[1] Debra Occhi, “Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message: Comparing Japanese Kyara with Their Anthropomorphic Forebears,” Asian Ethnology 71, no. 1 (2012): 113; “Japanese Mascots: The Yuru-Chara Guide,” DeepJapan, January 17, 2016.

[2] Occhi, “Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message: Comparing Japanese Kyara with Their Anthropomorphic Forebears,” 111, 113.

[3] “Japanese Mascots.”

[4] The Colbert Report was an American talk and news satire television show hosted by Stephen Colbert. The The Colbert Report is said to have had a large cultural impact on American society and culture. “The Colbert Report,” in Wikipedia, April 21, 2018; “Cultural Impact of The Colbert Report,” in Wikipedia, January 9, 2018.  

[5] Jim Hoskinson, TV show, The Colbert Report (United States: Comedy Central, August 23, 2010).

[6] “Cthulhu Attacks Japan’s File-Sharers,” News.3Yen.com, August 22, 2010.

[7] Family Guy is an American animated sitcom created by created by Seth MacFarlane for the Fox television network. Family Guy is the target of copious criticism and controversy due to its dark humor, sexual themes, and racial jokes. “Criticism of Family Guy,” in Wikipedia, May 14, 2018.   

[8] Shun-ga (春画, “spring pictures”) is a form of erotic art from Japan. Most shun-ga were color woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) featuring nudity and explicit sexual content, with a playful and humorous approach to sexuality. Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814) is one of the most famous shun-ga.

Zuzanna Stanska, “All You Must Know About Japanese Erotic Art, Shunga (18+),” DailyArtMagazine (blog), February 16, 2017.

[9] Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2009), 316.

[10] Thomas Lamarre, “From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving Drawings,” Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (January 1, 2002): 329–67.

[11] Justin McCurry, “Japanese Children’s Cartoon Crayon Shin-Chan Branded Pornography,” The Guardian, September 24, 2014, sec. World news.

[12] McCurry; Goreti Pera, “Série ‘Shin Chan’ só pode ser emitida após as 22h30. Assim delibera a ERC,” Notícias ao Minuto, May 16, 2017.

[13] Laura Ettenfield, “The Octopussy: Exploring Representations of Female Sexuality in Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea (1866) and The Laughing Man (1868),” in Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture, ed. Jon Hackett and Seán Harrington (Indiana University Press, 2018), 78.

[14] Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[15] J. Keith Vincent, “The Genealogy of Japanese Immaturity,” in Nihon-teki sozoryoku no mirai: Kuru japonorojii no kanosei [The Future of the Japanese Imagination: The Potential of Cool Japanology], ed. Hiroki Azuma (Tokyo: NHK Books, 2010), 15–46.

[16] Takashi Murakami, Little Boy: The Art of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New York; New Haven: Japan Society, Inc. / Yale University Press, 2005).

[17] Tomiko Yoda, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 246.

[18] Yuri Kageyama, “Japanese Police Arrest Alleged Spammer,” msnbc.com, January 25, 2008.

[19] “Japanese Police Arrest Inventor of Computer Virus,” Scoop News, February 1, 2008.

[20] Duncan Geere, “Japanese Virus Replaces Files with Pictures of Squid,” Japanese virus, WIRED UK, August 16, 2010.

[21] “Kyou Is a Virus ...,” こねこね倶楽部 (blog), August 5, 2010; Jerad Moya, “Japanese Man Behind P2P Virus Receives Suspended Sentence,” ZeroPaid.Com (blog), May 19, 2008.

[22] “Winny Developer Kaneko Dies at 42,” The Japan Times Online, July 8, 2013.

[23] “Japanese P2P Virus Writer Convicted, Escapes Jail,” Goverment Technology, May 16, 2008.

[24] Egan Loo, “Clannad Malware Creator Gets Two Years in Prison,” Anime News Network, May 16, 2008.

