Perky cartoon character Prince Pickles -- with saucer-round eyes, big dimples and tiny, boot-clad feet -- poses in front of tanks, rappels from helicopters and shakes hands with smiling Iraqis.
The cutesy icon hardly calls to mind the Japanese military that conquered and pillaged its way across Asia in World War II, and that is just the way the country's leaders want it.
As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen to its deployments.
"Prince Pickles is our image character because he's very endearing, which is what Japan's military stands for," said Defense Agency official Shotaro Yanagi. "He's our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationary."
Such characters have long been used in Japan to win hearts and minds and to soften the image of authority.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police tries to lighten its stern image with Peopo, which looks like a cross between a rabbit and a space trooper. The cell phone company NTT DoCoMo has a smiley mushroom, while rival KDDI sports a squirrel with headphones.
Japan's government hopes the same tactic can work overseas.
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso has proposed sending animation or cartoon artists abroad as cultural ambassadors, and the government has named a panel of executives to advise on ways to market Japanese animation and culture to foreign audiences.
Aso argues warm feelings for Japanese animation can translate into warm feelings for Japanese foreign policy.
"The more positive images pop into a person's mind, the easier it becomes for Japan to get its views across," Aso said in a speech last year to budding artists at Tokyo's Digital Hollywood University. "You are the people ... involved with bringing Japanese culture to the world."
The strategy faces considerable hurdles.
Many people in China and Korea are still bitter over Japan's wartime atrocities and moves to raise Tokyo's military stature -- like changing the pacifist constitution to allow more overseas missions -- are met with suspicion in the region.
Some critics also doubt cartoon characters will work outside Japanese culture, which exhibits an enduring fascination with childlike innocence -- even in adults.
"This could only happen in a country that is so open to immaturity," said Rika Kayama, a psychiatrist and author. "Authorities here feel it's easier and less threatening to use characters to get the public to accept them, rather than explain the facts."
The animated images mask real moves by Japan's leaders to bolster nationalist sentiment and flex military muscle abroad and the cutesy phenomenon has a dark side.
Artists were coerced to write cartoons that subtly spread militarist propaganda during World War II. One series centered on a family cheering soldiers off to war and sharing provisions with neighbors. Other artists depicted Allied leaders as cowards or repulsive devils.
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