A Behavioural Science Framework for Understanding Kawaii and Cuteness

EAPC 2 (1) pp. 79–95 Intellect Limited 2016 East Asian Journal of Popular Culture Volume 2 Number 1 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eapc.2.1.79_1 HIROSHI NITTONO Osaka University The two-layer model of ‘kawaii’: A behavioural science framework for understanding kawaii and cuteness ABSTRACT KEYWORDS ‘Kawaii’ is one of the most popular words in contemporary Japan and is recognized baby schema as representative of Japanese pop culture. It is often translated into English as ‘cute’, cognition but a subtle difference of nuance seems to exist between the two words. In this arti- culture cle, a framework for research on kawaii from a behavioural science perspective is cuteness put forward. After introducing the dictionary definition, history and current usage emotion of kawaii, this article reports survey results of Japanese students and office work- psychology ers about their attitudes towards kawaii. These findings and past psychological and behavioural science research lead to a two-layer model that consists of kawaii as an emotion and kawaii as a social value. This model postulates that the basis of kawaii is a positive emotion related to the social motivation of watching for and staying with preferable persons and objects, which is typically observed in affection towards babies and infants, but not limited to them. This culturally non-specific, biological trait has been appreciated and fostered in Japan by certain characteristics of Japanese culture. Because previous research on cuteness has been almost exclusively associated with 79 eeajpc2.1.indbajpc2.1.indb 7799 111/04/161/04/16 110:540:54 PPMM Hiroshi Nittono infant physical attractiveness and baby schema, using the relatively fresh, exotic word ‘kawaii’ may be helpful to describe this broader psychological concept. This article is published Open Access under the following licence: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC BY-NC). INTRODUCTION Many scholars have argued that ‘kawaii’ is a key concept characterizing modern Japanese culture (e.g. Botz-Bornstein 2011; Kinsella 1995; Masubuchi 1994; Yomota 2006). For instance, Hello Kitty is a typical kawaii character created in Japan in 1974 that is still beloved by many people across borders and generations (Belson and Bremner 2004). This concept attracts attention even outside Japan from various fields such as aesthetics (Ngai 2012) and engi- neering (Cheok and Fernando 2012). From February 2009 to March 2010, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan designated three young women who were active in the field of fashion as ‘Kawaii Ambassadors’ to promote the understanding and propagation of Japanese pop culture around the world (2009), meaning that ‘kawaii’ is now officially recognized and used as a foreign policy tool. Roughly speaking, kawaii means cute, lovely, pretty, adorable, etc. and this word is used in many daily situations to express the speaker’s favourable evaluation towards an object or a person. Like other everyday expressions, ‘kawaii’ has a unique connotation and is thought to be not fully translatable into other languages. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, the applicable scope of the word seems to be expanding, with its true meaning unclear even to Japanese people. This article provides a research framework for understanding kawaii from a behavioural science perspective. Although ‘kawaii’ is an adjective, hereaf- ter I also use it as a noun to represent the concept of this word. Many jour- nalists and academics have considered the reasons why ‘kawaii culture’ has developed in Japan (e.g. Masubuchi 1994; Sakurai 2009; Yomota 2006). These discussions are mostly based on subjective impressions and qualitative analy- ses respectively and, therefore, tend to emphasize cultural specificity rather than commonality. Beyond this tradition, I have proposed that the feeling of kawaii is based on human psychology with biological underpinnings, and that this feeling is especially popular and socially accepted in Japan because the Japanese culture has certain characteristics that foster this trait (Nittono 2009). Because some of the previous kawaii-related studies from my labo- ratory have been published in Japanese for Japanese audiences (Ihara and Nittono 2011, 2012; Nittono 2009, 2011), this article aims to introduce the overview of these data for international audiences with an update of the theo- retical framework. First, I provide an overview of kawaii, including its dictionary definition, history and current usage. Then, I report the results of surveys of Japanese students and office workers on their attitudes towards kawaii. Based on these findings and past research, I introduce a two-layer model of ‘kawaii’ that combines both a biological basis and cultural determinants. In particular, I elaborate the kawaii-as-emotion perspective using recent findings about the psychological and behavioural effects of kawaii. Finally, I propose that the word ‘kawaii’ is helpful to describe this broader psychological concept that goes beyond the concept of cuteness, which has been almost exclusively associated with infantility in past scientific research. 