“Cuteness Studies and Japan” the Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (2020) Eds

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“Cuteness Studies and Japan” The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (2020) Eds. Coates, J., Fraser, L and Pendleton, M.

Joshua Paul Dale Tokyo Gakugei University (Draft copy: please cite published version)

Kawaii, Cute, Cuteness

Kawaii and cute are increasingly prominent aesthetics in contemporary global culture.

While Japan’s kawaii boom arguably began in the 1970s (Kinsella 1995: 220), it wasn’t until the late 20th/early 21st century that cuteness began to explode worldwide as the number of cute images, commodities, foods, fashions, and fandoms underwent rapid expansion (Dale 2017: 1). The new field of cuteness studies, formed to address this phenomenon, analyzes not only its history and development, but also the connection between cuteness and gender, race, ethnicity, age, nationality, politics, and interspecies affiliations. Its aim is to take seriously what is often dismissed as a facile commodity aesthetic because of its gendered association with femininity, childhood and the domestic sphere (Dale 2017: 2; Ngai 2012: 3).

Until recently, the study of kawaii was primarily concerned with how this aesthetic emerged and propagated in Japan. Now, cuteness studies as a whole is taking on an expanding number of themes and concerns. Both the “Cute Studies” issue of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (2016), and the edited volume The

Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2017) place the kawaii and cute aesthetics within the framework of cuteness affect by considering cultures of emotion as well as commodity consumption. An issue of M/C Journal (2014) explores both aesthetics within the digital realm, while The Retrofuturism of Cuteness (2017) takes on the fascinating project of exploring the viability of reading cuteness into historical periods prior to the aesthetic’s—and the word’s—existence. Simon May’s The Power of Cute

Joshua Paul Dale 1 makes the case that cute and kawaii are key aesthetics to explain the current Zeitgeist.

My own forthcoming book explores the origins of cuteness deep in our evolutionary past and traces the development of both the cute and kawaii aesthetics up to the present day. Thus Cuteness Studies challenges conventional ways of thinking about time and geographical space, as well as gendered subjectivities, by analyzing both the cute and kawaii aesthetics while also considering the common affect that underlies them.

The influence of Japanese kawaii on the global popularity of cuteness is growing rapidly. Scholarly works such as Christine Yano’s Pink Globalization: Hello

Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific attest to the importance of kawaii as a form of soft power that negotiates both within and beyond national and ethnic identities in a globalized consumer market. Yet scholars sometimes fail to see the differences between Japanese kawaii and other cute aesthetics (Ngai 2012: 78, Plourde 2016: 7).

In this chapter, I contend that the aesthetic of cute is rooted in the etymology of the

English word in a way that positions it in opposition to kawaii. This fundamental difference makes it difficult for those steeped in cute to understand kawaii, and vice versa. It also means that critical insights gained from the study of one aesthetic may become valuable tools for analyzing the other.

This chapter employs the word “cuteness” to indicate the affective reaction felt when a subject finds an object to be cute or kawaii. In addition to the scholarship in cultural and media studies outlined above, there is a burgeoning amount of research in the physical and behavioural sciences on this affect. Empirical methods of data collection employed in over fifty years of scientific study range from simple surveys to increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking the body’s physical reactions to cuteness. fMRI and MEG brain scan studies of subjects exposed to images of babies

Joshua Paul Dale 2 manipulated to show high levels of cuteness revealed significant activity in the reward centers of the brain (Glocker 2009; Kringelbach 2008). Taken as a whole, this body of scholarship indicates that the cuteness response has its origins in the evolution of

Homo sapiens.

