ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the collective work of the imagination, the work that might be effected by imagining that a collective such as nation-state or national society might possess a common imaginative faculty and might imagine the same things. It examines the unique career of Moomin as an instance in Japan's construction of a national-social imaginary: 'We all love Moomin'. On one level, then, the so-called 'Moomin boom' is an instance of the successful marketing of 'cute' and 'retro' or nostalgic commodities that attests to the conformist tendency of Japanese consumers and their desire to follow a given fad. Hideko Mitsui suggests a closer reading in which it becomes more apparent that the success of Moomin products has much to do with people's personal creativity and imagination. The chapter demonstrates the variety of ways in which Moomin said to represent and mediate a nostalgic yearning for the recent past, while enabling the imagination of, and fantasies for, alternative, utopian futures.
