Love of Hello Kitty and historical legacy makes little boys of us all

IT SEEMS VERY fashionable these days to think of Japan as a 'little boy', as that country's premier Neo-Pop artist, Takashi Murakami, has demonstrated in the eponymous travelling art exhibition he is curating.

Mr Murakami is also the graphic artist behind those cloyingly quirky Hermes bags which are so popular among Hong Kong's tai-tais.

More profoundly, he believes that Japan's mostly apocalyptic comic-book (manga) sub-culture and its obsession with everything colourful and kawaii (cute) stem from the fact that the national psyche has not really recovered from the twin traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This can be gleaned from the imagery of atomic bombs, toxic wastelands and mass destruction dominating the plots of manga and film animation, or anime. On the other extreme, one has the excruciating cuteness of Hello Kitty and her infantile universe.

In short, Japan's growth has been stunted and it has remained a 'little boy' which was also the codename for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Mr Murakami traces this 'infantilisation' of the Japanese culture and mindset to, among other things, 'the replacement of a traditional, hierarchical Japanese culture with a disposable consumer culture ostensibly produced for children and adolescents', as one museum catalogue explains it.