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[2] Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 16.

[3] Krauss and Bois, 16.

[4] Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 19.

[5] Boyer, 18–19.

[6] Krauss and Bois, Formless, 18–21.

[7] Stephanie Bowry, ‘Before Museums: The Curiosity Cabinet as Metamorphe’, Museological Review 18 (1 January 2014): 36–37.

[8] Bowry, 39.

[9] Jussi Parikka, ‘New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.626252.

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[14] ‘Moe Anthropomorphism’.

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[22] Throughout this dissertation, I use the term “animanga” to indicate the joint products and culture of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics), as well as directly related products that are often adapted and informed by these media, such as light novels (novels with anime-style illustrations) and visual novels (anime-style videogames reseambling Western adventure games).

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[26] Throughout this dissertation, the names of people and characters originating from Japan will be presented in the Japanese order, in which the surname comes before the given name (unless they explicitally manifest a preference otherwise). Although many Japanese artists and scholars working internationally adopt the Western name/ surname order (as is the case of Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara), I have opted for this solution in the interest of consistency, as it avoids the confusion of having some Japanese names in Japanese order and others in Western order.

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[203] Shiokawa, ‘Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics’, 110.

[204] Shiokawa, 107–12.

[205] Vincent, ‘Making It Real: Ficiton, Desire, and the Queerness of the Beautiful Fighting Girl’, x.

[206] Setsu Shigematsu, ‘Dimensions of Desire: Sex, Fantasy, and Fetish in Japanese Comics’, in Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A. Lent (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press 1, 1999), 130.

[207] Patrick W. Galbraith, ‘Lolicon: The Reality of “Virtual Child Pornography” in Japan’, Image and Narrative : Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 12, no. 1 (1 March 2011): 102.

[208] Patrick W. Galbraith, The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan (Kodansha USA, 2009), 128.

[209] ‘Dimensions of Desire: Sex, Fantasy, and Fetish in Japanese Comics’, 130.

[210] Galbraith, ‘Lolicon’, 102.

[211] Comic Market Committee, ‘What Is the Comic Market?’ (COMIKET, 2014), ‘The 3rd Harumi Era’, https://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/WhatIsEng201401.pdf.

[212] Murakami, Little Boy, 55.

[213] Foster et al., ‘The Politics of the Signifier II’.

[214] ‘The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde’, 816.

[215] ‘Introduction: The Time of the Child’, in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness, ed. Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao (New York: Punctum Books, 2017), 13.

[216] Kao and Boyle, 14.

[217] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2004), 3.

[218] Edelman, 2.

[219] ‘“Survival of the Cutest” Proves Darwin Right’, ScienceDaily, 21 January 2010, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100120093525.htm.

[220] Patrick Barkham, ‘“Kill Them, Kill Them, Kill Them”: The Volunteer Army Plotting to Wipe out Britain’s Grey Squirrels’, The Guardian, 2 June 2017, sec. Environment, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/02/kill-them-the-volunteer-army-plotting-to-wipe-out-britains-grey-squirrels.

[221] Agence France-Presse, ‘Using Cute Animals in Pop Culture Makes Public Think They’re Not Endangered – Study’, The Guardian, 13 April 2018, sec. Environment, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/13/using-cute-animals-in-pop-culture-makes-public-think-theyre-not-endangered-study.

[222] ‘Saving or Harming the Planet with Plush Toys?’, Fur Commission USA (blog), accessed 14 June 2018, http://furcommission.com/saving-the-planet-with-plush-toys/.

[223] Harootunian, ‘Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History’, 119.

[224] Ellis S. Krauss, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff, eds., Conflict in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984).

[225] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24.

[226] ‘The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics’, Mechademia 5, no. 1 (10 November 2010): 29.

[227] Ivy, 5.

[228] Cross, The Cute and the Cool, 44.

[229] Dale et al., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, 27.

[230] Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 2012, 4.

[231] Dale, ‘The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,’ 52.

[232] Anne Allison, ‘The Cultural Politics of Pokemon Capitalism’, 1 January 2002, 2.

