In this there is a sobering reminder for those who expect that the new Japanese youth are going to cast off the trammels and bring revolutionary change to their country. If wild hairdos and tattoos meant wild and liberated people, then perhaps there might be some hope. But wild is not what it's about; it's about becoming a baby again.

If one were to look for the chief influence of Japanese modern culture on the outside world, it would definitely be in toys, games, comics, and fashion for children. In the United States and Europe, Japanese products such as Hello Kitty and Pokemon have been huge hits, but they appeal abroad almost exclusively to boys younger than twelve and girls younger than fifteen. As they mature, adolescent boys turn from Pokemon to games created by Americans and British designers, such as Myst or Doom, girls set aside Hello Kitty and start reading Seventeen or Elle. The same is true of anime (animated films), very few of which appeal to adults as did Disney's The Prince of Egypt; most series, such as Dragonball Z, beloved of nine-year-old boys, and Sailor Moon, a favorite of ten-to-fourteen-year-old girls, appeal to preadolescents.

It's a very different story inside Japan. Cute creations like Pokemon are targeted largely at adults, and the manufacturers of cute are among the few Japanese companies whose domestic profits actually grew during the 1990s stagnation. Sanrio, the maker of the Hello Kitty line (now expanded to more than fifty cute characters), grosses more than $1 billion a year through sales and licensing. Since the 1980s, animated films have taken first and second position in domestic cinemas almost every year, leaving films with real-life adult actors dead at the box office. Today, about half of all domestic film revenues come from anime.

The conquest of cute happened slowly, taking about thirty years to sweep all before it. The first step was when cute toys of the 1970s became cult objects for adult women in the 1980s; the next step was when, as Japan sank into recession in the 1990s, young male wage earners developed a taste for big-eyed cuddly creatures, and by the end of the century the conquest was near-complete. In 1999, a stuffed doll called Tare Panda with a round face, droopy eyes, and a soft body swept Japan, selling $250 million worth that year alone; most of the buyers were adult men. Takemono Katsunori, a thirty-four-year-old company worker in Tokyo, enthused, «A mere glance at it makes me melt.»

Mary Roach powerfully evokes the extent to which cute has conquered:

To anyone who knows Japan... the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force. The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up to save money with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), to have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey, a condom stretched over his body, entreating, «Would you protect me?»). They see backhoes painted to look like giraffes and police kiosks fixed up like gingerbread houses... Teenage boys tattoo themselves with Badtz-Maru, the Sanrio company's mischievous lumpy-headed penguin. Salarymen otherwise indistinguishable in their gray suits and cigarettes buy novelty cell phone straps adorned with plastic charms of their favorite cute characters: Thunder Bunny, Cookie Monster, Doraemon the robot cat. Cute is everywhere. They're soaking in it.

Japan is indeed soaked in cute, to the extent that it is no longer merely an amusing sidelight – one could fairly call it the cultural mainstream, and its influence reaches everywhere, from cinema to traditional arts.

Ikebana flower arranging provides a good opportunity to see how Japan's new environment and educational system are influencing the traditional arts. At the March 1997 official ikebana showing of the Tokyo Branch of Ikenobo School, Japan's oldest and most prestigious, with a lineage that dates to the sixteenth century, it could be seen that about half of each arrangement consisted of plastic. Flower arrangers wrapped petals around glitter hearts; they stapled stems to wires and rods; they draped branches with fiberglass mist and hung them with cutouts made from sheets of blue and orange vinyl; they painted thorns with acrylics, and encrusted leaves with Christmas-tree icicles. A lifetime spent in an ugly city surrounded by a degraded countryside will have its effect. Nature, for Japan's new flower masters, is half vinyl, wire, rubber, and paint. The one thing one might say in defense of this is that it honestly reflects the environment.

Even more thought-provoking in this Ikenobo show was the technical level of the arrangements. Those stapled and cutout leaves, glitter hearts, and the rest were put together with the amateurish zest one might find in a fourth-grade classroom. Flowers glued with epoxy mingled with bits of metallic foil and tubes of pink jelly – these are the work of children, not of adults.

While we are on the subject of flowers, there is no better field than this to study Japan's new «manual approach» to the arts, an outgrowth of the educational mode of telling students exactly what to think and do about everything. Flower schools such as Ikenobo and Hara have taken to diagramming their arrangements. Branch A stands at an 87-degree angle to the ground; Branch В turns away at a 32-degree angle to the right; and Branch С leans at precisely 55 degrees to the left. The tips of the branches must end within a triangle, with sides of such-and-such length.

Foreigners, and even Japanese new to a study of traditional arts, may assume that this rigid diagrammatic approach is a part of the tradition. But the opposite is true. Ikebana was a meditative practice, heavily influenced by Zen, taxing to the utmost the artist's spontaneous skill and sensitive observation of nature. Trying to duplicate a geometric shape was definitely not the point. Ikenobo Senno, the founder of the Ikenobo School and the father of ikebana, in the famous preface to his seminal essay on flowers in 1542, went out of his way to stress that the aim of ikebana was not to enjoy a shape but to bring out the basic nature of a flowering branch or tree, thereby mystically pointing the way toward the secrets of the universe.