Our ability to feel cuteness may be based in an evolutionary mechanism brought about by natural selection, but there are important cultural components to the aesthetics that have developed around this affect. Starting in childhood, experience and learning drawn from family and friends as well as media representations become the foundations of the disparate aesthetics of cute and kawaii. Seen in this light, the evolutionary origin of the cuteness response provides a starting point: a common ground from which to elucidate the cultural differences at work in the way this emotion is stimulated, expressed and communicated. The most fundamental of these differences lies in the etymology of “cute” and “kawaii,” so this is where I begin.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “cute,” a shortened form of

“acute,” may also mean “clever or cunning.” Accordingly, native English speakers are apt to view cute objects or people as inherently manipulative (Ngai 2012: 86). On the other hand, though the dictionary definition of kawaii still includes “pitiable” among its meanings, in modern usage the word has lost all negative associations: kawaii is an affective adjective that simply expresses the feeling of cuteness (Nittono 2016: 81;

Yomota 2006: 73). Thus, while “Don’t be cute!” is a common admonition in

American English, there is no equivalent phrase in Japanese using the word kawaii.

One may say “don’t be childish” in Japanese, but “don’t be cute” has no direct translation.

This difference has profound effects. In this chapter, I outline the history and development of kawaii in Japan to ascertain why this gendered aesthetic originally

Joshua Paul Dale 3 associated with children, girls and women has spread to so many areas of contemporary Japanese culture, and investigate the social implications of its popularity on both women and men. Turning to the scholarship on the cute aesthetic, I examine how its secondary meaning of clever has caused many scholars to locate negative affects, from despair and abjection to sadism and violence, at the heart of this seemingly benign aesthetic. Finally, I propose that kawaii culture—still driven by, but no longer solely associated with, Japanese girls and women—may provide an alternative viewpoint that would benefit scholarship on the cute aesthetic.

History and Development of the Kawaii Aesthetic

Like the English cute, the word kawaii did not enter common usage until the late

19th/early 20th century. However, cuteness has been expressed in Japanese literature and art for almost a thousand years, and its deepest origins lie in Japanese women’s culture. The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi), completed by court attendant Sei

Shonagon in 1002, includes objects and behaviors now called kawaii in her list of beautiful (utsukushii) things. These include young children in ceremonial costumes and small things in general, plus interactions with baby birds and children (Shirane

2007: 277).

The word kawaii derives from kawahayushi, which first appeared in the

Anthology of Tales from the Past (Konjaku Monogatarishū) from the late Heian period (late 12th century). Literally “face dazzled,” it meant ashamed, describing the case when one’s face flushes due to a guilty conscience; even today characters in manga and anime are drawn with reddened cheeks to indicate they are feeling kawaii, and this blushing reaction occurs in people as well (Esposito 2014).. This word evolved into kawayui over the next few hundred years, and the meaning shifted to pitiful or vulnerable. Yomota Inuhiko traces the first appearance of the (proto) word

Joshua Paul Dale 4 kawaii to 1603, when the word “cauaij” appeared in a Japanese to Portuguese dictionary compiled by the Society of Jesuits in Nagasaki (34). At that time the

Japanese word was kawairashii (kahayurashi) (Yomota 2006: 29-36). The modern meaning of kawaii is expressed by this word as early as 1686 in the novel The Life of an Amorous Woman (Kōshoku Ichidai Onna) (Yomota 2006: 34). By the late Edo era, the connotation of pity disappeared and kawaii attained its present meaning: a sense of love or affection, especially but not exclusively felt for small, vulnerable things such as children and animals (Nittono 2016: 81).

The explosion of printmaking (ukiyoe) in the Edo period (1603-1868) included many artists whose works are perceived as kawaii today. The mid-Edo period saw the publication of albums of comic pictures (toba ehon) by Ōka Shunboku, Hasegawa

Mitsunobu, and others. Considered a forerunner of modern manga, many of the drawings they contain are cute as well as funny (Shimizu 2013: 16). Several recent exhibitions have collected works that showcase the development of kawaii in the visual arts throughout the Edo period. The exhibited works may be seen in several published catalogs (Fuchu Art Museum 2013; Hinohara 2017; Takahashi 2014).

