Google Goes Kawaii
I do cute. I’m talking jellyfish umbrella, Hello Kitty dishes cute. Not so much that it’s cloying or obvious, mind you. The scottie dog socks under my suit are my business. (But you are permitted to smile if you see them.)
As a certified connoisseur of the kawaii, that particularly Japanese brand of cuteness, I present my latest obsession: the Teahouse theme for Gmail and iGoogle.
It features a little fox in a rice hat who putters around his pagoda-roofed home. He feeds the birds, prunes a bonsai, has tea with a monkey. In the evening he lights the lanterns and sleeps with only his head and tail poking out of the blanket. The images change every hour or two, it seems, and at 3:14 a.m. there’s a surprise.
How cute is this?
And now, for dignity’s sake, a little cultural context.
A rich and strange mythology surrounds the fox in Japanese culture. Called kitsune (kit-soo-nay), the fox can take human form, live for thousands of years, and become infinitely wise. Often a trickster or a seductress, the fox may possess women or generate a fire that leads travelers astray.
Numerous folktales feature the many-tailed fox, as well as plays, comic books, and the Shinto faith, in which kitsune are the messengers of the rice god Inari. For more information, check out The Kitsune Page, which includes the full text of a 1961 book on the subject, or the Wikipedia entry on kitsune.
Google’s fox is neither sacred nor mischievous. In the image above, he plays the biwa, a short-necked lute that came to Japan by way of China from Persia in the Nara period (710-759 CE). I associate the biwa with the Tale of Genji, in which courtiers and lovers play the instrument, and the martial epic Tale of the Heike, which was recited by wandering mistrels as they plucked its strings.
In the morning, our little fox approaches some yellow flowers (safflowers?), perhaps for the Japanese art of flower arrangement or ikebana. In the afternoon, he prunes his bonsai.
The brief lives of cut flowers and the gnarled, aged look of bonsai remind us of our own brief lives, and of time passing. This bittersweet awareness (mono no aware) is key in Japanese culture, particularly in Zen Buddhism. Bit of a weighty thought while you’re checking your email, but there you go.
While we’re looking at bonsai, here’s a virtual tour of the wonderful National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, where you’ll find trees that date back to Shakespeare’s time and ones that were raised by princes.
Other nods to “traditional” culture include the fox’s calligraphy, the standing stone in the garden, and the yokai (demons).
Where are the demons? That’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself — if you can take the cuteness.
My friend T., who would like to be referred to as “The Muscle,” has the following comment on this post: “You know what also reminds me of the transience of all things? Farts. You can say the same damned thing about anything.”
This is such a wonderful site. I visit every day. I hope it never, ever dies. Because if it did, I, and hundreds of others, would be sad.