Coveting thy brother's tomatoes

  

     It's tomato season. As readers well know, every year I plant a tomato garden and ... well, just look at these beauties, above, on display in a bowl in my kitchen.
     Am I proud? Why, sure! I'm so proud that ...

     Geez.

     How does Trump do it? Lie continually, I mean. I can't even lie about tomatoes.
     Okay. To be honest, which I seem doomed to being, not so proud. Not proud at all. Because I didn't grow them. My sister-in-law did.

     There, I said it. Are you happy?
     The tomatoes were a bolt from the blue. My brother and I were having a belated birthday lunch — 10 weeks late, in fact. We're both busy guys.
     I arrived at the restaurant — Blufish on Willow Road, excellent sushi, great prices, first-rate service, and a lux room like some trendy Manhattan eatery — and he was already sitting there.
     "I brought you a present," he said, pointing to a shopping bag on the floor. I seized the handles. Heavy. Lifting it to the table with both hands, wondering, What could this be? I look inside. Tomatoes. A lot of tomatoes. Big, beefy, red. Perfectly ripe.
     I felt a surge of complicated emotion that, in a movie, would involve flashing to the stunted tomato plants in my garden, and their pathetic output — mostly green, a few quivering on turning red — with this bounty. Game, set, match for my brother. Or, rather, his wife, since she had grown them.
     "What's Japanese for 'tomato shame'?" I asked. My sister-in-law is from Osaka. 
     "Tomato no haji," he said.

My tomatoes are just sad.

     I am shamed, tomato-wise. Plunged into tomato shame hell. It wasn't always like this. I remember those years, of carrying bags of tomatoes to the neighbors. Share the bounty. My bounty, the bounty of tomatoes grown by me. 

     But in recent years, not so much. Okay, not at all. I have an idea what's been stunting them — my apple tree, planted unwisely next to the garden 20 years ago, must hog enough sun. Switching out the soil for fresh compost hasn't done the trick.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm not completely lame in the garden. The cucumbers have been fabulous this year. Massive. Each one bigger than the next, monsters the size of my forearm. As soon as we polish off one there's another on deck. Which is good because, as you know, a cucumber goes bad in about three days, so it's great to have a steady, fresh, free supply.

One of the first paintings of tomatoes in
Japan, by Kanō Tan’yū (1602-1674)

     Being a word guy, I distracted myself by focusing on the Japanese word for tomato — tomato — which seemed odd, since the fruit came to that country in the Edo period — the 1600s — by Portuguese traders. At first they were considered merely decorative; it took several hundred years for people there to start eating them.  

     Europeans, too, were slow to eat tomatoes, which remember are part of the nightshade family, along with deadly nightshade and belladonna. (The leaves and roots of tomato plants are indeed poisonous). 

      The Oxford English dictionary offers some interesting historical takes: Grimstone's 1604 D'Acosta's History of the Indies, mentions "...Tomates, which is a great sappy and savourie graine." Then there is an evocative 1753 citation from Chambers Cyclopedia Supplement, "Tomato, the Portuguese name for the fruit of the lycopersicon, or love-apple; a fruit eaten either stewed or raw by the Spaniards and Italians and by the Jew families in England."

      The "love apple" term was due to its supposed aphrodisiac properties Noah Webster mentions it in his 1828 dictionary, though Samuel Johnson omits any hint of tomatoes in his 1755 dictionary, despite the word being in use. My Wentworth & Flexner Dictionary of American Slang cites the "a very attractive girl or young woman" meaning back to 1951, and R.S. Prather's Bodies in Bedlam: "The idea that such a luscious tomato might be mixed up in a murder went square against the grain."

"Karaage-kun Tomato BBQ Sauce Flavor"
is a mixture of BBQ sauce and ketchup.

    Circling back to Japan, which originally called tomatoes togaki, which means, "Chinese persimmons;" they made up for lost time becoming fans of both tomatoes and ketchup, which they call tomato kechappu. Southwestern Japan is Japan's tomato growing center — I've been there, to Kumamoto, for its regional mascot's birthday party, and remember that tomatoes are mentioned in Kumamon's calisthenics song. Japan also holds the Guinness world record for largest tomato plant. 

      So how did Japanese tomatoes end up with tagged to an English loan word name? The short answer is: they didn't. Both Japan and the United States borrowed the word from the same original source. Tomatoes are thought to have originated in South America, probably Ecuador or Peru, then found their way to the future Mexico, where the Aztecs named them tomatl. English has a number of foodstuffs that echo Nahuatl, the Aztec language: avocado (ahuakatl); chocolate (xocolatl); and chili (cilli).
     It's sorta cool to think that the ingredients you're assembling for dinner were called for, using basically the same name, by someone hungry after a long afternoon watching ritual victims having their hearts torn out atop a pyramid to the greater glory of Quetzalcoatl 500 years ago.

     I've been eating my bounty at almost every meal. On fresh bread, with goat cheese and butter. In peaches and tomato salad. Or cucumber and tomato salad. Or just sliced, eaten with a knife and fork and a spritz of fig vinegar. I've even experienced the joy of sharing. A neighbor stopped to chat, with his beautiful Doberman. We talked politics for a long time, then I had an epiphany.

    "Say," I said. "Would you like some tomatoes?" He nodded happily yes, he would. I ran in the house and selected four big beauties. 

     "Here you go!" I said, handing them over. I meant to tell him that I had not in fact grown them myself, but was regifting the tomatoes. Before I could, however the conversation wound up and he went on his way. Maybe not so honest after all.

My conversation with Janice Taylor.

Mask Masked by Gillian Wearing

     Having a book published can drive you a little nuts. Me anyway. After going through all the hard work required to paddle yourself to the center of this vast ocean of publishing, you now bob there, scanning the empty horizon,  ready to hail any distant sail.  
     That might be one reason why, after a person who instantly struck me as a Facebook scammer dangled her bait by inquiring about my book, I didn't do the smart thing and immediately block her. Instead I replied sincerely.

     Mind you, I hadn't gone completely mad — I never thought this was anything other than some guy in a windowless basement boiler room pinging 50 prospective marks at a time, looking for the one who'd doesn't pause and ask himself why a cute 20-something would suddenly be interested in a worn out old boot like himself. But she did start off her pitch in an unusual fashion. And I did let the line play out for a couple days — I guess I felt I was the angler as much as the prey. I was bored, curious how she'd spring the trap. Our chat began like this:

     Honestly, I didn't think much about it, at first. People do ask about how to get the book, as if they've never bought a book before. I looked at her Facebook page. It had some Chicago references on it. We do live in a diverse city. Nineteen of my friends — all men — had already friended her. She could in theory be a legitimate young person unfamiliar with the book buying process. The daughter of some businessman perhaps. It's possible. 

    The idea to create a professional account ... that was also different. A very specific suggestion, not one that would benefit her. Not the standard claim of a suitcase of cash found in Afghanistan that needs a trustworthy person to help with its disposal. It was the day before my book signing at Atlas, and I figured, okay, if she wants the book, and is real, she can stop by and purchase one. 

    I had looked at our mutual friends. All white men in their 50s or 60s. That screams scam. Alleged women romance and flatter older men and ... I'm not sure what. Hit them up for money for plane tickets for their joyful meeting. Or if she is supposedly in Winnetka, for bail or ... I'm not sure what. One of her friends was Vincent P. Falk, the genius programmer/fashion plate. That also told me she wasn't real.  I just couldn't picture Vincent Falk chatting up Janice Taylor at a North Shore soiree.

     It does? We'd lapsed into almost normal, nice-to-meet-ya conversation.     

     Thus ended our first evening's relationship. She was there, waiting, the next morning. I almost replied to her opening salvo with a testy, "Don't toss platitudes at me." But that seemed unkind, even to someone whose end game was ripping me off. I settled on acerbity.

         

     I was annoyed to find her back, but also sitting in a coffee shop, killing time. What was the harm?

     "Chicago is one of the bustling cities in the United States" sounds like a direct translation from Korean Wikipedia. And that page of drawings was snagged from the Instagram feed of an actual young California fashion designer, Amiko Simonetti. You can see her signature on the page that Janice posted. That was enough for me to unfriend her — and figured it was time to move this charade along. Why not just block her? I guess I wanted to see her try to spring her trap.

    I told myself there was an element of altruism to extending the conversation.  I figured, while she's after me, she can't also be sweet-talking someone else who might actually fall into the trap.  Plus people are not exactly lining up to chat with me. There is definitely something pleasant in just talking to someone. Those AI chatbots being developed now are going to make a fortune someday.

    The sun doesn't set over Lake Michigan. It rises. Okay, ignore her. But she kept circling back.

     I found myself lulled by another weakness: my tendency to want to share my own writing with others.

   Yes, Kumamon isn't technically anime, but yuru kyara, a "loose character." Close enough.

     Are you getting bored yet? I was. But somehow just blocking her seemed ... rude. No doubt a guy in some godforsaken place. But what if she was actually what she appeared, some 23-year-old daughter of a Korean businessman based in Wilmette, stealing other people's fashion designs, trying to seem impressive? Why be mean to that person? She hadn't done anything yet, nothing but chat. 

