More Words, Deeper Hole

Except that plain dots or circles for eyes were not a typical unmarked state in Japanese cartooning until the 1920s, under the influence of American cartoons like Life with Father, the creepy Jiggs and Maggie one. Before that, eyes were usually cariactured by curved lines, an eyebrow-iris/lid combination, or actually drawing out the damn things, cartoonists staying closer to a print tradition longer in Japan than elsewhere.

Sloppy work by a professional academic. Also, I note that he dances around the question of Japanese cartoon representations of Africans (and 'Melanesians' etc).

As for Shati's LJ post, it greatly overestimates that depiction's universality as a face, as well as the historical development of the smiley face as "unmarked". I suspect a cartoonist from an east Asian artistic tradition two hundred years ago would view the picture in the post as some sort of skull. Ruskin once saw a similar drawing, IMS from a medieval manuscript, and denounced it as ridiculously programmatic.