Certain Japanese products have a highly vendable aura of postmodern appeal. American boys know Japan makes the most important toys in the world, and hipsters worldwide know heels from Italy aren’t nearly as interesting or ironic as sneakers from Japan. What is the explanation for this? Armageddon, suggests Takashi Murakami, the multivalent impresario who has curated “Little Boy,” a comprehensive look at both authentic examples of Japanese popular culture and contemporary artworks inspired by them. The show opens at Japan Society this Friday.

Unlike any other culture on the face of the planet, nuclear annihilation has already visited the Japanese, and they are survivors. Remembering seeing frequent representations of the bomb on television as a child, Mr. Murakami is frank: “We thought, ‘It’s great! It’s beautiful! The U.S. has big power!’ But we also knew of the suffering [the bomb’s] effects caused for the real lives of the Japanese people.” Mr. Murakami sees the imaginary dystopias of anime cartoons and manga comic books as therapeutic, if also sick. Heroism is enacted by exertion of semi-magical willpower; anime features a lot of grimacing.

Postwar Japanese authorities suppressed memories of defeat. Otaku culture – the Japanese culture of fanatical fans – filled the resultant gap. Mr. Murakami explains: “There is a longing for some fundamental human power to awaken when humanity is backed into a corner.” Japan was backed into a corner by its defeat in World War II, and so, like a mutant monster, otaku culture arose. In the exhibition, Mr. Murakami emblazons a wall with Article 9 of the Japanese constitution – “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.” Next to the wall text sit stubborn-looking Godzilla toys.

Likewise, some have suggested that the prevalence of pubescent girls in otaku culture – both as sex objects and as sympathetic protagonists – is connected to the teenage girl’s role as the ultimate consumer, a perfect stand-in for every Japanese, insofar as Mr. Murakami describes them as “self-medicated denizens of a castrated nation-state.” The Japanese term for cute, “kawaii,” is etymologically linked to being pathetic.

Among these themes, the attractions of a post-apocalyptic paradise are most strikingly realized by Chiho Aoshima, whose computer-generated murals will be on view, in place of advertising posters, in the Union Square subway station. Ms. Aoshima transforms female characters into mountains and skyscrapers that are at once regal and cute. Even her images of disaster are inviting; arabesque tendrils of fire and smoke look fecund, like the renewing jungle that might grow over a ruined city. Her flat, plastic textures and synthetic colors make the end of nature look like a good thing.

In the 1990s, otaku culture changed. The yen fell, and the sarin gas attacks complicated the old romance of civic destruction. The “bishojo,” or beautiful young girl, became the scandalous epicenter of Japanese subculture. The plastic figurines of Yuki Oshima are beloved by women, but they also find a market with men, whose interest in the patently underage girls reveals the deep weirdness possible in the cancerous otaku brain.

It is typical of “Little Boy” that the bishojo toys are perhaps more densely imagined than the artworks that try to unpack them. Next to an opulent collection of Hello Kitty merchandise, Mr. Murakami hangs Takano Aya’s creepy paintings of slim nude girls walking dogs or floating in space. The mouthless kitty, who launched a branding empire, seems just as telling as Ms. Takano’s explicit images. Whether the dark side of otaku – pedophilia specifically, self-indulgence more generally – is a rebellious pose or simply warped, Mr. Murakami is deeply troubled by it. He calls the otaku heart “a guileless heart that mistakes its affection for misery, self-derision, and masochism for a conscience.” If the West becomes as a historically minded as Japan, Mr. Murakami fears, we will all have such hearts.

Mr. Murakami’s project depends in some ways on the precedent of Andy Warhol. But Warhol followed American culture; Mr. Murakami wants to lead Japanese culture. To do so, he here attempts a systematic interpretation of otaku culture, and this promise of thoroughness and definitiveness mark Mr. Murakami’s basic appeal. “Little Boy’s” strength is not in its aesthetic or political theses, but in its powers of collection. Mr. Murakami has amassed enough material to give us a glimpse of an elaborate cultural matrix.

Otaku producers are otaku fans, who aspire to total knowledge, do-it-yourself complexity, repeated climaxes, and endless iterations on a few themes. (The reigning kings of anime, Gainax, got their start as amateurs who made a five-minute animation featuring almost all notable previous anime heroes.) Otaku fantasy worlds accommodate a massive degree of complication, and it seems to be the patterns of variation, more than themes themselves, that make otaku what it is. Artwork inspired by otaku culture, while sometimes breathtaking, seems one-off by comparison to the interlocking majesty of these fans’ minds.

Until July 24 (333 E. 47th Street, 212-832-1155).