    The dumplings looked too good to be true. A Google Image search didn't find a source; no stock shot I could find. But I worried this could go on forever, and wanted to press her and see what happened.

    

    If you've hung in so far, we're nearing the denouement. 

     And so our conversation ended. I thought. I planned to post this a week ago Wednesday. Then the night before, she phoned me, just as I was sitting down to dinner. I have no idea how she got the number. We exchanged a few words — she didn't seem to want anything in particular other than to call me. As soon as I got off the line, I blocked her, which is what I should have done at the start.

     Her calling, stepping out of the realm of Facebook and into the telephone, creeped me out enough to hold this. I didn't want to do anything to encourage her presence in my world. But a week has passed, and I figure the coast is clear. Besides, I need something for today. What's the worst that could happen?

    

The smile and what the smile means

Kevin Portillo uses a computer to exercise his facial muscles while therapist Ann-Ashley Field looks on.

   

     I'm waiting for someone to ask me why I write for Mosaic Science—complex medical stories that take about a year to create, between crafting proposals, having a few rejected, finally getting one approved, then doing the work. I was actively researching and writing this latest piece, which went up over the weekend, for at least five months.

     But no one has, so I'll answer it anyway. The topics are fascinating. The first, "Face Fear," was about why we are afraid of those with facial differences, and what it's like to be disfigured—a topic I pitched for years before Mosaic said, "sure." The second, "Pray for Kumamoto & Kumamon," was on cuteness as an academic field—Mosaic sent me to Japan for a week. The third, "How to fall to your death and live to tell the tale," was about falling as a medical crisis, and this, my first assignment from Mosaic, on smiling, is intended to run in conjunction with the Wellcome Collection exhibition, Teeth, now running at their museum in London. 

     I like doing them—and this might sound a little crazy—BECAUSE they're so much work. As a writer ages, the tendency is to phone it in, particularly when you can turn your palm to the sky and pontificate endlessly on the news of the day. That's what readers seem to want most. So I figure, if I'm writing these pieces for Mosaic, I must be still on my game.

    This piece was the opposite of phoning it in. The assignment was "Write 5,000 words on smiling." That's it. I know Mosaic wants their stories built around specific individuals, and it took a couple months just to find Kevin Portillo. Thanks to him, his family and everybody at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. A first rate operation.

     Enough throat-clearing. Mosaic publishes under a creative commons license, meaning that you are free to republish their articles however you see fit. The Guardian newspaper has already run its version in their Observer magazine. Here is the Mosaic link, using their photographs. I took photos too, and here I'm using my own. It's very long, so take your time.

     Kevin Portillo practices smiling every day at home. Usually after brushing his teeth. Or when stopping by the bathroom, or anywhere with a mirror.
     He hooks an index finger into each side of his mouth and pulls gently upward. He puckers his face into a kiss, then opens wide into an O, trying to limber up his facial muscles. He practices both the Mona Lisa – slight, closed lip – and a wide, toothy smile.
     At least he’s supposed to do his exercises every day. Being 13, the American 7th grader sometimes forgets, though he understands their importance.
     “I need to stretch my cheeks,” he says. “I do it for a couple minutes. I have to do it every single day.” He exercises so much that his jaw sometimes hurts.
     Kevin was born in New Jersey with a rare malignant vascular tumour, a kaposiform hemangioendothelioma, covering the left side of his face, squeezing shut his left eye and pushing his nose to the right. Immediately after his birth, doctors whisked him away to another hospital in another state – the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. His mother didn’t see him again until he was eight days old.
     The doctor told Kevin’s parents that the chance of him surviving was slim.
     But survive he did. However, the large tumour and the damage from its treatment prevented him from being able to do one of the most fundamental things humans do.
     Smile.

     Most babies are born immediately able to communicate with the world around them in one way: by crying.
     A smile is the second signal babies send out. Newborns can smile spontaneously, as a reflex. This is sometimes misinterpreted by new parents as a reaction to their presence, a reward for their intense concern and sleepless efforts. However, it’s not until to six or eight weeks of age that babies smile in a social way. Blind babies do this at the same time.
     That new parents’ sometimes optimistically interpret the first reflex smiles as meaning something more underscores the duality of smiling: there is the physical act and then the interpretation society gives to it. The smile and what the smile means.
     A smile is clear enough on a physical level. There are 17 pairs of muscles controlling expression in the human face, plus a singular muscle, the orbicularis oris, a ring that goes entirely around the mouth.
     When the brain either reacts to a stimulus spontaneously or decides to form an expression intentionally, a message is sent out over the 6th and 7th cranial nerves. These branch across each side of the face from the eyebrows to the chin, to some combination of muscles controlling the lips, nose, eyes and forehead.
     The basic upward curving smile is achieved primarily by two pair of zygomaticus muscles, major and minor. These connect the corners of the mouth to the temples, tugging lips upward, often accompanied, depending on the underlying emotions and thoughts, by the levator labii superioris, raising the upper lip, and other muscles of the face.
     And as for the oft-cited folk wisdom about how it takes more muscles to frown than smile – the jury’s still out, especially as different smiles require different numbers of muscles. However, one source suggests the number could be very similar (and that one particularly insincere smile might take not much more than the pair of risorius muscles).  

Kouros (Getty Villa, Los Angeles)

      
    It is when we leave the realm of physiognomy, however, that the smile becomes enigmatic. This contraction of various facial muscles resonates across the entire arc of human history, from grinning Greek kouros sculptures from 2,500 years ago, right up to Internet emoji, those little images that pepper our communications.
     One study of smartphone users from 60 countries showed that emoji with smiling faces are by far the most prevalent in messages. The most popular overall – the face with tears of joy – was picked as the 2015 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries.
     Just as this emoji expresses more than mere happiness – tears adding the ironic twist so popular online – interpreting the nuance of smiles, which can convey so much more than “happy”, is a challenge whether dealing with art history or interpersonal encounters or the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.
     Smiles aren’t as simple as they might seem. What a smile means depends on who is seeing it, when it is flashed, where and by whom.

     A comprehensive 2016 study, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior questioned thousands of people in 44 cultures about sets of photographs of the same eight faces. The first group saw a set of photos with four people smiling and four not. The second group saw photos where the people smiling in the first set were presented as non-smiling, and vice versa.
     People from certain countries – Germany, Switzerland, China – deemed the smiling faces more intelligent. Others – Japan, India, Iran – favoured non-smiling faces.
     Why? That question is also complicated, but in essence, the study’s researchers concluded it has to do with trust, with whether a society is set up so that its members assume that other people are dealing with them honestly. “Greater corruption levels decreased trust granted toward smiling individuals” the authors concluded.
     Which might explain why Russians smile less frequently than Brits. If you’re expecting to be deceived, then a stranger’s smile is seen as part of that deception, and therefore malign.
     That attitude harkens back to a very old view of smiling as being opposed to pious solemnity. Despite all those smirking sculptures, there is exactly one smile in the Old Testament – Job, ironically – though in many passages faces are said to “shine”, which could mean smiling or could mean heavenly radiance.
     Eastern religions often use the smile to denote enlightenment. The actual name of the religious text Flower Sermon, which describes the origin of Zen Buddhism, is “Pick up flower, subtle smile”. The Buddha and various religious figures were depicted with serene smiles, though the original Buddhist texts are as devoid of smiling as Western scripture. Jesus weeps but never smiles.

                                                                              *

     Nor did Kevin Portillo, not fully. He did not smile when expected. At 5 weeks old he was already a week into chemotherapy with vincristine, an anti-cancer drug so powerful it can cause bone pain and skin rashes. Doctors warned his mother that the treatment might leave him blind, or deaf, or unable to walk.           

Kevin Portillo as a newborn

     

     “If he survived,” says his mother, Silvia Portillo, in Spanish. “The doctor always said he cannot give us hopes that he may survive.”
     Whether stunted due to the tumour or killed by the chemo, Kevin’s 7th cranial nerve withered. That nerve originates at the brain stem then branches out across the face. It is susceptible not only to tumours, as in Kevin's case, but to rare conditions such as Moebius syndrome, a congenital facial paralysis due to missing or stunted cranial nerves. You can’t smile, frown, or move your eyes from side to side.
     “You essentially have a mask on your face,” says Roland Bienvenu, 67, a Texan with Moebius syndrome.
     Without being able to smile, others “can get the incorrect impression of you,” says Bienvenu. “You can almost read their thoughts. They wonder, ‘Is something wrong with him? Has he had an accident?’ They question your intellectual ability, think maybe he's got some intellectual disability since he's got this blank look on his face.”
     A lopsided smile can be as problematic as no smile at all.
     “I have half a smile, so even with that I am able to successfully convey emotion,” writes Dawn Shaw, born with a teratoma – a fast-growing tumour that was interfering with her wind pipe. “The hardest part for me was seeing photos of myself smiling, because smiling exaggerates the fact that half my face doesn’t move very much. But eventually I learned to own it. That is me. That is how I look.”
     The challenges stemming from lack of a smile are frequently compounded. When people have a medical condition severe enough to keep them from smiling, other difficulties tend to be involved.
     “He was different than the other kids,” says Silvia Portillo of her son. “He was fed for four years through the G-tube in his stomach. He wasn’t able to have a normal life, because every few hours he had to be connected to the machine to be fed.” Little kids, being curious, would look and ask what happened to him, she says.

