15 of 365
Baby Jesus and friend.
OK, first a little background. I own and operate a small English language school in Japan; mostly for children. Our biggest event each year is our Christmas party. We rent out an auditorium and our students put on English plays for their parents and families. It's quite a big deal for us and draws between 300-400 people.
This year, for the first time, we're doing a play on the birth of Jesus. I figured we needed a baby Jesus for the final scene, so I've been asking our students (we teach children from kindergarten through high school) to loan us a baby doll that we could use. The only response I got was a cartoonish rag doll kind of figure that I didn't think would really work. So, after some searching, I located the old-fashioned baby doll I was looking for at Toys-R-Us.
That's where it got weird. In this country that reveres cute and worships Little Kitty and other expressionless freakish cartoon characters, the majority of our students found the realistic baby doll to be frightening. Even adult students reacted that way.
There's got to be something wrong with a national psyche that reacts in revulsion to dolls that look like real people and finds vapid, featureless cartoon characters irresistibly cute.
In this photo, Ollie the orangutan is reassuring Jesus that no matter what others say, we love you just the way you are.
15 of 365
Baby Jesus and friend.
OK, first a little background. I own and operate a small English language school in Japan; mostly for children. Our biggest event each year is our Christmas party. We rent out an auditorium and our students put on English plays for their parents and families. It's quite a big deal for us and draws between 300-400 people.
This year, for the first time, we're doing a play on the birth of Jesus. I figured we needed a baby Jesus for the final scene, so I've been asking our students (we teach children from kindergarten through high school) to loan us a baby doll that we could use. The only response I got was a cartoonish rag doll kind of figure that I didn't think would really work. So, after some searching, I located the old-fashioned baby doll I was looking for at Toys-R-Us.
That's where it got weird. In this country that reveres cute and worships Little Kitty and other expressionless freakish cartoon characters, the majority of our students found the realistic baby doll to be frightening. Even adult students reacted that way.
There's got to be something wrong with a national psyche that reacts in revulsion to dolls that look like real people and finds vapid, featureless cartoon characters irresistibly cute.
In this photo, Ollie the orangutan is reassuring Jesus that no matter what others say, we love you just the way you are.