[233] Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 43.

[234] Ngai, ‘Our Aesthetic Categories’, 1 October 2010, 64.

A cuter Ph.D.

This dissertation is a collection of essays forming an “encyclopedia” of links between cuteness and negativity in the contemporary milieu, with a focus on the Japanese cute, known as the kawaii. It is also an artist’s book in the form of a website (https://www.heta.moe/) that does not seek to illustrate or explain my artworks but develops their ideas and thought processes through the medium of writing. Because cuteness is “a dumb aesthetic”[1] indexing everything that academic discourse (traditionally) is not, it can conduct certain “acts of sabotage against the academic world and the spirit of system.”[2] As such, cuteness suggests a deviation from traditional dissertation models, valuing attributes opposed to forms of phallogocentrism—namely, the childish, the small, the weak, the playful, the sentimental, the fragmented, the feminine, and so on. In my case, I aim to make my Ph.D. cuter. The choice of form, structure, and themes in my dissertation, therefore, captures the central idea that my artworks and writings world-build together with each other. There is no research question to be dissected, no cutting its internal parts, believing that totality exists even if it is unattainable. Or, rather, if there is a research question, it should be: what can a Ph.D. dissertation do, i.e., what and how can it perform, to reflect my artistic identity? That is, idiosyncratic and constantly changing, sometimes obscure—hopefully—capable of the unexpected; a bit skittish, nervy. Cute (?). The answer, or one possible answer, or the answer I came up with, is that it can serve as a prompt, a stimulus to encourage the creative exploration of everyday objects, to engage with that which enters my mind and my eyes, now and in the future. A reason to really focus my attention (for a short time), and to play with ideas as one does with a ball of string, twisting and untangling.

In other words, I want my Ph.D. dissertation to be like a playing partner, and I want it to go like this: (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧. As such, instead of a single question and a single text, I present a collection of short entries relating to kawaii phenomeno-poetics, i.e., one’s experience of the affective, imaginative, and aesthetic meanings exuding from cute objects. I have divided this document into three parts: “Part I – Encyclopedia,” “Part 2 – Three Papers,” and “Part III – Artist’s Statement.” Part I consists of twenty-one shorter entries of 2500 to 4000 words. In entries such as “Absolute Boyfriend,” “Fairies,” or “THE END,” I focus on a single work—respectively, a manga by Watase Yū, the animated television series Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, and Shibuya Keiichiro’s video opera THE END—by delving into their thematic, conceptual, and aesthetic substance. Other entries, like “Gesamptcutewerk,” “Pastel Turn,” or “Zombieflat” lack a central object, instead weaving an analysis of various cultural artifacts, connected by an underlying motif, e.g., the “total work of art,” “pastel colors,” and “undeadness.” What all the entries in Part I have in common is my goal of a freer, more speculative scholarship, considering a broad range of objects including mass-cultural artifacts like manga, anime, or videogames, but also painting, sculpture, video art, performance, and so on. On the website, the collection of pictures, GIFs, and videos made à propos of each entry is another crucial component of the encyclopedia. More than an illustration of contents, I wish it to provide a meaningful reflection in and of itself, about the forms of contemporary cuteness.