                                                                                     *

     While those who cannot smile can blame the state of their facial nerves and muscles, those who can smile are often concerned with a different aspect of physiognomy: their teeth. More than $3 billion (US) are spent worldwide on teeth-whitening products, with billions more spent on braces, and on purely cosmetic dentistry: straightening crooked teeth, for instance, or reducing the amount of gum that shows when a person smiles.
     Caring for the state of your teeth is not a modern concern. The Romans had dentists and used chewing sticks and toothpaste. They preferred dazzling white smiles, sometimes rinsing their teeth in urine to enhance the effect.
     Despite some modern perceptions, the ancients had surprisingly good teeth, for reasons that have nothing to do with dentistry. A CAT scan of 30 bodies of adults recovered at Pompeii found they had “perfect teeth”. This was due to two factors: short life spans – they didn’t live long enough for their teeth to go bad – and, most importantly, lack of access to refined sugar, that great destroyer of dental health.
     When piety was an overarching value, smiles were, well, frowned upon, as the precursor of laughter, which was held in true disdain. Prior to the French Revolution, broad smiles in art were overwhelmingly the realm of the lewd, the drunk and the boisterous lower classes.
     “The whole face ought to reflect an air of seriousness and wisdom,” John Baptist de La Salle wrote in his 1703 The Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility, allowing a person might, under certain circumstances, convey the impression that he is happy, provided it is done within limits. “There are some people who raise their upper lip so high or let the lower lip sag so much that their teeth are almost entirely visible. This is entirely contrary to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, for nature gave us lips to conceal them…”
     In The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, Colin Jones argues that smiling reflected the gathering sense of individual worth that went along with the beheading of kings:      

This shift in social practises and in sensibilities involved the emergence of the perception, common in our own day, that the smile offered a key to individual identity. In late eighteenth-century Paris, the smile came to be viewed as symbol of an individual's innermost and most authentic self. In a way that was perceived as both novel and modern, it was held to reveal the character of the person within. 

     Photography, by capturing smiles, eventually helped popularize them. Though the sitters in 19th-century photographs still rarely smiled, a neutral continence being both easier to hold over the long exposure necessary at the time and less likely to detract from the gravity of the occasion.
     “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever,” humorist Mark Twain was quoted as remarking in the 1913 memoir of an acquaintance.
     Around the same time, however, Kodak in the US launched extensive advertising campaigns to help consumers see photography as a means of recording joyous events and celebrations.

        Over the the century, smiles showed a confidence in keeping with the rise of modern capitalism. “An insincere grin? That doesn’t fool anybody,” Dale Carnegie wrote in his 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, embraced as a life guide by millions. “We know it is mechanical and we resent it. I am talking about a real smile, a heartwarming smile, a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the marketplace.”
     Part of the attractiveness of smiles is they are so easily extended. Part of their menace is that they can also be just as easily withheld.
     “For a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to the life,” Charlie says at the end of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman.” “He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake.”

                                                                                *

     Once Kevin was able to eat food, go to school and enjoy usual childhood pastimes – he became passionate about soccer and playing the drums – he still felt the tremors of a half smile in a world solidly established upon “a cultural expectation of pearly perfection,” as Richard Barnett writes in his book The Smile Stealers.
     “I couldn’t smile on my left, I only smiled on my right,” says Kevin. “My smile was weird...people kept asking what happened to me, why I'm like this. I keep telling them I was like this when I was born.”
     If you see someone in a wheelchair, you anticipate that the person might have trouble walking and assume a physical condition is involved. But facial paralysis carries no telltale equipment, and is rare enough that the unaffected population is not generally familiar with congenital conditions or those that come later, such as Bell’s Palsy, an inflammation of the sheathing around the facial nerves on one side that paralyzes half the face, causing the eye and corner of the mouth to droop.
     Usually temporary, Bell’s Palsy generally slowly goes away as mysteriously as it arrives. Doctors suspect it is caused by a viral infection., and usually strikes men and women between the ages of 15 and 60. . There are also traumatic events – car wrecks, sporting accidents – that damage nerves and muscles in the face, plus congenital irregularities such as cleft palate. 
     A common condition that can also affect the smile is stroke. A sagging smile or face dropped on one side is one of three signs that a person has had a stroke and needs immediate emergency care.
     ‘Face’ is the first symptom in the ‘FAST’ mnemonic for the symptoms of stroke – the A refers to weakness or numbness in one of the arms; S is for speech, which may be slurred or garbled; the T is for ‘time’ to call the emergency services. Often, there is permanent damage.
     While losing a smile is huge at any age, it can have a particular impact on younger people, who are starting out, forming the bonds that will carry them through the rest of their lives.
     Or trying to.
     “It’s a huge problem,” says Tami Konieczny, supervisor of occupational therapy at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHoP). “When you look at somebody, the first thing you see is their face, their ability to smile or not smile, or an asymmetrical smile. It’s your social world.
      “If someone can’t read your facial expressions, then it’s difficult to be socially accepted. It’s hugely devastating for kids. I had kids photoshopping their pictures. They are taking mirror images of their good side and copying it, photoshopping their own pictures before posting them to social media.”

                                                                                *

     Photoshopping might work on Facebook. But fixing a smile bisected by nerve damage and subsequent muscle loss – because Kevin couldn’t move the muscles on the left side of his face, they atrophied – is far more complicated. Sometimes, it requires multi-stage plastic surgery spread out over a year or more.
     There are two major procedures available for facial reanimation, according to Dr Phuong Nguyen , a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at CHoP, tells me.
     The newest, which has its roots in older techniques, is called a lengthening temporalis myoplasty – taking part of the broad band of muscle that powers the jaws and re-purposing it to draw up the lips.
     That wasn’t ideal for Kevin because he had one side of his face working, so the older, more complicated surgery was used to take advantage of that.
     “Kevin had the most commonly done one, a classic two-stage cross face nerve graft followed by a free gracilis muscle transfer,” says Dr Nguyen. “To be perfectly honest, when Kevin had his stage, we weren’t familiar with the lengthening temporalis myoplasty procedure yet.”  

Dr. Phuong Nguyen, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

     
     He learned the procedure from facial reanimation pioneer, Dr Ronald Zuker, a Canadian plastic and reconstructive surgeon, and from its originator, French surgeon Dr. Daniel Labbé.
      “My preference is to do it when kids are five years of age,” says Dr Zuker. “At the time, if I can restore a smile for them, they can go to primary school, meet kids on the playground, meet kids in class. They have their smiles, and are well-equipped to handle that situation.”[21]
     Why put children through what is still elective surgery?
     “It’s incredibly important to be able to interact with humans on a face-to-face basis,” says Dr Zuker. “If you don't have the ability to smile, you are at a disadvantage. People cannot understand your inner emotions. They mistake your appearance for being [uninterested], or not too bright, or not very involved in the conversation.”
     Still, some parents prefer to wait until their children are older and can participate in the decision.
     “If families want to wait, that's perfectly fine,” says Dr Zuker. “Sometimes when a kid is 9 or 10 they look in the mirror and say, ‘You know, I really want this surgery.’ That's the time to do it.”
     Which is what happened with Kevin Portillo. He was doing well, “even with that scar on his face, has always been popular at school,” says his mother. “He’s always been a happy kid.”
     But there were kids that made fun of him, she says. “When he was about 9, he used to say, one day he was sad. I said ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘Some kids, they’re not my friends. They laugh at me because I look funny.’ It was really hard for us as parents.”
     “We always wanted the surgery,” his mother says. "But we were told it was impossible. We had to wait to see how everything was changing.”
     At age 10, Kevin told his parents that he wanted to do what most people do without giving it a second thought. He knew it would be a long, painful difficult procedure, but it was one he wanted to undergo.
     “He’s very engaging, very motivated,” says Anne-Ashley Field, his occupational therapist at CHoP. “His goal, I wrote in my notes, was to have a symmetrical smile.”

                                                                          *

     As with smiles themselves, so the scientific study of smiles reflects the cleavage between the physical and the interpretive. The former is part of the long history of plastic surgery, which tends to center around the nose, both as the center of the face, and the victim of diseases like syphilis and the knives of vengeful authorities and warlords.
     The father of modern plastic surgery, Harold Gillies, wrote in 1934 reporting that restoring the ability to smile made the patients “feel much more comfortable.” In addition, Gillies observed, “the psychological effect is also one of considerable value.”
     Charles Darwin’s discusses the interpretation and value of smiles in the landmark The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, his follow-up to 1871's Descent of Man. (And a book, it should be noted, greatly influenced by surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell, for whom Bell’s Palsy is named. Bell did pioneering work on the idea that the brain communicates its commands through nerves.)
     Like many, Darwin sees a smile as the first part of a continuum.
     “A smile, therefore, may be said to be the first stage in the development of a laugh,” Darwin writes, then reverses course, musing that perhaps the smile is instead the remnant of laughter. He observes his own infants closely, detecting in two their first smiles at six weeks, and earlier in the third. He comments how smiles do more than merely convey happiness, mentioning the “derisive or sardonic smile,” the “unnatural or false smile” and showing photos of such smiles to see if his associates can read what they mean. 