[25] Geere, “Japanese Virus Replaces Files with Pictures of Squid.”

[26] Geere.

[27] Sharon Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 243.

[28] Masayoshi Someya, “Japan Outlaws Creating Malware,” TrendLabs Security Intelligence Blog, June 22, 2011.

[29] Colin P. A. Jones, “Too Much ‘Ganbaru’ Could Push Anyone over the Edge,” The Japan Times Online, June 8, 2015.

[30] Rich McCormick, “The Malware Museum Shows the Cute Computer Viruses of the Past,” The Verge, February 8, 2016.

[31] McCormick.

[32] McCormick.

[33] Christopher Tavares, “Origin of the Cookie Monster,” Multics, March 13, 1995.

[34] Tavares.

[35] Tavares.

[36] Tavares.

[37] Laura Fitzpatrick, “The Biggest Pranks in Geek History,” Time, September 8, 2008.

[38] Fitzpatrick.

[39] Talainia Posey, “When Viruses Attack,” TechRepublic, February 25, 2000.

[40] Cross, The Cute and the Cool, 44.

[41] Rob Wentworth, “Computer Virus!,” Up All Night Robotics, July 1996.

[42] “Ransomware,” a portmanteau of “ramson” and “malware,” is malicious software “used to mount extortion-based attacks that cause loss of access to information, loss of confidentiality, and information leakage” A. Young and Moti Yung, “Cryptovirology: Extortion-Based Security Threats and Countermeasures,” in Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (1996 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, USA: IEEE Comput. Soc. Press, 1996), 159. 

[43] “Bullet hell,” also called danmaku (弾幕, "barrage"), are a subgenre of vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up videogames from the early 1990s, where players must dodge an overwhelming number (hundreds or thousands) of bullet-like projectiles, arranged in intricate patterns “Bullet Hell,” TV Tropes, accessed September 28, 2018; “Shoot ’em Up,” in Wikipedia, August 16, 2018. 

[44] Cecilia D’Anastasio, “Anime Malware Locks Your Files Unless You Play A Game,” Kotaku, July 4, 2017.

[45] D’Anastasio.

[46] D’Anastasio.

[47] Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 96.

In August of 2010, media all over the world, from online technology news websites like PC World and The Wired to television shows like The Colbert Report, covered the news of a Japanese computer virus that replaced data files with pictures of cartoony octopuses, squids, and sea urchins. The Ika-tako virus (イカタコウイルス), translating to English as “Squid-Octopus” (in Japanese, ika, イカ, means “squid” and tako, 蛸, means “octopus”), was uploaded to the Internet by an unemployed 27-year-old man called Masato Nakatsuji, infecting somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 computers worldwide. The malware, disguised as a music file, lurked in the depths of Winny, a Japanese P2P file-sharing program for Windows. When executed, it worked through the affected hard disks, sending their files to a central server set up by Nakatsuji and replacing them with homemade drawings of marine invertebrates. [Figure 1] Eventually, Nakatsuji was arrested and sentenced by the Tokyo District Court to two years and six months in prison, on charges of property destruction.

Nakatsuji’s drawings resembled the “loose” aesthetics of Japanese yuru-kyara (“relaxing characters”). Yuru-kyara are unsophisticated mascots whose wobbly, awkward looks make them all the more lovable.[1] [Figure 2] Kawaii icons such as Hello Kitty are meant to have an enjoyable, even healing effect on observers[2]; but unlike Hello Kitty and other polished corporate commodities, the yuru‑kyara’s primary function is to “convey a love for the local area or hometown,”[3] promoting tourism to increase a region’s revenue. Despite their economic goals, yuru‑kyara come off as noncommercial characters, more earnest and flawed than the slick products of well-oiled profit machines, such as Sanrio (Hello Kitty’s motherhouse). The unassuming quality of Nakatsuji’s amateur drawings, too, is yurui, meaning “loose,” “wobbly,” “slack,” “relaxed.” In the media, the most circulated Ika-tako mascot was a bubble-shaped orange octopus with chubby tentacles and a round mouth. This character appeared in several variations: giving a friendly wave, comically angry, wearing an afro. Other figures by Nakatsuji included an adorable, spirited white squid, a lazy‑looking whelk, a sleeping sea urchin, a drooling jellyfish, and a bowtie-wearing starfish. Also, surprisingly, a mole, the only mammal in the group—an animal that lurks underground instead of underwater, but a lurker nonetheless. [Figure 3] The dissonance at play here is that, although Nakatsuji’s characters look yurui, they do not heal, but destroy, like any form of “digital pollution,” prompting the Ika-tako virus to vacillate between cuteness and aggression, friendliness and antagonism.