From this point of view, what we see in modern ikebana books is a denial of everything that ikebana once stood for. The same goes for the modern tea ceremony, which also has manuals demonstrating how to sit and stand at every instant of the ceremony, and where to lay the utensils – exactly so many centimeters from the edge of the tatami, no more, no less. All this has the look and feel of tradition, but it's definitely not tradition. The rules in these manuals are newly invented, written especially for adults who have graduated from Japan's postwar schoolrooms.

All of this is not to say that Japan's culture, modern or traditional, has become hopelessly childish. The great fashion designer Miyake Issey, the inspired flower arranger Kawase Toshiro, the architect Ando Tadao, and other fine contemporary artists have shown a profound understanding of Japanese tradition and combined this with a contemporary outlook. The world rightly admires these great artists, yet back home in Japan they do not represent the mainstream, and in private they despair at what they see going on around them. For every exquisite pleated Issey vest sold in Aoyama, youngsters in Harajuku are buying myriad kawaii garments with oversize socks, sailor suits fringed in lace, purses embellished with the smiling face of adorable three-year-old Chibi Maruko-chan, and shoes that squeak. In the time that Ando completes one pure abstract structure, Hasegawa Itsuko and her followers have raised dozens of fuyu -type monuments across the land, each a kindergarten-style concatenation of fiberglass, metal cutouts, and plywood. For every lady pleased by Kawase's simple arrangements of a few flower petals and branches, tens of thousands of Ikenobo followers labor on manga-esque creations of foil and vinyl. The future belongs to them.

Well, not completely. I had an interesting encounter at that ikebana show that illustrates in a nutshell the difference between how the Japanese and foreigners look at Japan's cultural crisis. As I was walking down the rows of flower arrangements, I came across a young American woman who was studying ikebana in Tokyo and her middle-aged Japanese lady friend whom she had brought along to see the show. «Isn't the Japanese love of nature wonderful?» the American woman commented to me. «I guess so,» I replied. «But I see here some vinyl, here some fiberglass and leaves stapled to painted cardboard. Where's the nature?» The American ikebana practitioner grew angry. «Treating flowers this way is traditional!» she exclaimed.

The Japanese woman, who had not said a single word, joined in at this point. It turned out that she was not an ikebana practitioner herself; she had come along merely to see the art form that her foreign friend was so enthusiastic about. She had been walking around feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but in such a prestigious location and with her friend oohing and aahing, she had not felt confident in expressing her doubts. Hearing me, she relaxed and gave vent. «Yes!» she exclaimed. «These things are monstrous. This is environmental degradation, that's what it is!»

The American woman was typical of a phenomenon: the foreigner who converts to Japan, as one might convert to a religion. For her, announcing that flower arrangements of this type were «traditional» had all the weight of quoting the Bible. Tragically, she was unaware of how removed such arrangements really are from tradition; but she exemplified the many foreign writers, especially on culture, who continue to purvey modern Japanese arts to the world as unquestioning devotees. It's because of the existence of such converts that the real troubles in Japans environment, design, architecture, and cinema have never been expressed in the foreign media. For foreign students of Japan, it has been a long and chronic case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

The Japanese woman, however, had a healthy and natural response; she didn't care about tradition: ugly was ugly. Or, at a deeper level, she instinctively understood what the tradition should have been, and could feel without knowing exactly why that these arrangements were all wrong. The Japanese are not so nostalgic about their own culture that they have become blind to its problems. And in this lies the hope for revitalization and change.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the new Japan is the explosion of wacky youth fashion, which is hugely influencing young people all over East Asia, and drawing a lot of attention in the Western press. The «look» is by now familiar from many a magazine article: spiky dyed hair, face entirely smoothed in heavy makeup to a shiny copper or caramel complexion, shaved and painted eyebrows, and high clunky shoes-plus lots of cute Hello Kitty accessories. The impact on East Asia is, in a sense, a healthy one, in that Asians are finally discovering their own identities, and the new styles coming out of Japan are in many ways better suited to their local cultures. Terry McCarthy writes: «Despite the marketing muscle of American record companies and film studios, there is an inevitable cultural shortfall – Asians may watch the American shows, but the bronzed, buffed bodies of Baywatch are not something that most Asian teens could (or even would) aspire to.» Nineteen-year-old fashion student Watanabe Eriko puts it succinctly: «It's stupid for the Japanese to compete with Western designers. . . .We should be selling our own Eastern styles to Asia, because Asians have the fashion sense and bodies to complement Japanese designs. Why must we go to Europe to dress tall blondes? Our aesthetic matches black hair and slimmer bodies better.»