Ayuko Watanabe
Design can tell us a lot about the country of their origin. You can learn especially from elements such as colour, shape and material because these elements are so fundamental and tend to show the source of inspiration. Even if you observe just one particular category of design you can see elements of the country’s characteristic. Character design with its huge market in Japan reflect its culture. They are evaluated as art, and integrated to contemporary art. Such characters even as that become popular among young girls in all over the world, took strong influence from traditional values.
One of the most popular characters “Hello Kitty” tells us about Japanese emotional communication. Hello Kitty is a female cat with cute ribbon. She has no mouth, whiskers, or tail, so ovbiously she doesn’t have elements that real cats have, and because she doesn’t have such realistic elements there’s no expression on her face. This design is strongly connected to mask culture in Japan. Traditionally Japanese people say a beautiful woman is “a woman whose face is as expressionless as a Noh mask”. When you look at Geisya, their faces are all white painted with extremely small lips and they all have almond eyes. Their face has make up which easy to break so they can’t express their emotion. Hello Kitty, Pokemon, Gundum, Ultra-man, are the popstars for characters that are representative Japan. They have simple face, yet we can image hidden emotion, or what’s going on when we see them. Japanese people tend to feel less explanation is elegance and sometimes it express more. We see this idea here and there, now and past. It is not too much say that this idea is the very original that qualifies the characters them for very Japanese.
Creativity in Japan is characterized by simplicity and lack of overt expression. The Japanese garden is one of example. In the West, garden almost always include flowers, trees and lawn which people like to keep organized. They cut, limited or shape itself is controlld. We can say western gardens are an art form with nature as its pallette which we then enjoy visually. On the other hand, in Japanese there is a type of Japanese garden that basically just has rocks and sand. We call it “Kare-San-Sui” which means dry landscape garden. Rocks are usually used for representing something concrete, such as cranes, turtles, and mountains. Sand is basically used for representing water, for example lake, river or sea. The interesting point of Japanese garden is that every elements in space has a hidden meaning. So, the viewer not only just observe but they are force to think with their imagination.
I see a lot of traditional logic in Japanese character design. In most cases, we only see their look and recognize them as the object to admire. However when I take a fresh look at them, I found they can be analyzed with traditional influence just like historical fine art.