The media responses to the Ika-tako virus demonstrate the ease with which it slips into negative and racialized realms beyond its scope as a simple piece of malware. For instance, in The Colbert Report,[4] the popular American host Steven Colbert remarked that the Ika-tako virus was surprising because “believe it or not, these Japanese squid drawings are not pornographic.”[5] Another blogger proclaimed that “Cthulhu attacks Japan’s file-sharers,” stating that the “Ikatako virus… replaces files with pictures of the great squid‑god, Cthulhu” and labeling it a “Tentacle Attack.”[6] The fact that, in the western collective imagination, mentions of “squid” and “Japanese” evoke extravagant tentacle erotica and Lovecraftian monstrosity, is also observable in an (in)famous short sketch of the American adult animated sitcom, Family Guy.[7] [Video 1] After Stewie corrects Brain that tai chi is of Chinese origin, not Japanese, he adds that “the Japanese have a whole other thing going on.” In typical Family Guy fashion, the scene cuts abruptly to a Tokyo street where two Japanese men stand talking to each other. The following scene takes place:

The sketch feeds off the racial stereotype of Japanese men as sexual deviants with bizarre fetishes. Nevertheless, the fact that the production team chose to shift its regular animation and art style to accommodate the anime octopus and schoolgirl is highly suggestive. The octopus talks and moves around, but his body is still except for the jerky movements of his mouth and tentacles. The schoolgirl, a generic female character reminiscent of Sailor Moon, is entirely static, sliding through the screen rather than walking. The scene’s perversion is emphasized by the octopus’s appearance—a giant, energetic purple cephalopod with plump tentacles, large sparkling eyes, and a coy “:3”‑shaped smiley face, closer to a friendly Superflat mascot than to Hokusai’s famous shunga[8] octopus. In this way, the sketch parodies what is perceived as markers of “Japaneseness” in anime. On the one hand, its limited animation,[9] i.e., the technique of “moving drawings” instead of “drawing movements,”[10] that often characterizes anime on a formal level; on the other, its perverted cuteness, in which the aesthetics of the kawaii functions as an ambivalent symbol of innocence and deviancy. In general, the leniency of Japanese comics and animation towards sexually suggestive contents has raised many eyebrows, both internationally and domestically. For instance, series like Crayon Shin-chan[11] are targeted initially at a seinen (“young adult men”) demographic but are broadcasted in children’s television networks and shows in Japan and around the world. As such, Shin-chan “has delighted Japanese children, and infuriated their parents, for more than two decades” and continues to raise complaints and restrictions in countries like Portugal and Indonesia.[12]

