!

The Internet has decreased some of the power kisha clubs hold, and may yet be a game changer. Independent presses, foreign news sites and citizen journalists have all been part of a movement to provide news outlets that aren’t heavily influenced by government channels.

Independent online news sources like Days Japan and Free Press Association of Japan have started to pop up, but they’ve had some difficulty gaining traction with a Japanese public who are somewhat reluctant to trust online news media over traditional news outlets.

Unfortunately, things are probably going to get worse before they get better. In December of 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe enacted a state secrets law, a move many consider a major step backwards for civil liberties in Japan. Under the new law, those who leak classified information will now face 10 years in prison and anyone found guilty of abetting a leak will get five. Kisha clubs also show no signs of going away.

But there have been some victories in all of this, too. For example, in 2001 Nagano Prefecture’s then-governor, Yasuo Tanako, abolished kisha clubs in the prefectural office. Any journalist, whether they were associated with a major newspaper or a small website, were given the same opportunities to gather information, no blackboard agreements required. And even though Yasuo Tanako has moved on from his Nagano roots, the kisha clubs he pwned haven’t come creeping back.

It’s been relatively easy up until now for kisha clubs to party down without anyone noticing. But with the continuing controversy over how the Fukushima catastrophe was reported in the news and the public outcry against Abe’s new state secrets law, the days of the kisha club may be numbered after all.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources

• http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,…
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2007/01/…
• http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/recor…
• http://dowjones.com/pressroom/releases/2…
• http://www.timeout.jp/en/tokyo/feature/2…
• http://www.aim.org/don-irvine-blog/online…
• http://www.projectcensored.org/fukushi…
• http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-…
• http://nigeriaworld.com/articles/2010/may…
• http://www.pressnet.or.jp/english/about/…

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.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Additional Reference:

• New York Times: The Cute Factor