      The scientific study of smiles finds differences in gender (generally, women smile more) and culture. Smiles are definitely communicative – people smile more when in public than they do when alone, or when interacting with others in public than when not.
     Scientists have shown that smiling faces are far easier to recognize than other expressions. What they don’t know is why.
     “We can do really well recognizing smiles,” said Dr. Aleix Martinez, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University and founder of its Computational Biology and Cognitive Science Lab. “This is true both for humans and for machines.
     “Why is that true? Nobody can answer that right now. We don’t know. We really do not know. We have a classical experiment, where we showed images of facial expressions to people, but we showed them very rapidly: the image of facial expression at a fraction of a second: 10 milliseconds, 20 milliseconds. People can detect a smile even in exposures smaller than 10 milliseconds. I can show you an image for just 10 milliseconds you can tell me it's a smile. It does not work with any other expression.”
     Fear, he says, takes an exposure time of 500 milliseconds – 50 times as long as a smile, which makes absolutely no sense, evolutionarily speaking. “Recognizing fear is fundamental to survival,” he says, “while a smile.... But that’s how we are wired.”
     Individuals can be recognized more easily if they’re smiling. Alibaba, China’s answer to Amazon, launched its new facial recognition payment system called “Smile to Pay” in September 2017.
     Despite science’s early start about 150 years ago, scientists are still in the stage of trying to count and categorizes types of smile among the millions of possible facial expressions.
     “One of fundamental questions in the scientific literature right now is how many facial expressions do we actually produce?” says Martinez. “Nobody knows.”
     Scientists such as Martinez theorize that smiles – as well as frowns, and other facial expressions – are remnants of humanity’s distant pre-linguistic heritage. Human language started developing as far back as 100,000 years ago, but our expressions reach back further still, to our earliest foundations as human beings.
     “Before we could communicate verbally, we had to communicate with our faces,” Martinez says. “Which brings us to a very interesting, very fundamental question in science: where does language come from? Language is not fossilized, not found in any other living species. How could something that complex have evolved from nothingness?”
     One of the hypotheses is that it evolved through facial expression of emotion, he says. “First we learned to move our facial muscles – ‘I’m happy. I feel positive with you! I’m angry. I feel disgust.’ Then language came through a grammaticalisation of facial expressions, which over time evolved into what we call grammar and language.”
     Between the confidence of the modern individual and the prevalence of computer systems, smiles could become an even greater part of our culture.

                                                                           *

     

     In October, 2015, Dr Nguyen, who plays in a band, cranked up some rock music in the operating room at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia while he began by removing a section of sural nerve from Kevin’s right ankle and attaching it to the working right side of his face, running it underneath his upper lip, to the paralyzed left.
     “We bring it across, parking it, waiting for nerves to regrow from the right side to the left,” Dr Nguyen says.
     That process took almost a year. The neurons to form along the nerve fibre advanced about a millimeter a day (about 24,000 times slower than a snail).
     Not all of those axons make it across. This means that the nerve can lose the ability to transmit information – up to 80 percent lost, and in a few cases the nerve doesn’t transmit information at all.
     “The thing with nerve-based surgery, you don’t get a lot of instant gratification or feedback,” says Dr Nguyen. “You do the procedure and don’t know if it works or not. You have to wait.”
      During that time, doctors would periodically tap areas of Kevin’s cheek, to see if the nerve was taking. “When it tingles, you know the nerve is growing,” says Dr Nguyen.
     The body has a way of covering losses. Removing that nerve did cause a small patch of skin on Kevin’s ankle to go numb. But as he was still growing, the numb patch began to shrink as the neural network took over its function.
     Once Dr Nguyen was certain the nerve was in place and functioning, it was time for the second stage of the surgery.
     One morning in August 2016, Dr Nguyen took a purple marker and wrote a “P” on Kevin’s left temple and an “NP” on his right – for “paralysed” and “not paralysed” – a common surgical precaution against the risk of cutting into the wrong side of a patient; easier than you might imagine, considering the draping done before surgery.
          “It happens,” says Dr Nguyen. “You want to make it idiot-proof.”
     He also drew a pair of parallel lines, marking the location of a prime artery, and an arrow: the vector Kevin’s smile would take.
     The surgeon made an incision from the temporal hair line, in front of the ear, pivoting back under and behind his ear, extending into his neck– the standard location for hiding plastic surgery scars. The skin on a face peels back easily. He attached three sutures to the inside corner of Kevin’s mouth and gently pulled, to gauge exactly where the muscle should be attached.
     “So you know it’s in the right place,” explained Dr Nguyen. “If you don't get this right, they’re going to have to live with it for the rest of their life.”
     The moment Dr Nguyen put strain on the triple surgical thread was the first time Kevin Portillo ever smiled on the left side of his face.
     That done, Dr Nguyen removed a 12-centimeter segment of gracilus muscle, along with a section of artery and vein, from the inside of Kevin’s left thigh, as well as the obturator nerve. The muscle was secured in place by a customized splint that hooked into Kevin’s mouth and was sewn to the side of his head to keep the relocated muscle from pulling out before it healed.
     The section was taken from Kevin’s thigh because the powerful upper leg is rich in muscles.
     “There are so many muscles that do the same function ... you don't miss this,” Dr Nguyen says.
     Well ... most wouldn’t miss it. Kevin, a diehard young soccer fan, did.
     “When the surgery came I couldn’t play,” he says. “I didn’t know it would take that long. I thought it would take a couple days and I would be back.”
     Just how long was he sidelined?
     “It was more than two weeks,” he says, sorrowfully.
     “He wasn’t concerned with how serious the surgery was,” his mother says, laughing. “He was more concerned with not being able to play soccer.”
     Over the next year, Kevin began to get motion on the left side of his mouth.
     “It’s really kind of a magical thing,” says Dr Nguyen “We do this procedure, a number of hours and effort, using not a small amount of resources. We don’t know if it works or not. I saw him post-operatively within first couple of weeks, he looked like he had this big bulgy thing in his cheek. Nothing was moving. All of a sudden, he was smiling. It was a really incredible moment.”

                                                                   *

 

     Well, magic and hard work. Low tech and high tech. 
     Kevin Portillo begins his bi-weekly occupational therapy session by holding a 2-cent white plastic fork in his mouth and showing that he can maneuver it up and down. 
     “Try to purse our lips together to make it stand up,” says Anne-Ashley Field, his therapist at CHoP. “We’ve got it pretty solid in the middle. Try to work it over to the weaker side. Nice try ... and that’s harder.”
     Kevin puts on purple latex gloves and pulls at the inside of his cheek.
     “You’re going to do your stretch on the inside,” says Field. “A nice, slow hold. Good. Bring that thumb up... Do you feel like it’s getting looser than it was?”
     “Mmm-hmmm,” Kevin agrees, gloved fingers in mouth.
     She takes some photos. There is a lot of photography in facial therapy, to track progress.
     “Now give me the biggest open mouthed smile you can,” says Field. “Good. Can you make the left side go up even more? Try to make your gums even.”
     Then, after more exercises, she asks if he is ready for the computer work.
     They move into the next room, to a $20,000 Lenovo biometric therapy system. Field sticks a surface EMG – an oblong black sensor that reads electrical activity in the muscle – to Kevin’s left cheek and he plays video games, Load Ship, where he took animated boxes from a conveyor on the screen by smiling and relaxing.
     “Give me a big smile,” Field says, calibrating the device. “And relax.”
     He plays for four minutes, the game burbling a skittery kind of jazzy electronic music.
     They play a few other games: one trying to get a man to a safe spot as two serrated blue spaces come together. Then a marble maze.
     “How are you feeling?” she asks.
     “Hurts,” he replies.
     Physical rehabilitation is the part of the surgical process that often gets overlooked, but it can make the difference between success and failure.
      “It’s huge, particularly with facial palsy,” says Dr Nguyen. “You can do technically very sound surgery on two completely different patients and have two completely different outcomes based on how involved they are with their own therapy… It just doesn’t look as good .... So much of this goes into mirror therapy… training your brain… to move something that was never moving.”
     How does Kevin feel about being able to fully smile after a lifetime of not being able to?
     “I’ve been getting better on how I react. I do it automatically,” says Kevin. “Sometimes when somebody says a joke. It actually feels great now. Before it felt weird to not smile. Smiling both sides of my mouth at same time, I feel I'm one of other people who smiles right.”
     His mother remembers the moment she noticed.       

     “We were at the table, we were eating,” says Silvia Portillo. “And then we said, ‘Kevin, are you moving there?’ He started moving. Not the way he was doing today; little movements.”
     “We were eating,” he says. “I think she said something funny, and I just smiled.”
     And how does smiling affect his life?
     “Before I was actually shy,” he says. “Right now, I'm less shy, more active.”
     “I used to have trouble expressing my emotions. Now people know if I'm smiling or laughing. When I laughed, before, I laughed weird.
     “And right now, they know, bit by bit, that I was trying to smile, I was expressing my laughter and my smile. When I play soccer, and [score] a goal, I'm happy. I’m smiling, to tell everybody I scored.”