Part II follows the “three papers” Ph.D. thesis format, a more recent alternative to the traditional dissertation, with a decentralized structure and shorter length. Contrary to the encyclopedia entries in Part I, these papers have about 8000 words and follow the proper format of a humanities research paper, with an abstract, introduction, discussion, and fewer pictures. The three papers presented in this part are “‘Gaijin Mangaka’: The Boundary-violating Impulse of Japanized ‘Art Comic,’” ““Nothing That’s Really There: Hatsune Miku’s Challenge to Anthropocentric Materiality,” and “She’s Not Your Waifu; She’s an Eldritch Abomination: Saya no Uta and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels.” The first paper focuses on š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka,’ a special issue of the celebrated pocket-sized comic anthology š! in which I have participated, addressing the question of Japanized contemporary art by Western artists. The second investigates the Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku as hyperobject (a concept by philosopher Timothy Morton) from a feminist new materialist perspective. Finally, the third paper delves into Saya no Uta (“Song of Saya”), a Lovecraftian-Cronenbergian adult visual novel, examining it in light of Queer Game Studies and antisocial queer theory. Although on the website, I make no distinction between Part I and II—all entries belong to my imaginary collection of art and pop-cultural objects—these three papers attest to my capacity to navigate different theoretical frameworks and write according to the standard format of academic journals. In fact, at the time of this dissertation’s completion, I have submitted all three articles to international journals with blind peer review. Moreover, “Gaijin Mangaka” relates directly to my artistic “tribe,” i.e., non-Japanese artists using Japanese pop-cultural references in their works, and therefore is suited for a lengthier analysis in the context of this dissertation.

Part III consists of my artist’s statement, my artist’s bio, and my C.V. The artist statement, to be used in my professional practice as an artist, presents an overall vision of my work, situating it in the contemporary art practice. It also directs readers to my online portfolio at https://www.heta.moe/, where I have documented the artworks produced during the duration of my Ph.D., including images, photographs, and short descriptions of each artwork or series of artworks. An abridged version of my online portfolio is also attached to this dissertation. Part III is to be complemented by the final exhibition of my artworks, which will take place at my faculty on the day of the thesis defense.

In the remainder of this introduction, I will detail some aspects concerning my dissertation’s methodology, namely, its “encyclopedic” format. I will also offer a brief observation of the field of Cute Studies and make a general introduction to the question of cuteness and negativity, in which I pre-emptively tackle a set of “negative” concepts which will recur in Parts I and II. After that, I will turn my attention to this dissertation’s main topic, the Japanese cute or the kawaii, addressing its etymology, history, and culture. In the same vein, I present an overview of cuteness and manga—including the Interwar period,  girls’ comics (shо̄jo manga) and boys’ comics (shо̄nen manga)—as their coevolution is especially relevant not only to grasp the aesthetics of kawaii but as a primer to various encyclopedia entries. Finally, I will close this introduction with a few concluding remarks (“Coda: Feeling Cute, Might Delete Later”), suggestive of loose ends and future prompts to be explored in relation to cuteness and negativity.

While the dictionary and the encyclopedia are at odds with the Ph.D. dissertation in many ways—for instance, the adjective “encyclopedic” can be used to negatively pass judgment on a thesis, highlighting a propensity for quantity over quality or an excess of the content itself—they are all, at heart, teleological formations. The dissertation culminates in a thesis, in which all parts (literature review, methodology, results) converge towards a theory to be proved, aiming for the specialization of students in one field of knowledge. Even when opening new lines of inquiry in “future work” sections, it entails a sense of closure of a research phase with everything else lying beyond its scope, and Ph.D. students, often suffering from academic fatigue, fantasize about writing the last word in their dissertation’s conclusion. In turn, dictionaries and encyclopedias seek to collect the entirety of knowledge or branch of knowledge. Their alphabetical order is a strategy to organize that which has no inherent ordering, as no word or entry is more important than the other. As such, they are inherently non-sequential, evading the logical chain that characterizes a Ph.D. dissertation.

In the making of this dissertation, I was inspired by a lineage of unconventional “dictionaries” initiated by George Bataille’s critical dictionary in the Documents (1929-30) magazine and continued by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s Formless: A User's Guide (1997). [Figures 1 & 2] Both subvert the dictionary as a tool that objectively describes the meaning of words, mocking its aspirations to totality, replaced by a collection of short, idiosyncratic essays. Indeed, Bataille’s dictionary “is not much of one.” As Krauss and Bois put it:

In Formless, too, the book’s division clashes with its alphabetical order: because all 28 entries are organized from A to Z, the book’s four parts (“Base Materialism,” “Horizontality,” “Pulse,” “Entropy”) seem subject to chance or, at least, conditional to the dictionary’s deterministic order.