80 eeajpc2.1.indbajpc2.1.indb 8800 111/04/161/04/16 110:540:54 PPMM The two-layer model of ‘kawaii’ WHAT IS ‘KAWAII’? Because ‘kawaii’ is an attributive adjective in modern Japanese, it is usually assumed to be an attribute of a certain object. However, this definition often causes confusion, because the same object may or may not be perceived as kawaii depending on the situation and one’s personality. To think about this issue more deeply, we can start with the dictionary definition of kawaii. The following cita- tion is my translation from the largest Japanese dictionary, Nihon Kokugo Daijiten: kawai-i (adjective) (1) looks miserable and raises sympathy. pitiable. pathetic. piteous. (2) attractive. cannot be neglected. cherished. beloved. (3) has a sweet nature. lovely. (a) (of faces and figures of young women and children) adorable. attractive. (b) (like children) innocent. obedient. touching. (4) (of things and shapes) attractively small. small and beautiful. (5) triv- ial. pitiful. (used with slight disdain). (2000) As this definition shows, kawaii has various, somewhat contradictory mean- ings, which may be understood from looking at the history of this word. Figure 1 illustrates the genealogy of ‘kawaii’ and related words according to this dictionary. ‘Kawaii’ appeared as an altered form of ‘kawayui’ in the Edo era (c. seventeenth to nineteenth centuries). The origin of ‘kawayui’ is thought to be from ‘kawa’ (face), -‘hayu’ (flushing) and -‘shi’ (adjectival suffix), which meant ‘ashamed’ or ‘to feel like blushing due to a twinge of conscience’. In medieval times (c. twelfth to sixteenth centuries), ‘kawayui’ was used in the sense of pitiable or piteous, with the connotation of something that one ‘could not bear to look at’. Later, the word was also used to suggest the sense of affection that derived from feelings of pity towards weaker members of soci- ety, such as women and children. In the late Edo era, the connotation of pity disappeared and only the sense of love and affection (‘can’t leave someone alone’, ‘care for’) remained. Moreover, ‘kawaii/kawayui’ came to be used for describing lovely small things as an attributive adjective. Incidentally, in ancient times, this meaning was taken on by the archaic word ‘utsukushi’, the meaning of which changed to ‘beautiful’ (‘utsukushii’) in early modern times. Originally, kawaii signified the affection of superiors towards inferiors, but the meaning of any word varies across historical ages. Nowadays, kawaii is also Figure 1: Genealogy of the word ‘kawaii’ and related words. 81 eeajpc2.1.indbajpc2.1.indb 8811 111/04/161/04/16 110:540:54 PPMM Hiroshi Nittono used for describing some elderly people as a kind of compliment. Although the classic meaning is lost today, it is still useful to conceptualize kawaii in connection with an affective state and regard kawaii as an affective adjective. To learn about its contemporary usage, an exploratory search was made on a large Japanese language database, NTT Database Series on Lexical Properties of Japanese (Amano and Kondo 1999, 2000). In this corpus of newspaper articles published between 1985 and 1998, ‘kawaii’ was used 2263 times – much less frequently than the related words ‘utsukushii’ (beautiful, 8094 times) and ‘kirei’ (neat, 6147 times). In contrast, standard word familiarity ratings (1=‘low’ to 7=‘high’) included in the same database showed that ‘kawaii’ (6.438 and 6.625 for spoken and written words, respectively) was rated as more familiar than ‘utsukushii’ (6.281 and 6.531) and ‘kirei’ (6.125 and 5.906 or 5.156, depending on the kanji characters used). These results suggest that ‘kawaii’ is a word that does not appear very frequently in official print publications, but is quite familiar in daily life. That is, ‘kawaii’ is a word that is private and informal in essence. Then, the connotations of the word were examined by distributing seman- tic differential questionnaires to Japanese university students. Three surveys were conducted on different occasions with different samples. The first survey was conducted in July 2008 (N = 169, 71 men and 98 women, 18–21 years old) to compare the words ‘kawaii’, ‘kirei’ and ‘kakkoii’ (cool). The second survey conducted in November 2009 (N = 101, 46 men and 55 women, 18–22 years old) compared the three words, ‘kawaii’, ‘kawairashii’ (small, sweet and lovely) and ‘kawaisou’ (pitiable), which appeared in the word history (Figure 1). The last survey was conducted in July 2011 (N = 288, 144 men and 144 women, 18–22 years old), and compared ‘kawaii’ in different Japanese writing systems (hiragana letters and katakana letters), and a related word, ‘kyuto’, which is the Japanese pronunciation of ‘cute’ in katakana letters. Hiragana letters are mainly used in contemporary Japanese in combination with kanji characters, while katakana letters are usually used for transliter- ating foreign words in the Japanese writing system and for onomatopoeic expressions.

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