A two-part exhibit at the Fuchu Art Museum in 2013 divided kawaii artworks into several areas. These included: works that evoke emotional qualities such as pitiable, kenage (admiration for something small trying its best despite its diminutive size), funny, pure/innocent and small/alone; general principles such as geometry of form, minimalist techniques and reiteration; childlike forms; and qualities such as the charms of awkwardness and naivety. This exhibition was intended to define and display the precepts of kawaii as they gradually emerged in Japanese art.

Joshua Paul Dale 5

FIGURE 1: This late 18thc. work by Nagasawa Rosetsu in the Ōkyo style depicts the spirit of a frolicking puppy by employing body deformation and a stylized outline: techniques later found in manga. Courtesy of Homma Museum of Art.

The exhibition was quite popular, and I found the visiting crowd engaged in continual discussion about whether particular works were or were not kawaii.

Going forward from the Edo period to the twentieth century requires consideration of the shōjo (adolescent girls), who would become the first mass market for kawaii goods and images. The category of shōjo emerged through late nineteenth and early twentieth century educational reforms. These focused on the education of boys who, in an increasingly militarized Japan, were being formed by the state to become future soldiers. Girls’ education beyond elementary school was only available to the urban middle and upper classes, and sought merely to turn them into mothers and wives (Takahashi 2013: 116). Thus shōjo emerged as a liminal category, indicating girls who were protected not only from sexual activity but also physical labor. Early twentieth century magazines marketed to girls emphasized this status by featuring images of dreamy, fashionable girls indulging in a world of the imagination

Joshua Paul Dale 6 (Takahashi 2013: 116). Though this ideal was modeled on the upper classes and the nobility, it provided a popular aspirational model for girls of the middle classes

(Kawamura 1994: 32).

In 1914 a key event in the history of kawaii occurred: the illustrator Takehisa

Yumeji opened a shop in Nihonbashi, Tokyo that sold his own line of products to schoolgirls such as embroidery, writing paper, umbrellas, dolls, etc. (Nakamura 2013:

13). Takehisa mixed traditional Japanese and contemporary Western themes into his designs, incorporating items such as musical scales and playing cards (Nakamura

2012: 10-13), and referred to his designs as kawaii, an early use of the word

(Nakamura 2013: 13). He represents a pioneering example of artists who blurred the boundary between fictional worlds and reality by offering young girls the chance “to literally buy into the shōjo look” (Takahashi 2013: 117). Moving forward a few decades, Nakahara Junichi, who specialized in drawing dreamy girls with large eyes, was extremely popular among girls in the 1930s.

FIGURE 2: In Nakahara Junichi’s 1941 cover illustration for the magazine: “The Shōjo’s Friend,” a young girl with a wistful expression wears a traditional yukata along with a Western hairstyle and bow. ©Junichi Nakahara/Himawariya

Joshua Paul Dale 7 A powar revival of his style made him very influential in the development of the kawaii aesthetic further in the century (Takahashi 2013: 119-120).

Kawaii Extends its Reach

In postwar Japan, kawaii continued its rise as an aesthetic largely aimed at and consumed by girls and, increasingly, women. From the 1950s, the illustrator Naito

Rune drew in the “large-headed” (nitōshin) style and popularized the word kawaii, expanding its meaning beyond the merely childish (Nakamura 2013: 14). This large- headed style, also embodied by Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters, mimics the proportions that tend to provoke a cuteness response, and it has an important place in the history of both the cute and kawaii aesthetics. A famous early example of crossover between the two is the Kewpie doll, invented as a character by Rose O’Neil in 1909 and produced as bisque figures starting in 1912. A worldwide hit, the Kewpie doll influenced the development of kawaii. The eponymous Kewpie Mayonnaise – a staple of the Japanese kitchen – began including an illustration of a Kewpie doll on its packaging in 1925.

FIGURE 3. The original Kewpie Mayonnaise jar from 1925. Image provided by Kewpie Corporation.

Joshua Paul Dale 8 By that time several Japanese companies were producing celluloid Kewpies for both domestic and overseas consumption.