My encyclopedia, which is also “not much of one,” uses Bataille’s dictionaries and Formless as models for the dissertation, not just in structure and length, but in their engagement with what Ernest Boyer calls a “scholarship of integration” or “connectedness.”[4] As Boyer writes, “By integration, we mean making connections across disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating nonspecialists, too.” And continues: “In calling for a scholarship of integration, we do not suggest returning to the ‘gentleman scholar’ of earlier time, nor do we have in mind the dilettante. Rather, what we mean is serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear original research.”[5] To Krauss and Bois, this connectedness is a way “not only to map certain trajectories, or slippages, but in some small way to ‘perform’ them.”[6] In my case, these “trajectories” and “slippages” draw together Western and Japanese objects and frameworks. Indeed, I was first interested in the Japanese cute, the kawaii, because of the way that Japanese comics, animation, and videogames reflect many topics present in Western art and theory in fresh, unexpected ways.

Another crucial feature of dictionaries and encyclopedias is their provisional nature, as language and knowledge are continually shifting and evolving. Ironically, encyclopedias like the online Wikipedia, that incorporate provisionality and open-endness, are often scorned by the gatekeepers of knowledge and referencing them remains, for the most part, an academic no-no. In my encyclopedia, I deliberately insist on the interplay of “high” and “low” sources of information, using books, monographs and papers alongside Tumblr posts and collaborative websites like KnowYourMeme, TvTropes and fan wikis. In doing so, I seek to reflect my experience as a trained scholar and artist who is also a product of the Internet revolution, marked by the rise of user-generated content and social media. Indeed, my interest in the kawaii itself would not have been possible without the unprecedented circulation and accessibility of Japanese popular culture in the 2000s. After all, the millennials were the first generation to be brought up en masse on Japanese cartoons like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Evangelion, or Pokémon, thanks to globalization and the World Wide Web. In the spirit of provisionality, then, an essential aspect of my encyclopedia is that, on my website, it is to remain an open-ended collection of entries, subject to growth and change, of which the volume submitted to my faculty’s administrative services is but a momentary crystallization. After the conclusion of my Ph.D., I will continue to add new entries, and existing entries may be changed or removed, in a continual editing process of which I will keep track in the Blog section of the website.

My encyclopedia also employs the archetype of the cabinet of curiosities or wonder-room as an organizing principle, insofar as, like the curiosity cabinet, mine is also a compendium of artifacts. Renaissance wonder-rooms were collections of unusual objects organized in idiosyncratic categories, according to flexible guidelines and the collector’s imagination.[7] [Figure 3] As historian Stephanie Bowry puts it, “Far from being chaotic, cabinets attempted not only to represent, but to actively perform the entangled nature of objects through their selection and categorization of material, and to experiment with the limits of representation by creating new kinds of objects.”[8] The curiosity cabinet exists at the intersection of the encyclopedic and the “weird materialities”[9] of culture, bringing out the entanglement of theory and practice as products of the same world-building drive. What interests me in this model is that, like the dictionary and encyclopedia, the curiosity cabinet is an open-ended collection subject to growth and change, negating the closure expected from Ph.D. dissertations. However, compared to the dictionary and encyclopedia, which tend towards abstraction (i.e., concepts, words, events), the cabinet of curiosities is of an objectual nature. I identify with it more, as each of my entries originates from looking at an object, artwork, or character, and mapping its connections to other artifacts and concepts. In a sense, in building my encyclopedia, I, too, feel like I am a collector of sorts, adding my treasures to an imaginary (virtual) room.