The connection between monstrous tentacles and cuteness is not limited to Western views on anime, being found in Japanese shows, usually played for comedic effect. As example is the popular manga series Shinryaku! Ika Musume (“Invade! Squid Girl”) by Anbe Masahiro, the protagonist is an adorable anthropomorphized girl with hair shaped like blue tentacles. [Figure 4] Although Ika Musume is a slice of life comedy with an environmental message—the Squid Girl seeks revenge on humankind for polluting the ocean—the series is no stranger to tentacle rape (in Japanese, shokushu goukan) allusions, both in the show and in the works of fans. For instance, the entry for “Squid Girl” in the satirical website Encyclopedia Dramatica features various pornographic illustrations of Squid Girl assaulting other female characters with her tentacles. [Figure 5] The fear that octopuses and squids, no matter how cute they appear on the surface, will turn sexually aggressive, speaks to a lineage of tentacle erotica in ero-manga and anime pornography—commonly known as “hentai” in the West—arguably initiated in in 1814 by Hokusai Katsushika’s famous erotic woodblock print Tako to Ama (“Octopuses and shell diver,” known as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife). [Figure 6]

As scholar Laura Ettenfield points out, in the West, octopus-like monsters also have a history of association with unrestrained, primitive female sexuality, for instance, in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea, 1866).[13] Nevertheless, because of how pervasive tentacle erotica is in Japanese comics and animation in particular, the Ika-tako virus would be a completely different and arguably less interesting object had Nakatsuji used photographs or realistic drawings of tentacled creatures. It would still align with the broader oceanic terror, or thalassophobia, widespread in literary and popular culture—which has its most well-known representatives in Jules Verne’s giant octopuses in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870) and H. P. Lovecraft’s tentacled abomination, Cthulhu—but the perverse connotations to Japanese animation would be lost. The same applies to the Family Guy sketch, whose pervertedness would be decreased had the show’s standard art and animation been used to depict a “real” octopus and woman. The characters’ cuteness is thus at the heart of the heightened sense of violation at play, whether it is sexual, in the case of Family Guy, or otherwise invasive, in the case of the Ika-tako virus, that penetrates computers to destroy data.

In these examples, the cute mascots are optimistic, goofy, and relaxed, giving off an impression of blissful innocence, as if unaware of the nefarious consequences of their actions. They are like naughty children, whose behavior, however disruptive, is—or should be, in our experience—fundamentally benevolent.[14] Indeed, Nakatsuji, the creator of the Ika-tako virus, channels this “naughty child” image himself. A graduate student from the Osaka Electro-Communication University, many news reports stressed that Nakatsuji was an unemployed techie in his late twenties, like the stereotypical otaku or NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) “parasite single,” perceived to be socially or intellectually immature by Japanese society at large. Despite Cool Japan campaigns to rehabilitate the image of otaku in the eyes of the general public, otaku remain to this day an embodiment of Japan’s postmodern afflictions,[15] resulting from the breakdown of discipline, work ethic, and other heteropatriarchal principles, linked in the Japanese memory to horrific events like Miyazaki Tsutomu’s brutal child murders, or the recent Kyoto Animation arson attack. Like Murakami Takashi’s “little boy”[16] figure, the otaku as lost/ infantilized man symbolizes the “displacement of progressive social and political ideals and involvement, and withdrawal into the selfish and conformist middle-class domesticity and material comfort of privatized family life.”[17] This regressive movement, as Nakatsuji’s actions seem to demonstrate, breeds its own streak of pent of resentment and frustration, eventually manifesting in antisocial behaviors and destructive actions against the social and technological structures of post-industrial society. 

Significantly, the Ika-tako virus incident was not the first time that Nakastuji was arrested for a cybercrime. In 2008, he had been detained in relation to coding and distributing the Harada virus, one of Japan's “Big Three” virus at the time,[18] named after an acquaintance of Nakatsuji’s called Harada.[19] [Figure 7] Nakatsuji also distributed a Harada subspecies that replaced data with stills from the cult anime series Clannad, showing the heroine walking amidst falling cherry blossoms.[20] [Figure 8] Other subspecies of the Harada virus used moé characters from shows like Haruhi Suzumiya, Lucky Star, and Kanon. The pictures were captioned with digitally superimposed phrases admonishing the users of Winny for their illegal file-sharing activities.[21] [Figure 9] Such a controversy was brewing in Japan, as Winny’s developer Kaneko Isamu was fined and arrested in 2004 for encouraging users to copy and distribute movies, games, and other contents illegally (although the Osaka High Court overturned the decision and acquitted him in 2009).[22] During the trail, Nakatsuji argued that “If movies and animated films are illegally downloaded, TV networks will stop showing these programs in the future.” And added: “My hobby is to watch recorded TV programs, so I was trying to stop that.”[23] At the time of Nakatsuji’s detention, Japan lacked laws against malware creation and distribution. As a result, Nakatsuji was sentenced to two years in prison and a three-year suspended sentence for the copyright infringement of Clannad and defaming another student (presumably, Harada).[24]