In the 1950s, the large-headed phenomenon expanded when first banks, then other companies began producing plastic mascot items to advertise their services. As

Japan’s postwar economic expansion gained force, more women became housewives and (unlike housewives in most Western countries) usually had control of the family finances. As salaries rose, banks began offering free goods as incentives to set up accounts, and plastic coin banks that depicted young children in the large-headed style proved to be a hit with these new consumers. Other companies, such as pharmaceutical firms, soon followed suit with their own cute mascots. Sato-chan, a cute elephant advertising the Sato Company, appeared in 1955, while the twin frogs

Kero and Koro-chan made their debut in 1958 advertising the Kowa Company.

Kawaii mascots and characters were thus well established in Japanese mass culture well before the debut of Hello Kitty in 1975.

The oil and dollar crisis caused by the 1973 Arab oil embargo led more

Japanese companies to focus on the domestic market rather than on exports to the

United States. Thus, the success of Hello Kitty quickly spawned a host of imitators, and the kawaii boom was truly launched (Nakamura 2013: 16). Countless new characters and designs found a willing audience not only in young girls, but also adult women who had spent their childhoods following the work and buying the “fancy goods” designed by illustrators such as Takehisa, Nakahara, and Naito.

The 1980s saw a shift in girls’ (shōjo) manga away from exotic locales with fantastical storylines to everyday life in Japan in a new genre known as maiden’s

(otomechikku) manga (Prough 2011: 51). The heroines of these stories were drawn to appear cute rather than beautiful (Kan 2007: 200). Moreover, as Kan Satoko writes,

Joshua Paul Dale 9 they had “cute inner minds,” meaning that the characters were appealing due to their ordinary imperfections, which helped foster self-affirmation in the girls who read this genre (Kan 2007: 201).

Kawaii has been expressed in the fine arts in Japan for almost a thousand years. It became associated with mass consumption gradually: first in magazines and fancy goods that marketed an image of upper class schoolgirls to the middle class and then, with the postwar economic expansion, to girls of all classes and ages. Many girls who had grown up with kawaii found themselves still drawn to this aesthetic when they became adults (Kinsella 1995: 245; Ōtsuka Eiji quoted in Prough 2011: 51-52).

As housewives in charge of family finances, their economic power grew in proportion to the national economy. Companies responded to this growing domestic market by producing more and more kawaii goods aimed predominantly at women and children, who comprised over half the population.

Yet this does not explain the sheer size of the footprint that kawaii now occupies in Japanese culture overall. The key to understanding this ubiquity, many critics believe, lies in the extent to which the shōjo became a symbol of the archetypal

Japanese consumer in the later stages of postwar economic development. As the postwar economic boom continued, the image of the shōjo—drifting, searching, dreaming of a rose-colored future always on the horizon—became increasingly attractive to Japan’s stressed out students and salarymen trapped in the rat race of late-modern capitalism. Due to their youth, shōjo were detached from both the economy of production and reproduction. They faced no demand to inhabit a productive place in society, which represented an unattainable freedom to adults. The shōjo became a symbol, relegated to “pure play as pure sign” as John Treat puts it, and kawaii was the main signifier of this sign (1993: 362, 363).

Joshua Paul Dale 10 In the late 1980s and early 1990s male Japanese critics such as Horikiri Naoto,

Yamane Kazume and Ōtsuka Eiji wrote about the conspicuous consumption that characterized the Japanese economy of the period as a feminizing and infantilizing process (Orbaugh 2003: 202). Asada Akira made the link explicit when he coined the phrase “infantile capitalism” to describe the childlike passion and play that characterized the frenzied consumerism arising in Japan’s postwar economic recovery

(1989: 275). Katō Norihiro, in his evocatively titled essay “Goodbye Godzilla, Hello

Kitty,” traces the current boom in kawaii to the contradictions, discomfort, and dislocation experienced in occupied Japan after the war. According to Katō, the wartime history that Japan did not want to confront was swept under the rug, and frantic postwar consumerism arose as a way to keep it there (2006: 77). As proof, he points not only to the rise of Hello Kitty but also the domestication of Godzilla, who has evolved from an uncanny monster to a kawaii character (2006: 78).