The cute and the curious also share some common ground as aesthetic categories. On the one hand, the curious bears a suggestion of smallness, as it is often not surprising or impressive enough to be “astonishing” or “amazing,” thus hinting at a passing interest in things sufficiently tiny to fit into a cabinet. On the other, despite its strong influence in contemporary culture, cuteness remains, for the most part, a “curiosity” in aesthetic criticism, resisting the solemnity of established categories like the beautiful or sublime.[10] Exotic Japan, too, has always been a cabinetizable curiosity in the eyes of the West, reduced to the decorative motif of Japonaiserie, i.e., the porcelain, lacquerware, and screens eagerly sought after by seventieth-century collectors and onward.[11] Even today, kawaii culture fits neatly into the discourse of “wacky orientalism,”[12] with lists of Japan’s most disturbing prefecture mascots (yuru kyara) amusing the Internet alongside news of Hello Kitty dildos and insane street fashion like gyaru (“gal”) or decora. [Figure 4] For better or worse, these stereotypical associations of “Japaneseness” hold a poetic significance in their transgression of the boundaries of nature and artifice, reality and fantasy, encouraging the formulation of playful connections between objects, concepts, and affects.

Moreover, while the Portfolio and the Encyclopedia exist in separate sections on my website, the homepage is a section exhibiting the writings and the artworks mixed in with each other: the GRL KABINETT. Here, encyclopedia entries and portfolio entries are represented by AI-generated anime girls, created by using the website https://make.girls.moe, and curated from a pool of several hundreds of automatically generated girls to best fit the spirit of each entry. In animanga fandom, this process is called moé anthropomorphism, or moé gijinka, in Japanese, “a form of anthropomorphism in anime and manga where moé qualities are given to non-human beings, objects, concepts, or phenomena.”[13] In moé anthropomorphism, “Part of the humor of this personification comes from the personality ascribed to the character (often satirical) and the sheer arbitrariness of characterizing a variety of machines, objects, and even physical places as cute.”[14] Because the girls are unlabelled, accessing the entries from the GRL KABINETT also encourages visitors to engage playfully—and, perhaps, a bit annoyingly!—with the contents of my website.

The choice to represent the curiosities in this virtual cabinet through moé anthropomorphism, instead of icons retaining a mimetic relationship to their content, hints at the contradictions of cute aesthetics in contemporary culture, namely, at cuteness’s permanent tension between reinforcing and subverting the existing social order, sometimes, in the same gesture. Indeed, as scholar  Thomas Lamarre puts it, “unless you’ve mastered easy flight to other planets, you’ve surely run up against signs of increasing anxiety about the effects of capitalism in today’s world… Regardless of what you think about capitalism, it’s hard to escape a sense of disparity between the creativity of consumer activity today… and the contemporary crisis of capitalism.”[15] I find this contrast both funny and unsettling in ways that reflect, quite efficiently, the contradictions in my own writings and artworks. After all, what does it mean to thread so intimately among the products of consumer culture? Regardless of analytical depth, in the end, what will my wonder-room look like? Perhaps not so much like a cabinet of curiosities, but like the figurine-encasing displays in the rooms of an otaku?

In embracing the relational quality of the curiosity cabinet, I do not rely on a hard definition of cuteness. Instead, my premise is that “cuteness itself is defined in relative terms, based on the available elements in each story,”[16] each chapter, each entry. This indeterminism aligns with the belief that, as scholar Joshua Dale argues, cuteness is “a potential… response to a definable (albeit not completely defined) set of stimuli,”[17] and therefore an overarching, ossified definition would cut against the methodological grain of my encyclopedia. This “case by case” approach, based on close reading and close looking, facilitates the temporal and geographical transitions arising throughout my encyclopedia, as I impose no time or space restrictions on the analyzed objects. But also, it allows me to explore cuteness in terms of content and representation through different theoretical frameworks, drawing from an array of knowledge fields including art studies, critical theory, Japanese studies, anime and manga studies, comics studies, media studies, queer studies, gender studies, feminist theory, new materialism, and so on. I also assume a stance in which no object is undeserving of detailed attention, regardless of its smallness. In fact, in my experience and art practice alike, it is often from details and the more fleeting sensations that words and images are fleshed out, rather than from totalizing thought systems.

