> Annalee Newitz, writes of it:
> >http://www.sfbg.com/36/17/news_cute.html
>
> The Asian-philia at the heart of America's obsession with cuteness is
> hardly motivated by the same innocence that animates the little girls in
> Hayao Miyazaki's orgiastically cute film My Neighbor Totoro.
Annalee gets most of the details right, though I'd say it's more about East Asian culture (the silicon triangle of Japan, HK/Singapore/Taiwan, and South Korea) than Asia per se. "Totoro" was sunk by really hideous English dubbing, but Miyazaki does sneak in one way cool micropolitical scene (hint: watch for the painting).
Some of the most popular stuff from East Asia is extraordinarily gloomy, though: the Zilla flicks revel in mayhem, the John Woo gangster tragedies run up a massive body count, and the greatest anime movie and series of all time, "Princess Mononoke" and "Evangelion", respectively, both have some really brutal moments. On some level, kawaii consumerism was probably the necessary ideological compensation for the titanic, grinding combat of the keiretsu capitalisms, in their life-and-death struggle with the political, cultural, and economic armatures of the American Empire (this is no mere metaphor: East Asia was the bloodiest battlefield of the Cold War). It's something you can sense, boiling beneath the surface of the PS2/Gamecube buzz, lines of game-code like neon DNA. This kitty has claws, and the North American hunters are now the hunted.
-- Dennis