You won't BELIEVE what these famous actresses look like NOW!

     A quarter century ago, Queen Elizabeth II gave a speech where she famously referred to 1992 as an "annus horribilis" — Latin for "horrible year" — for its variety of scandals and setbacks, including a major fire at Windsor Castle.
     The temptation is to dub 2016 the same, for the rise of reaction and xenophobia, and nations lining up to swan dive into folly. Britain's Brexit, the Philippines' elevation of a murderous madman, and of course our own election of an unfit, erratic fraud to lead our country to ... well, we have no clue, do we? Either where he promised, or its opposite, or somewhere in between.
     I will resist that temptation to describe 2016 as an annus horribilis for the simple reason that we need to reserve the phrase for later use. Before I checked, I assumed the Queen had unleashed annus horribilis for the year Diana died, but no, that didn't happen until 1997. You don't want to pull the cord on "horrible" too soon because what happens when things really get bad? "Double horrible" just doesn't pack a punch. 
     And, ever the optimist, I am fully open and receptive to the idea that Trump, through his ham-handedness, ignorance and bullying will not be as effective a tyrant as feared. I'm not hoping he'll ruin the country. Chaos and stasis will never be so welcome. Maybe he'll blunder into solving the immigrant crisis and sealing an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Nixon, remember, went to China.
    Also – and this is important – a strong argument can be made that Trump is merely shining the harsh sodium vapor lamp of his  train wreck ego and self-puffing mania on flaws that were already manifest in the American system. What was shrugged off and clucked at under Barack Obama suddenly seems more more malign – and properly so – under the prospect of a Trump regime. He might have unleashed the haters, but they were already here, in the blocks, set in their runners' crouch, waiting for the gun. 
     OK. So now we've squinted at the big picture, on to the little: 2016 was the third calendar year of this blog, begun on July 1, 2013. I'm happy to report that it has become a quotidian part of life – my life anyway, and maybe yours.  I've never come close to missing a post—though I reserve the right, for being hit by a bus, etc. I did go to Japan with nothing in the can, but it turns out that their country is wired, too, and filing something wasn't a challenge or a chore. 
     None of this is. 
     Looking at the stats, I'm happy with the blog's progress.
    At the end of 2013, after six months of existence, the daily average readership was 918. By Dec. 30, 2014 it was 1200. The end of 2015 was 1539, and now its 1730, nearly double what it was three years ago. And the numbers are trending upward: January, 2015 was the first month to break 50,000 readers—this year, every month since May has done so, with two breaking 60,000, including a record November at 65,166. My gut says in 2017 we'll reach 80,000.
    But those are just numbers, and nothing to brag about on real web success terms. What about quality? I spent the entire year shrieking in alarm over Donald Trump, going back to posts like Jan. 27 "Preparing for President Trump" and Feb. 25  "Silvio Trump." To observe that it didn't help would be obvious—no columnist did, or could. I tried, and that's what is important, and no doubt will be a source of comfort as our nation twists and distorts like a candy wrapper in a campfire. 
    There are some pieces I'm quite proud of – or the cuteness article I researched in Japan, "The Saving Grace of Kumamon," I was able to use the photos on the blog that Mosaic didn't want, and in general I've been glad to have everygoddamnday.com to present versions of stories that I prefer, plus essays that aren't available online. 
    As far as pieces written exclusively for the blog, I didn't notice any original pieces that approached the quality of, say, "Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery" or "Abe Lincoln would not have done it." That is worrisome. Then again, I finished a book and had it published, so maybe my focus was there. And there were a few original highlights: my April 1 post, "The End," managed to fool a lot of readers, despite being inaccurate in every aspect—foreshadowing of Trump's triumph, perhaps. After the paper sent me to buy an assault rifle, leading to June 17 "That old Second Amendment only goes so far," having this blog, a venue where I could set the record straight, to my satisfaction at least, in June 23's "Dunk Tank." That was very important to me when I was getting abuse from all sides, from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and every yahoo with a Twitter account.
    Enough. My wife thinks I shouldn't post the numbers, but my blog, my rules. It was worth doing,, and continuing to do, only because you continue to follow along, and I appreciate it, and thank you. 
    

A break from politics, sort of, with Japan's top bear

 

    This ran in the Sun-Times Friday. I didn't post it here, because I figured people had read enough about Kumamon Tuesday and wouldn't want more. But then I realized, some might have been put off by the 6,000-word treatise that ran in Mosaic, and might appreciate the 650-word, reader-friendly version. Plus it does have some elements not in the original. And how long can you puzzle over a photo? So, just in case, here it is:

     “Tell the world about our Kumamon,” urged Hoei Tokunaga, as we shook hands goodbye after a weekend together last March. That one sentence, so sincere, almost beseeching, somehow summarized my week in Japan.
     Tokunaga’s title is assistant deputy director of the Kumamoto prefectural government. In reality he is a coat holder for a teddy bear, one of 20 functionaries wrangling the massive business dealings, intense media interest and hectic publicity schedule of Kumamon, an imaginary black bear with red cheeks that is among the most popular mascots in Japan.
     Kumamon’s handlers claim he is on his way to becoming bigger than Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty. So I might as well introduce him to you, given that he is almost unknown in this country. In Asia, Kumamon sold $1 billion worth of merchandise last year.
     You may have noticed we are not talking about politics. That’s intentional. If President Obama’s passionate evocation of the power and glory that is America left you unmoved Wednesday, if Hillary Clinton’s address Thursday only intensified your doorjamb-biting hatred for her, what am I supposed to do? Politics is a 24-hour hobbyhorse and sometimes, to remain sane, a person should get off and let it rock by itself for awhile. Friday, the gateway to the weekend, is the perfect day to take a break. The bad dream that is Election 2016 will be waiting for us Monday, right where we left it.

To continue reading, click here.  

"Pray for Kumamoto & Kumamon" — The birth of Cute Studies

      This was a challenge. I first started talking to Mosaic in October about writing something about cuteness as an academic field. We quickly decided the topic warranted a research trip to Japan. The visit required a lot of prep work, contacting government officials and academics, lining up hotels and a translator. Then when I was finished, in April, the narrative had to be recast after the area I visited was hit by an earthquake.
      So I was very happy when the story was finally posted, last Tuesday. 
      Mosaic encourages distribution of its features, and we were all pleased that The Guardian reprinted this, and it was carried by the BBC, and Digg, and many other popular sites. The story is republished here under a Creative Commons license, which means you are free to repost or reprint it as you like—my version here is slightly different than what Mosaic published, in that it includes my photos and a few favorite lines that were cut in the editing process. Their only requirement is that you credit Mosaic, which posts a new long form article on topics of health and science every week, and link back to the original article.
    It's quite long, so you might want to space your reading out. There is also a sidebar on cuteness and robots which I'm posting Thursday. 

     On April 14, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, toppling buildings and sending residents rushing into the streets. Hundreds of aftershocks—one an even stronger 7.0 quake—continued for days, killing 49 people, injuring 1,500, and forcing tens of thousands from their homes.
     News spread immediately around the globe on social media.
     “Earthquake just happened,” Margie Tam posted from Hong Kong. “R u ok kumamon?”
     “Are Kumamon and his friends safe?” wondered Eric Tang, a Chinese college student.
     “Pray for Kumamoto and Kumamon,” wrote Nut Nattsumi Silkoon, a violin teacher in Thailand, a phrase that would be repeated thousands of times.
     Kumamoto is a city of 700,000 in a largely agricultural province in southwestern Japan.
     But what, or more precisely who, is Kumamon? And why in the wake of an immense natural disaster did concern for earthquake victims focus on him, specifically?
     That’s a bit more complicated.


                                                               *


      It is March 12, 2016, one month before the earthquake. Kumamon bounds onto an  outdoor stage at the opening event of his birthday party in Kumamoto. About 150 guests, mostly women, cheer, clap and whistle. 

     Kumamon waves and bows. He's a little less than two meters tall, with black glossy fur, circular red cheeks and wide, staring eyes. He’s dressed for the occasion in a white satin dinner jacket trimmed in silver and a red bow tie.
     One woman in the crowd holds a Kumamon doll swaddled in a baby blanket. Another dressed her doll in a grey vested outfit matching her own. She says it took her a month to sew. A number of fans pasted red paper circles on their cheeks to mimic his. Those in the first row arrived at 3 a.m. to snag their prime spots to greet the object of their intense though difficult-to-explain affection.   