For Katō, the decline of the bellowing Godzilla and the rise of the mouthless

Hello Kitty mark the disappearance of the authentic in Japanese culture. However, he closes on a note of ambivalence, writing that Hello Kitty also looms “as a symbol of the unknown powers of the voiceless” (2006: 79). Though aspects of Katō’s historical analysis are compelling, his characterization of anyone who produces, consumes, or embodies kawaii as “voiceless” indicates a refusal to listen to the women and men drawn to this female-dominated aesthetic who are using it to redefine authenticity altogether.

The Power of Kawaii

In the late capitalist Japan of the 1980s and 1990s, more and more young people— men as well as women—began to see the position of the shōjo as desirable. The origin of this desire is often traced to the end of the student protest movement of the 1960s.

Joshua Paul Dale 11 From the 1970s on university students turned inward, to fantasies in manga and magazines, and away from politics (Kinsella 1995: 251; Treat 1993: 365). In the

1990s, as new crossover manga and anime such as Sailor Moon began to combine the action and adventure of boys’ manga with shōjo characters, more and more men found themselves occupying a position of both desire and identification vis-à-vis the shōjo and as such, became consumers of kawaii. The paradoxical strength wielded by the heroines of girls’ manga and anime is key to their appeal (Shiokawa 1999: 107).

Their popularity stems from the fact that the shōjo’s unformed state of kawaisa

(cuteness) allows for a seemingly infinite power for transformation while still retaining a liminal state of “relative freedom from socially prescribed rules, and an unmarked gender” (Orbaugh 2003: 217, 226).

Hasegawa Yuko, in her work on contemporary Japanese women artists, goes further when she writes that deliberately existing in a state of kawaisa, in which maturity is never reached, is an oppositional stance that “has the potential to perform a political function of undermining current ideologies of gender and power (2002:

140). There are recent signs that some Japanese men seek not merely to consume but also to embody the position—and power—of the shōjo. The recent “genderless” fashion style is a case in point. Sharon Kinsella identified this as a nascent trend as far back as the late 1980s (1995: 243). Taking both genderless men and kawaii girls as his subject, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein offers an intricate analysis of the paradoxical

“strength out of weakness” that allows kawaii to twist and distort existing structures of gender without overturning them (2016: 111, 120).

Masafumi Monden maintains that the kawaii aesthetic may function as a “soft revolt” in the way it presents an asexual cuteness as an authentic aspect of femininity.

He writes: “Crafting and performing shōjo through gestures and particularly clothes,

Joshua Paul Dale 12 allows Japanese women to present themselves as being segregated from obvious sexualization” (2015: 85). This is part of a larger movement of women in older age brackets identifying with aspects of kawaii. The fashion magazine JJ coined the term otona-kawaii (adult kawaii) in 2004 to describe adult women who wished to extend the kawaii aesthetic into adulthood (Yomota 2006: 137-138). The term joshi, formerly indicating young women, became popular in the early 2000s as a word for these adult women to describe themselves as they forged a new identity focused on adult cuteness

(Yonezawa 2014: 3, 4). Through their collective use of this term, some Japanese women partake in a communal feeling of identification that transcends age and social status, which allows them to see themselves as active subjects rather than passive recipients of a male gaze (Baba 2012: 11, 12).

Kawaii has now evolved into a standard aesthetic of contemporary Japanese culture (McVeigh 2012: 135). Even state agencies, from the post office to the police and self-defense forces, have kawaii mascots (McVeigh2012: 150). Along with such official mascots, localities from cities to prefectures have created thousands of yuru kyara, or “wobbly characters” to represent their regions. Less polished than company products, yuru kyara are hugely popular with all ages, and the overwhelming majority of them are kawaii. Yuru kyara often appear in full body costumes (kigurumi) that impede the movement of the person inside, making them more wobbly and increasing their kawaii appeal. In fact, when performing, the interaction of yuru kyara with their fans is limited to arms waved in greeting (Occhi 2012: 122-125).