Nakatsuji’s justifications for his actions, namely, his statement that he was trying to save the Japanese culture industry from piracy by creating and distributing a computer virus, grant him the aura of a “naughty child” with his heart in the right place but questionable means. In the same vein, Nakatsuji told the police that he did not think that he would be arrested for the Ika-tako virus, as he had created the squid and octopus drawings himself.[25] When questioned about the Ika-tako virus, Nakatsuji also claimed that “I wanted to see how much my computer programming skills had improved since the last time I was arrested.”[26]  These declarations align Nakatsuji with what Sharon Kinsella calls the “little rebellion”[27] of Japanese cuteness, as opposed to the more conscious and aggressive stances that often characterize Western countercultures. Although Nakatsuji’s words are not openly confrontational, they make a mockery out of petty copyright laws and the absurd fact that he was first arrested for violating intellectual property instead of his actual cybercrime. Indeed, Japan’s bill against cybercrime was only approved and revised in 2011, one year after Nakatsuji was sentenced, this time around, for property damage caused by the Ika-tako virus—another workaround used by the Japanese authorities at the time to punish malware developers in the absence of specific laws.[28] Likewise, Nakatsuji’s drive to do his best in malware creation jabs at Japan’s culture of ganbaru (“perseverance”), whose ubiquitousness rivals that of the kawaii, and that many Japanese consider oppressive.[29]

All in all, the Ika-tako virus could be said to have a nostalgic quality, resembling “the cute computer viruses of the past.”[30] As Rich McCormick puts it in an article for The Verge, there was an earlier, more earnest period in computer history when flashy malware set out to destroy a computer, pure and simple, instead of mining for credit card information and other exploitable data.[31] The website Malware Museum offers an online archive of these computer viruses from the 1980s and 1990s, that operated in MS-DOS. The viruses have been neutralized, removing their harmful code and leaving only the colorful, playful visuals that can be downloaded by Museum’s visitors. Some of these old viruses, like “Mars Land,” appeal to the poetic beauty of the medium, showing a digital landscape of red dunes with the tagline “coding a virus can be creative.” [Figure 10] Others take a more straightforward approach, like that “one piece of nefarious code that simply displays the word ‘ha!’ in flickering ASCII characters.”[32] [Figure 11] The Ika-tako virus may be less spiteful in tone, but still pushes the boundaries of naughtiness, naivety, and spontaneity, threading into a territory of negativity where kawaii visuals, race, sexuality, and cybercrime conflate.

While computer viruses and cuteness may seem like an odd pairing, their history interlocks from their onset. The Cookie Monster program from MIT Multics, often credited as the world’s first computer virus, was named after “a heavily-aired cereal commercial of the time [that] featured a ‘Cookie Bear,’ after which the annoying behavior of this program was patterned.”[33] The original program was a harmless prank codded by an IBM computer operator at Brown University in the late 1960s, who manually activated it to tease unsuspecting students.[34] In 1970, an MIT freshman, Seth Stein, created an automated version of the Cookie Monster, that “spread from its birthplace… to practically every Multics site in the world,”[35] including the Pentagon—even though, unlike later viruses, the Cookie Monster did not replicate itself, thus having to be transferred manually from site to site via magnetic tape.[36] The Cookie Monster ran in the background, occasionally blocking the computer processes to display a message requesting a cookie. After a few minutes, if no action took place, it flashed the message “I didn't want a cookie anyway” and disappeared.[37] If users typed in the word “cookie,” the “Cookie Monster” flashed “thank you” and went to sleep, unblocking the computer.[38] [Video 2] Rumors have it that writing the word “oreo” would remove the virus entirely.[39] In popular culture, the program came to be associated with the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (who only debuted in 1969, after the creation of the virus), mostly, because of the 1995 film Hackers, which included a fictitious rendition of the Cookie Monster virus featuring the famous muppet. [Video 3]