      “Actually, I have no idea why I love him so much,” says Milkinikio Mew, who flew from Hong Kong with friends Lina Tong and Alsace Choi to attend the three-day long festival, even though Hong Kong is holding its own birthday party for Kumamon. She slept in, showing up at 6 a.m. for the 10 a.m. kick-off, so had to settle for a seat in the last row.
     Kumamon is ... well ... he’s not a exactly cartoon character, like Mickey Mouse, though he does appear in a daily newspaper comic strip. He’s not a brand icon either, like Hello Kitty, though like her, he does not speak, and like her, his image certainly moves merchandise.
     He’s sort of a ....
     But first, the big moment is here. A birthday cake is rolled out, and the crowd sings “Happy birthday.” Then birthday presents. A representative from Honda, which has a motorbike factory nearby, gives him its Kumamon-themed scooter. An Italian bicycle maker unveils a custom Kumamon racing cycle. Plus a new DVD, an exercise video, featuring Kumamon leading calisthenics.
     The Italian bicycle is not for sale, yet. But the other two items are, joining the more than 100,000 products that feature his image, from stickers and notebooks to cars to airplanes — a budget Japanese airline flies a Kumamon 737. When Steiff offered 1,500 special edition Kumamon dolls, the $300 figure sold out online in five seconds, according to the German toymaker. Last year Leica created a $3,300 Kumamon camera, a bargain compared to the solid gold statue of Kumamon crafted by a Tokyo jeweler which retails for $1 million.
     So what is he then? Kumamon is a yuru-kyara, or “loose character,” one of the cuddly creatures in Japan representing everything from towns and cities to airports and prisons. The word is sometimes translated as “mascot” but yuru-kyara are significantly different than mascots in the West, such as those associated with professional sports teams — Benny the Bull, Cyril the Swann — which tend to be benign, prankish one-dimensional court jesters that operate in the narrow realm of the sidelines during game time.
     Kumamon has a far wider field of operation as the yuru-kyara for Kumamoto Prefecture (a prefecture is like a state in the U.S. or a county in England) and has become more than a symbol for that region, a way to push its tourism and farm products. He is almost regarded as a living entity, a kind of funky ursine household god (it is perhaps significant that the very first licensed Kumamon product was a full-sized Buddhist shrine emblazoned with his face). Kumamon has personality. “Cute and naughty” Tam explains, later, asked what about Kumamon made her care about him enough to be concerned about him immediately after the earthquake.
     She wasn’t alone. After the April 14 quake, Kumamon’s Twitter feed, which has 473,000 followers, and typically updates at least three times a day, stopped issuing communications. With a thousand buildings damaged, water to the city cut, a hospital jarred off its foundations, and 44,000 people out of their homes, the prefectural government, which handles Kumamon’s business dealings and appearances, had more important things to do than stage manage its fictive bear.

      But Kumamon was missed.
     “People are asking why Kumamon’s Twitter account has gone silent when the prefecture needs its mascot bear more than ever,” the Japan Times noted on April 19.
    Into the vacuum came hundreds, then thousands of drawings, posted by everyone from children to professional manga artists, not only in Japan, but in Thailand, Hong Kong, China. They waged an impromptu campaign of drumming up support for earthquake relief, using the bear, which stood in for the city itself and its people. Kumamon was depicted leading the rescue efforts, his head bandaged like Apollinaire, lifting stones to rebuild the tumbled foundation of Kumamoto castle, propping up tottering walls, enfolding children in his arms.
     “Ganbatte Kumamon!” many wrote, using a term that means something between “don’t give up” and “do your best.” 

               
                                                               *


     Kumamon is kawaii­­­—the word is translated as “cute,” but it has broad, multi-layered

Kumamon meets the Emperor and Empress

meanings, enfolding a range of sweetly-alluring images and behaviors. Not only does kawaii include the army of Japanese mascots, but a world a fashion that has adult women dressing as schoolgirls and schoolgirls dressing as Goth heroines or Lolita seductresses, giving rise to ero-kawaii, or erotic kawaii, a mash-up of cute and sexy.
      Kumamon is not sexy. Though when the Empress Michito met Kumamon, at her request, during the imperial couple’s visit to Kumamoto in 2013, she asked him, “Are you single?” He hovers in a realm of fantasy closer to a character from children’s literature, a cross between the Cat in the Hat and a teddy bear. Fans line up to hug him, often reaching back for a lingering last touch as they’re led off to make way for the next waiting fan. There is a tacit agreement to never allude to anything as crass as a man in a bear suit. 

Masataka Naruuo, left, helps his boss through a press conference.

     To, if not accept his reality, then to pretend that it exists. In 2014, Kumamon gave a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, where his title was given as “Director of PR.” The journalists posed respectful questions. “How many staff do you have, to help you out with your activities?” one asked. The answer, “We have about 20 staff members in our section,” was delivered by one of those subordinates, Masataka Naruo, who enjoys saying that Kumamon is his boss.
     What is happening here? Why are we drawn to cuteness? What about it causes us to open our pocketbooks and our hearts? Is appreciation for cuteness hardwired in human beings? Is it something embraced by individuals, or imposed upon them? Does it limit us? Or liberate us?
     These are questions being mulled by a potential new academic field, “Cute Studies.” We eagerly spend fortunes on cute avatars — Kumamon earned $1 billion in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that—without ever wondering: What is cute? What does it say about our society? Is what it says good or, possibly, could cuteness harbor darker facets as well?
     And where do our concepts of cuteness originate? That one is easy. The primal source of all things cute is found in every country, in every city and town, every neighborhood and close to every block in the world. You may have the template for all the cuteness in the world right in the next room and not even realize it.


                                                                    *
 

  

      Soma Fugaki has dark eyes that sparkle with intelligence as he scans the opening night crowd at “Blossom Blast,” a feminist art show at the UltraSuperNew gallery in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district.
     Drinks pour, music pulses. But Soma can’t dance, or walk, or even stand. His arms and legs are stubby, his muscle tone, poor. Nor can he speak. He has a condition the Japanese call akachan joutai, or “being a baby.”
     Soma is five months old, squirming in the arms of his father, Keigo, who gazes lovingly into his son’s face and describes what he sees. 

Soma and Keigo Fugaki

     “Everything about him is a reflection of myself,” Keigo says. “It’s like a cartoon version of myself. That has to do with how much I think he’s cute. I stare at him all the time. He looks like me. It’s my features, but exaggerated: bigger cheeks; bigger eyes.”
     Babies are our model for cuteness. Those last two details—big cheeks, big eyes—are straight out of Konrad Lorenz’s kindchenschema, or “baby schema,” as defined in the Nobel-Prize-winning scientist’s 1943 paper on the “innate releasing mechanisms” that prompt affection and nurture in human beings: fat cheeks, large eyes set low on the face, high forehead, small nose and mouth, stubby arms and legs that move in a clumsy fashion. Not just humans: puppies, baby ducks and other young animals are enfolded in Lorenz’s theory.
     Lorenz’s paper is the Ur-document of Cute Studies, but did not produce an immediate reaction among the scientific community — he was a Nazi psychologist writing during wartime, exploring their loathsome eugenic theories, a reminder that the shiny face of cuteness invariably conceals a thornier side.
     For decades, scientists focused on what babies perceive, what they think. But in the 21st century, attention turned toward how babies themselves are perceived, as cuteness started taking its first wobbly steps toward becoming a cohesive realm of research.
     Part behavioral science, part cultural studies, part biology, the field is so new it hasn’t had a conference yet. Experiments have demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills — useful modifications for handling an infant. A pair of Yale studies suggest that when people say they want to “eat up” babies, it’s prompted by overwhelming emotions — caused, one researcher speculated, by frustration at not being able to care for the cute thing, channeled into aggressiveness.
     These emotions are triggered chemically, deep within the brain. Experiments hooking up volunteers to MRIs have shown how seeing cute creatures stimulates the brain’s pleasure center, the nucleus accumbens, releasing dopamine, in a way similar to what happens when eating chocolate or having sex.
     Women feel this reaction more strongly than men. While biologically this is explained by the need to care for infants, society’s larger embrace of cuteness leads academics in gender studies to wonder whether cute culture is the sugar pill that sexism comes in — training women to be childlike — or could it instead be a form of empowerment, “that publicly signaled these young women taking control of their own sexuality,” in the words a paper by Hiroshi Aoyagi and Shu Min Yuen, recently printed in a journal edited by a little-known American instructor living in Tokyo who has become something of the father of Cute Studies.


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     “Feel free to wear these slippers,” says Joshua Paul Dale, pausing to remove his shoes at the entrance to his large — well, large for Tokyo — light-filled apartment in the Sendagaya section of the city.
   

