Hello Kitty & Co: bastard babes of the dastardly Little Boy

Ever wondered why the Japanese are so obsessed with cuteness? An exhibition curated by artist Takashi Murakami at New York's Japan Society goes a long way to explaining the country's obsession with Hello Kitty, wide-eyed anime heroines, odd-looking monsters, and Lolita-esque schoolgirls.

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture uses manga, anime, model toys and fine arts to relate these phenomena to the defining event in modern Japanese history: the dropping of the two atomic bombs in 1945.

'The exhibition makes a convincing argument that these pop cultural artefacts represent a kind of collective unconscious,' says Amy Kurlander, former manager of publications at the Japan Society Gallery. 'It's an unconscious which is still working its way through traumatic materials concerning the Pacific war, the atomic bomb, and its aftermath.'

The phenomenon consists of two seemingly contrasting styles, says Kurlander. There's the violent and apocalyptic images of anime and manga - which often explicitly deal with the catastrophe - and the cute, happy, anodyne objects such as Hello Kitty.

'They seem very different, but are actually two sides of the same coin,' she says. 'They exemplify a culture which isn't really growing up - a culture which refuses to grow up.'

Murakami is known as the artist who invented the Superflat art style in Japan. Superflat links the two-dimensional style of anime and manga with traditional Japanese art, which operated without perspective.

Superflat also draws on post-war epherma such as manga to provide a kind of visual nexus for contemporary Japanese culture. It crosses fine art with pop culture to make the point that, in Tokyo, distinctions between the two are becoming increasingly blurred.