Joshua Paul Dale 13

FIGURE 4. A small girl meets a yuru kyara at the 2018 Yuru Kyara Grand Prix in Osaka. Photo by author.

When I attended my first yuru kyara parade in 2015, I was surprised by the number of adults who waved back at these kawaii characters, in spite of the fact that the people inside the kigurumi suits couldn’t see them. Then I realized they were waving at a character, not a person. The act of waving is simply enjoyable even as an indirect act of communication. It enables a crowd to share kawaii affect and testifies to the power of this aesthetic to exert such a broad appeal to so many.

Cute vs. Kawaii

There is a significant strand of scholarship on the cute aesthetic that claims negative affects as defining attributes of cuteness in general. Sianne Ngai, in her work on cuteness in the avant-garde, claims that the cute is inextricably tangled with a long list of adverse aspects: from violence to sadism; aggression to betrayal; despondency to abjection. Several of her examples are from Japanese kawaii, which she misreads

Joshua Paul Dale 14 as the same aesthetic as the cute (2012: 78). For example, when Ngai analyzes the artworks of Nara Yoshitomo, the Japanese avant-garde artist with an international reputation who is known for his depictions of creepily cute children, often holding knives or cigarettes, she concludes that Nara’s work involves a self-conscious foregrounding of the violence that Ngai believes is constitutive of the cute aesthetic as a whole (2012: 78). Thus, when Ngai concludes that cute objects seem to call forth an

“aggressive desire to master and overpower” them, she is including kawaii in this formulation (2012: 78).

I argue elsewhere that Ngai places too much importance on the English word’s secondary meaning of cunning or clever in order to locate aggression and violence at the heart of the cuteness response (Dale 2017: 38, 39). Scholarship on kawaii as a separate aesthetic yields an alternative view. In her article “The Art of Cute Little

Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics,” Marilyn Ivy takes Ngai’s argument in a new direction when she argues that the cute objects within commodity culture “embody an extreme powerlessness that can turn over into its opposite: resistant testimony to the violence of domination” (2010: 14). Ivy’s nuanced use of Ngai’s argument allows her valuable insights into Nara’s predominantly female fan community and their relationship to kawaii.

Ivy argues that by “cutifying” the raw impulse towards rebellion among youth in capitalist societies, Nara creates a movement of political resistance based on shared affects and attachments that “generates forms of association and communality difficult to establish in late capitalist Japan” (2010: 23). Ivy’s reading differs from the other modes of kawaii as resistance outlined above (see also Miller 2011). Rather than attempting to remain in a state of immaturity, Nara’s fans transform the anomie of life in capitalized, commodified culture through their collective engagement in his art,

Joshua Paul Dale 15 thereby: “forming unexpected solidarities based on a grappling with the kawaii, the aesthetic marker for the most reified of objects and the most vulnerable of subjects”

(Ivy 2010: 26).

Conclusion

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report of 2017 lists Japan in 114th place out of 144 countries. Certainly some aspects of kawaii, such as

“immature” and “childlike,” further gender inequality to the extent that they inform the social expectations placing Japanese women into a position subordinate to that of men. Yet kawaii culture, driven by Japanese women’s tastes and preferences, also pushes back against this sexist stereotyping. I close by considering the rapid expansion of new portmanteau categories generated by young Japanese women that combine kawaii with both allied and opposing affects. These new kawaii combinations not only include kimokawa (disgusting), gurokawa (grotesque) and busukawa (ugly), but also tsuyokawa (strong) (Aoyagi and Yuen 2016: 101; Miller,

2011; MyNavi 2017). These new categories offer a fundamentally different approach than that taken by much scholarship on the cute aesthetic. Instead of locating negative qualities inside the concept of the cute, these portmanteau words emphasize the gap between kawaii and the added quality in order to create fresh opportunities to feel kawaii affect, expanding the field of cuteness aesthetics.