Joshua Paul Dale

 Dale, 50, a cultural studies scholar on the faculty of Tokyo Gakugei University, is the driving force for creation of Cute Studies. He was the first to assemble academic papers into an online “Cute Studies Bibliography,” a list now at nearly 100 publications, from T.R. Alley’s “Head shape and the perception of cuteness,” in Developmental Psychology to Leslie Zebrowitz et al’s “Baby Talk to the Babyfaced” in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
     Dale’s latest step in creating his field is editing the The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture’s special cuteness issue, published in April 2016.
     “The articles collected in this issue demonstrate the flexibility of cuteness as an analytical category, and the wide scope of the insights it generates,” he writes in the introduction.
     Despite such progress, it is too early to declare cuteness an independent scientific field, like geology.
     “It hasn’t yet happened,” says Dale, who estimates that only a few dozen academics worldwide focus on cuteness. “We hope that it’s in the process of happening. I started independently and then other scholars are interested. We have conference panels to try to get the word out. I suppose the next step is to get the funding and do a small conference or symposium.”
     Dale says one inspiration is “porn studies,” now with its own quarterly, created after academics united to focus on a topic they felt cultural researchers were neglecting out of misplaced squeamishness. A distinct field encourages exploration.
     “If we just limit it to people in biology, or people in one area, then certain work will get done and certain work won’t get done,” Dale says.  
     Hiroshi Nittono, director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka  

Dr. Hiroshi Nittono

University, contributed to the East Asian Journal’s special issue. Nittono, wrote the first peer-reviewed scientific paper with “kawaii” in its title, and postulates a “two-layer model” of cuteness: not only does it encourage parental care of newborns, first, but once a baby grows to toddlerhood and begins interacting with the world, cuteness then promotes socialization, a pattern Dale sees reflected in the aborning field.  
     “It’s interesting because it’s inherent in the concept itself,” Dale says. “Cute things relate easily to other things. It kind of breaks down the barriers a little bit between self and other, or subject and object. That means it invites work from various fields. It’s interesting to get people together from different fields talking about the same subject.”
     Not that you need an academic conference to do that. Japan has uniquely embraced cuteness as reflecting its national character, the way tea ceremonies or cherry blossoms were once held up as symbolic of Japanese nationhood. In 2009, the government appointed a trio of “Cute Ambassadors,” three women in ribbons and baby doll dresses whose task was to represent the country abroad. But the preferred national image doesn’t necessarily correlate to the found reality.


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Tokyo subway station

     Cuteness is so associated with Japan that encountering the actual country — mile after mile of unadorned concrete suburban buildings alternating with rolling green fields and periodic densely-packed cities — can come as something of a surprise. The Tokyo subway is jammed with hurrying businessmen in dark suits, rushing women in paper masks, racing kids in plain school uniforms. Cute characters such as Kumamon can be hard to spot, and to expect otherwise is like going to America and expecting everyone to be a cowboy.
     Still, there are pockets of cuteness to be found — tiny yuru-kyara charms dangling off backpacks, peeking from posters, or construction barriers in the form of baby ducks.
     But not everywhere, not even in most places.
     Even in Kumamoto during Kumamon’s birthday weekend. Exit from the Shinkanesen bullet train at Kumamoto station, and there is nothing special on the platform. Not so much as a banner. Not until you take the escalator down and catch glimpse of the enormous head of Kumamon set up downstairs, plus a mock stationmaster’s office built for Kumamon. The train station shop is filled with Kumamon items, from bottles of sake to stuffed animals including, somewhat disturbingly, a plush set that pairs him with Hello Kitty, the wide-eyed bear directly behind Kitty in such a way as to suggest ... well, you wonder if it’s deliberate.
     In the city, his face is spread across the sides of buildings, with birthday banners hanging from the semi-enclosed shopping arcades that are a feature of every Japanese city.
     Six years ago, Kumamoto wasn’t known for much. There is an active volcano, Mt. Aso, nearby, and the 1960s reproduction of a dramatic 1600s-era castle that burned hundreds of years ago. In 2010, Kumamoto residents told officials there is nothing in their city that anyone would want to visit. The region is largely agricultural, growing melons and strawberries.   

     They were being asked about local attractions because in 2010 Japan Railways was planning to extend its Shinkansen bullet train to Kumamoto, and the city fathers were eager for tourists to use it. So they commissioned a logo to promote the area, hiring a designer who offered a stylized exclamation point (their official slogan, “Kumamoto Surprise,” was a bright spin on the fact that many Japanese would be surprised to find anything in Kumamoto worth seeing). The exclamation point logo was a red blotch, resembling the sole of a shoe. The designer, seeking to embellish it, and knowing the popularity of yuru-kyara, added a surprised black bear. “Kuma” is Japanese for bear. “Mon” is local slang for “man.”  
     Paired with a mischievous personality — Mew calls him “very naughty” — Kumamon made headlines after Kumamoto held a press conference to report that he was missing from his post, having run off to Osaka to urge residents there to take the train. The stunt worked. Kumamon was voted the most popular yuru-kyara in 2011. (Japan has a national contest, the Grand Prix, held in November. The most recent one was attended by 1,727 different mascots and 80,000 spectators. Millions of votes were cast).
     A few Kumamoto officials resisted Kumamon — their concern was he would scare off potential tourists, who’d worry about encountering wild bears, of which there are none in the prefecture. But the Kumamoto governor was a fan, and cannily waived licensing fees for Kumamon, encouraging manufacturers to use him royalty-free. 
     Rather than pay up front, in order to get approval to use the bear’s image, companies are required to promote Kumamoto, either by using locally manufactured parts or ingredients, or boosting the area on their packaging.  The side of the box the Tamiya radio-controlled “Kumamon Version Buggy,” for instance, has photos of the region’s top tourist destinations. In one of the songs on the exercise DVD released on his birthday, as Kumamon leads his fans through their exertions, they grunt, “Toh-MAY-toes ... Straw-BEAR-ies” ... Wah-TER-melons.” All agricultural products that are specialties of Kumamoto. Go into a grocery store and Kumamon smiles from every pint of strawberries and honeydew wrapper.
     It’s as if Mickey Mouse were continually hawking California oranges.     
     The bullet train began service to Kumamoto on March 12, so the date now used as Kumamon’s official birthday. He was there to greet the first scheduled train, a moment recreated during his birthday fest.
     Shopping in Kumamoto the day before the start of the celebration, Mew and her friends wear Kumamon t-shirts and carry Kumamon backpacks. They stand in the entrance of the Otani Musical Instruments, a store in the Kamitori Arcade. Otani sells sheet music and guitars, but has put a sale banner featuring Kumamon in its window and a table of small items carrying his image: keychains and change purses and handkerchiefs, some with musical motifs, directly at the store’s entrance.
     The three women show their discoveries to each other. They own a lot of Kumamon products already. Why buy more? What makes Kumamon so special?
     “Because he’s very cute,” says Tong, in English.


                                                                        *

 

      Nobody is cute in Shakespeare. The word did not exist until the early 1700s, when the “a” in “acute” was replaced by an apostrophe — ‘cute — and then dropped altogether, the sort of truncation for which frenetic Americans in their restive colonies were already notorious.
     “Acute” came from “acus,” Latin for needle, and later denoting pointed things. So “cute” at first meant “acute, clever, keen-witted, sharp, shrewd” according to the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which doesn’t suggest the term could describe visual appearance. This older, “clever” meaning lingers in expressions like “don’t be cute.”
     The newer usage was still being resisted in Britain in the mid-1930s, when a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph included “cute” on his list of “bastard American expressions,” along with “O.K.” and “radio.”
      Not only is “cute” unknown before 1700, but Lorentz’s kindchenschema is largely absent from visual arts before the 20th century. Even babies in medieval artworks are depicted as wizened miniature adults.

Kewpie

      Cute images of the kind we’ve become accustomed to begin showing up around 1900. While purists fussed, popular culture was discovering the bottomless marketability of cute things. Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip in 1912 about “Kewpies” — taken from “cupid” — preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads who soon were being handed out as carnival prizes and capering around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
      Cuteness and modern commercialization are linked.
      “In terms of Western culture, world culture in general, it’s definitely the rise of consumption and the nascent middle class able to afford trivial objects,” says Joshua Paul Dale.
      Still, kewpies followed the lines of actual human anatomy, more or less, the way that Mickey Mouse resembled an actual mouse when he first appeared on film in 1928. A half a century of fine-tuning made him much more infantile, a process naturalist Stephen Jay Gould famously described in his “biological homage” to Mickey. Gould observed that the mischievous and sometimes violent mouse of the late 1920s morphed into the benign, bland overseer of a vast corporate empire.  

Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie

     
     “He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty character of Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom,” Gould writes.
     In Japan, the national fascination with cuteness is traced to girls’ handwriting. Around 1970 schoolgirls in Japan began to imitate the caption text in manga comics, what was called koneko-ji, or “kitten writing.” By 1985, half of the girls in Japan had adopted the style, and companies marketing pencils, notebooks and other inexpensive gift items, like Sanrio, learned that these items sold better festooned with a variety of characters, the queen of whom is Hello Kitty.
     Her full name is Kitty White, named for Alice in Wonderland’s cat, Kitty. She has a family and lives in London (a fad for all things British hit Japan in the mid-1970s).
      That first Hello Kitty product — a vinyl coin purse — went on sale in 1975. Today, about $5 billion worth of Hello Kitty merchandise is sold annually. In Asia, there are Hello Kitty amusement parks, restaurants and hotel suites. EVA, the Taiwanese airline, flies half a dozen Hello Kitty-themed jets, that carry images of Hello Kitty and her friends not only on their hulls, but throughout the plane, from the pillows and antimacassars to, in the bathroom, toilet paper emblazoned with Hello Kitty’s face, a detail which an observer does not need to hold a doctorate in psychology to wonder about.
     Just as Barbie’s measurements drew critique from feminists and scholars, so Hello Kitty caught the interest of academics, especially in Japan, where the progress of women has lagged far behind that of other industrial nations. With girlishness a national obsession —  Japan did not ban possession of child pornography until 2014 — and its most popular female icon lacking a mouth, if cuteness does become a separate field, then, like porn studies, much credit has to be given to feminist pushback against what Hiroto Mursawa of Osaka Shoin Women’s University calls “a mentality that breeds non-assertion.”