The playful nature of the Cookie Monster virus highlights how cuteness’s phenomeno-poetics are tied to the idea that, as historian Gary Cross puts it, “the cute can steal cookies from the cookie jar but do it without real malice or greed.”[40] Ironically, it was this naughty but innocuous child, the Cookie Monster, that opened Pandora’s box of malware, as similar programs began to be used to steal passwords from computer users.[41] In fact, more recently, a malware called Rensenware took the “cuteness” of Cookie Monster-like viruses to new, sadistic extents. Instead of asking for bitcoins like ransomware usually does,[42] Rensenware demanded that victims played Touhou Seirensen~ Undefined Fantastic Object (2009), the twelfth installment of the cult series of Japanese bullet hell[43] shooter videogames, Touhou Project. Touhou Project (東方Project) is a dōjin (self-published) game by the one-person Japanese game developer Ōta Jun'ya, under the pseudonym ZUN, whose first installment, Highly Responsive to Prayers, was released in 1996 for NEC’s PC-9801. The series, featuring cute graphics and music in anime style, revolves around a shrine maiden who fights yōkai (a type of Japanese folkloric monster) while dodging waves of projectiles covering the entire screen. When Rensenware is activated, a pop-up window appears showing a picture of the character Murasa Minamitsu—a boss from Undefined Fantastic Object who is a female spirit in a sailor suit—requiring that victims not only beat the game but do so in maximum difficulty (“Lunatic”) and reaching 200 million points. [Figure 11] The task is virtually impossible, as even the perfect playthroughs available online, displaying incredible levels of gaming skill, fail to get the 200 million mark. [Figure 4] Thus, while at first glance, Rensenware was kind enough to grant its victims a chance to regain control over their computers, they were in for an incredibly frustrating ride. Gone are the days where “cookies” and “Oreos” were enough to appease an annoying, but mostly harmless program.

Rensenware, as it turned out, was also the work of a prankster. According to Kotaku, its creator was a Korean undergraduate student who wrote Rensenware as a joke because he was bored.[44] He fell asleep after uploading Rensenware to GitHub (an online software development platform for computer code), realizing the next morning that it had spread. After that, he uploaded an “antidote” software accompanied by an apology to those who were affected by the virus.[45] “I made it for [a] joke,” he wrote. “And just laughing with people who like Tōhō Project Series.”[46] Like the Cookie Monster, the cuteness of the Ika-tako and Rensenware viruses, resulting in both cases from their use of animanga visuals, reflects the nature of their creators as “naughty children” who wreak havoc out of boredom or earnest, if misplaced, intentions. While these microphenomena are fascinating in and of themselves, such cute aggression suggests a broader impact in the realm of digital pollution: a mixture of candor and detournement—literally, “rerouting” or “hijacking,” which is what malware does, by seizing or eliminating computer data. The “weird materialities”[47] resulting from the entanglement of cuteness and digital disgust may be counterintuitive, but they are surprisingly widespread, impacting how humans relate to technical artifacts and navigate the advanced capitalist world of the twenty-first century.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Creepypasta & Red Toad Tumblr Post.

REFERENCES in Ika-Tako Virus.

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers.

Mentions or depictions of pornography and sexual assault.