"Cute Formalism" in Japan

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   For everyone who knows anything about Japanese culture or Japanese society or who has been to Japan, he or she must have this "je ne sais quoi" feeling that is extremely hard to pinpoint. It is not "cultural shock" that I am talking about here. There is just something very unique about Japanese culture and Japanese society that requires one, as a layperson or as a student of social science, to re-examine one's long-held notions about social norms, traditions, and values.
One of the oddest but extremely insightful characterizations (IMHO) of Japanese culture that I have come across is the idea of "cute formalism", a term coined by musician and blogger Nick Currie. 

http://pedia.nodeworks.com/C/CU/CUT/Cute_formalism

"In an essay written in Japan in 2001, Currie described how formalism in the Modernist West had always been austere, macho, serious, one of the "high arts", but that a new variety of "cute formalism" was developing in Postmodern Japan. No less experimental, this new formalism managed to be playful, populist, childish or feminine in accent, and superflat (the term is borrowed from Japanese artist Takashi Murakami). 
According to Currie, Cute Formalism is what happens when ostranenie and onanie play themselves out in a social context of low anomie and bonhomie. Ostranenie is Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky's term for the artistic technique of making things strange, onanie is a term for a masturbatory playfulness related, perhaps, to Freud's "polymorphous perversity", anomie is the high levels of crime and social disintegration seen more in the West than in Asia, and bonhomie a pervading atmosphere of unthreatening friendliness and politeness. These necessary pre-conditions explain why Cute Formalism had its genesis in Japan.
The following is where you can find the original essay written by Currie.

http://www.imomus.com/thought300501.html

I especially like the following paragraphy:

"Japan is a more formalist society than any other I know, and it's not just the Inscrutable Signs Effect. Japanese people honour formalism in their love of unnecessarily complicated ways of serving tea, arranging flowers, lettering in ink, and stringing and trussing up beautiful women. They love and excel at making highly formal technical systems; they still build technology, from robots to cellphones to magnetic levitation trains, better and smaller than anyone else. They accord extraordinary respect to formal systems like etiquette. Their language has all sorts of different ways of saying things according to how polite you need to be, and yet, oddly enough, they have almost no sense of social class differences. Strangest of all, they have a religion with lots of rituals but no god! Western people would say 'Where's the beef? How can you sustain a belief system without providing some ultimate justifying content like an unseen, all-powerful creator?' The answer is that, in Japan, god is in the details, in the yakimono teacup and the way you turn its rim three times before sipping the powdery green matcha. Form itself is god."

Unfortunately, Wikipedia deleted the "Cute Formalism" entry as ill-fated neologism. 