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     “If your target is young women, it’s saturated,” says Hiroshi Nittono, of the market for cute products in Japan. That is certainly true. In an effort to stand out, some yuru-kyara are now made intentionally crude, or semi-frightening. There is a whole realm of kimo-kawaii, or “gross cute,” epitomized by Gloomy, a cuddly bear whose claws are red with the blood of his owner, whom he habitually mauls. Even Kumamon, beloved as he is, is still subject to a popular Internet meme where he is revealed as Satan in disguise.
     Because the practice of putting characters on products is so prevalent, and subject to resistance, Nittono, a placid, smiling man who wears an ascot, has been working with the government on developing products that are intrinsically cute. He asks to meet, not at his apartment or an academic office, but at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Hiroshima, where he is finishing up an academic tenure.
     For the past few years, Nittono and the government have been collaborating to develop cute items, a few of which are laid out on a table: a squat makeup brush, a bowl, a brazier, a few medallions and tiles. Given the mind-boggling array of cute merchandise available at shops in every mall around the world, it is not an overwhelming display of the ingenious synthesis of academe and government.
      Nittono’s group is exploring how cuteness can be used as a device to draw people toward products without blatant branding.
     “We use kawaii for such sentiment, feeling, kawaii things are not threatening, that is the most important part, small and not harmful,” says Nittono. “A high quality product is somewhat distant from the customers; it looks expensive. But if you put kawaii nuance on such product, maybe such items can be more approachable.”
     “If you have something cute, then you want to touch it, and then you see the quality of it,” adds Youji Yamashita, a ministry official.


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Date Tomito

 

     Objects can be unintentionally kawaii. With her husband Makoto, Date Tomito owns “Bar Pretty,” a tiny side street tavern in Hiroshima. Six people would be crowded sitting at the bar. Makoto comes in from the market bearing a small plant in a yellow pot, a present for his wife.
      “This is kawaii,’ Date says, holding the plant up, elaborating. “There are lots of different meanings for kawaii: ’cute,’ ‘small,’ ‘clumsy.’ Some things just have a cute shape.”
     She stresses something about kawaii.
     “It’s never bad,” she says. “I never use kawaii in an ironic way. Kawaii is kind of the best compliment. Around Japanese people, especially girls and women. They really like kawaii stuff and things.”
     Not that Japanese necessarily consider themselves kawaii. In a German study of 270,000 people in 22 countries, the Japanese came in dead last in being pleased with how they look. More than a third of the country, 38 percent, said they are “not at all satisfied” or “not very satisfied” with their personal appearance.
     Those surgical masks worn in public? Yes, to avoid colds, pollution and allergies. But ask Japanese women, and many will say that they wear them date masuku — “just for show.” Because they didn’t have time to put on their make-up, or because they don’t consider themselves cute enough, and they want a shield against the intrusive eyes of their crowded world.


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Harajuku Mikkoro

     One question that Joshua Dale agrees could be worth exploring in his new field is how cuteness is affected by duplication, by overload. One baby draws you in, a dozen send you fleeing. Cuteness doesn’t seem to work as well multiplied. In abundance, it can be overwhelming.
     Go to Harajuku, the fashion district not far from Dale’s apartment—which, perhaps significantly, is sparsely decorated, with nothing stereotypically “cute” on display. The stores are so crammed with kawaii merchandise, vast arrays of character faces and kitsch and glittering fashion accessories, it’s almost blinding.
     And for every Kumamon, for every popular yuru-kyara, there are a hundred Harajuku Mikkoros. A five foot tall yellow and brown bee, Harajuku Mikkoro stands on a sidewalk, celebrating Honey Bee Day by finishing up three hours of loitering in front of the Colombin Bakery and Café, greeting passersby, or trying to. Most barely glance in his direction and do not break stride, though some do come over and happily pose for the inevitable picture. There is no line.
     Harajuku Mikkoro is cute yet obscure, the common fate for most yuru-kyara. The city of Osaka has 45 different characters promoting its various aspects, and must fend off periodic calls for them to be culled, in the name of efficiency; one administrator piteously argued that the government officials who created these characters work hard on them and so would feel bad if they were discontinued.
     Harajuku Mikkoro is trying to avoid that fate.
     “He is not a success yet,” admits one of his handlers, distributing cubes of the café’s trademark honey cake. “Many are not as successful....”
     “...as Kumamon?”
     “We’re trying to be.”



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     Humanity has always embraced household gods — not the world-creating universal deity, but minor, more personal allies to soften what can be a harsh and lonely life. Not everyone has the friends he deserves, or the baby she’d cherish. Often people of both sexes are alone in the world.

     On Shimtori Street, in Kumamoto, is a second floor walk-up tavern, the KumaBar, so called because its décor consists entirely of Kumamon images: dozens of them, all sizes: figurines, dolls, signs, posters. He beams from bottles — Kumamoto-made beer and sake are featured here — and smiles from menus. Sitting at the bar is a full-size fiberglass Kumamon statue, with changeable eyes that, at the request of customers, the bartender will adjust to reflect advancing inebriation.
    KumaBar opens its doors at 7 p.m. the night before the birthday festival begins, and Rika Usui is waiting. She hurries in and grabs the stool at Kumamon’s right, orders a drink and pats his paw.
     She is, she says, a home economics teacher in Tokyo.
      Does she like Kumamon?
     “A lot,” she says.
     Why?
     “The way he moves,” she says, in Japanese. “He moves jerkily. He’s round and cute.”
      She does not like any of the other yuru-kyara.
      And her students? Do they like Kumamon too? They do, universally.
      “It doesn’t make a difference,” she says. “Girl or boy.”
     Usui has her picture taken with Kumamon, and spends a long time puzzling over the various Kumamon products for sale, glassware mostly, including one glass showing him sprawled on the ground, perhaps asleep. She eventually purchases a Kumamon kitchen apron.
     The bar begins to fill up. She does not talk to the arriving patrons, or even seem to notice them. Just before she leaves, she quietly turns and raises her glass to Kumamon’s lips to give her friend a quick little sip, and then is gone.

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Tamami Yazawa, performing as "LivePainter Gerutama."

                                                          

     Back at the UltraSuperNew gallery opening attended by Soma and his father, guests watch artist Tamami Yazawa in a frilly white miniskirt, draped in white feathers, with fuzzy leggings, an enormous yarn bow atop her head, her face painted white with a red flower on each cheek and blue dots running down her nose. She kneels in the gallery window and dabs at a teal and yellow painting that closely resembles finger-painting writ large.
     Her professional name is Gerutama, and she insists that, despite appearances, she is definitely not kawaii. She is a “LivePainter.” Some Japanese of both sexes reject kawaii—“fake” is a word often used. But they are in the minority. Japanese women still live in a culture where single women in their 30s are sometimes referred to as “leftover Christmas cake,” meaning that after the 25th — of December for cake, the 25th year for the women — they are past their expiration date, and hard to get rid of. Nobody wants either.
     “Kawaii is sickening,” says gallery-goer Stefhen Bryan, a Jamaican writer who lived for a decade in Japan and married a Japanese woman. “Kawaii is especially baby-like. If a woman acts like an adult in Japan, it’s an offense. Their self-esteem is nothing in this country. It’s all under the aegis of culture. It’s low self-esteem en masse.”
     Without question. But there is also more going on with cuteness than just the training wheels that help keep a sexist culture from toppling over, more than just conditioning girls to survive in a world dominated by men, or a tactic to hotwire biology in order to sell change purses and motor scooters. A very human need is also being filled. Teddy bears exist because the night is dark and long and at some point mom and dad have to go to bed and leave you. There is real comfort in cuteness.
     “Filling in an emotional need is exactly where kawaii plays a significant role,” writes Christine R. Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific. “Even in America, journalist Nicholas Kristof has written of an ‘empathy gap’ in today's society. He points to the place of objects that may be considered promoters of ‘happiness,’ ‘solace,’ ‘comfort.’ When a society needs to heal, it seeks comfort in the familiar. And often the familiar may reside in ‘cute.’ Witness the use of teddy bears as sources of comfort for firefighters in the wake of NYC's 9-11. So I see kawaii things as holding the potential as empathy generators.”
     Kumamon is a power station of empathy generation. In the weeks after the Kumamoto earthquake, Kumamon was so necessary that in his absence his fans simply conjured him up themselves, independently, as an object of sympathy, a tireless savior, an obvious hero.
     And then the bear himself returned. Three weeks after the April 14 earthquake, Kumamon visited the convention hall of the hard-hit town of Mashiki, where residents were still sleeping in their cars for protection as one of the 1,200 tremors continued to rumble across the area. The visit was reported on TV in the papers, as news, as if a long sought survivor had stumbled out of the wreckage, alive.
     The children, many who lost their homes in the earthquake, flocked around him, squealing, hugging, shaking hands, taking pictures.
     “It’s so fluffy and cute,” said Suzuha Araki, 5, smiling.


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