Everything in the Room Had Eyes

The "Pon Pon Pon" video puts Kyary Pamyu Pamyu in a room that appears to be alive—walls and surfaces covered in cartoon eyeballs, brains, teeth, and hands, everything pulsing and bouncing around her while she performs movements that sit somewhere between choreography and controlled seizure. Director Yusuke Tanaka takes the kawaii aesthetic and pushes it past cute into something genuinely unsettling: not adorable so much as aggressively, almost threateningly adorable, like if Hello Kitty had a dissociative episode and decided she preferred it. The track is a J-pop sugar rush, the video is a hallucination, and together they hit the internet in July 2011 and spread everywhere, marking the precise moment Japanese pop stopped being a subculture you had to seek out and became something that arrived in your feed whether you’d opted in or not. I had opted in.