[AUDIO: Japanese pop ultra-kawaii music ]
NARRATOR
DOB is the name of the bowtie-sporting character in the middle of the circle of mushrooms. His resemblance to Mickey Mouse is no accident. Takashi Murakami himself also wears a bowtie. DOB is a hybrid—part artist, part everyone’s favorite mouse.
Murakami is responding to Japan’s fascination with the cute, called kawaii. It’s rumored that Emperor Hirohito of Japan loved Mickey Mouse so much that when he was buried in 1989 he was wearing his Mickey Mouse watch.
NARRATOR
The colorful mushrooms reference the atom bomb. Growing up, Murakami heard a lot about it from his mother who saw the mushroom cloud from miles away. Takashi Murakami described it this way in The Broad’s UnPrivate Collection series talk.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI
She said, you know, Nagasaki atomic bomb maybe she saw that kind of a rainbow color in the sky, right? A very, very curious color, like not rainbow but kind of the orange plus never seeing the landscape she said.
NARRATOR
For Murakami, as with many others in his generation, war permeated his earliest memories.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI
My memory was linked with documentary stuff in, you know, Japanese TV…World War II, like… Hawaii, so why Japan had lost the war and many, many war images and also the Cold War, too, like in America and the Soviet Union.
NARRATOR
With the DOB character, Murakami developed an alter ego that could navigate many currents in his work–pliable, with an unassuming face that could convey both the “cuteness” that has overtaken Japanese culture, as well as the menace of the underlying social forces that contribute to this escapist fantasy.