Finally, in examining the relationship between cuteness and negativity, I have made a deliberate effort to include art and pop culture that is not only Japanese but also Japanized—what scholar Casey Brienza has called Japanese pop culture “without Japan,”[18] meaning “products of a sometimes globalized, sometimes transnational, sometimes hyperlocal world… produced without any direct creative input at all from Japan”[19] but which nevertheless retain symbolic and stylistic markers associated with manga, anime, Japanese videogames, and so on. Yoda Tomiko, too, has argued that the handle “J-” often accompanying the products of Japanese pop culture (e.g., J-pop) is useful precisely because of its degree of separableness from the national. As a part-object, “J-” embodies the contractions and contradictions of “Japan” (or any nation-state, really) in globalized capitalism. As she puts it, “Rather than assuming that the Japanese popular culture today ultimately refers to some form of larger national frame, we may understand the prefix J- as inscribing the subculturation of the national.”[20] In Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (2011), scholars Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade indorse a similar view (with which I concur), writing that,

At the heart of any definition of Japanese popular culture are a number of contradictions. First, we believe that the use of a nation-state, such as Japan, as an organizing principle for the categorization of culture, especially contemporary popular culture, is ultimately untenable. We see Japanese popular culture as a study of information flows associated with Japan rather than anything “essentially” or “authentically” Japanese. In the case of Japan, this is sometimes less arbitrary because of the barriers of geography and language. Thus we demonstrate that the designation “Japanese” in Japanese popular culture is more an associative starting point than a marker of exclusivity or locus of origin for what are indeed a globalized set of phenomena.[21]

By expanding the objects of analysis to outside the boundaries of Japan’s territory (a particularly enclosed one, considering its insular position), I wish to emphasize that these essays are meant to reach a broader crowd beyond the niche of animanga[22] fans and fellow weeaboos (“wapanese” or “wannabe Japanese,” obsessive Western fans of anime and manga). Presently, Japanese popular culture is an unavoidable “soft power,” which seeps into our everyday lives, and whose influence makes itself more and more visible in non-Japanese art schools and contemporary art. For instance, as the encyclopedia entry and paper “Gaijin Mangaka” addresses, in the 2020s, the realm of experimental graphic narratives, called “art comics,” has experienced a wave of non-Japanese authors openly influenced by manga. Likewise, references to Japanese popular culture, particularly comics and animation, have become a not uncommon occurrence in Western contemporary art, especially in the work of artists currently in their 20s and 30s. Sometimes, these can cause educators and students to clash and struggle, either to understand and accommodate these trends within their viewpoints (in the former’s case) or to present and navigate their preferences within a contemporary art world context (in the latter’s). I hope that my encyclopedia contributes, at some level, to a better understanding that kawaii, anime, and manga operate beyond the boundaries of subcultures or the Japanese nation-state and, therefore, can be productively used to engage with all kinds of art and aesthetic criticism, including in educational contexts.

As an emerging academic field, Cute Studies or Cuteness Studies encompasses interdisciplinary scholarship from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.[23] The term was coined by scholar Joshua Dale, who has promoted its development and dissemination by launching the online resource Cute Studies Bibliography, co-editing The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and editing the “Cute Studies” special edition of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, both in 2016. To date, other cute-centric academic publications include an issue on Internet cute by the M/C Journal (2014) and The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (2017), edited by Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao. The study of cute aesthetics in Western scholarship was pioneered in the 1990s and 2000s by cultural theorist such as Daniel Harris (Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, released in 2000) and Sianne Ngai (starting with “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde” in 2005), along with Sharon Kinsella, a sociologist specializing in kawaii, and Garry Cross, who wrote the landmark history of American cute culture The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture, in 2004. Ngai’s scholarship of cuteness culminated in Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (2012), [Figure 6] in which she argues that cuteness reveals “the surprisingly wide specter of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities.”[24]

Ngai’s integration of cuteness within her broader project of examining the “politically ambiguous work of… emotions”[25] contributed to establishing cute aesthetics as a valid topic of research. Ngai’s “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” (2005), her earliest article on cuteness later adapted into a chapter in Our Aesthetic Categories, focuses on Japanese contemporary artists like Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo[26] as hallmarks of cuteness’s dark side. In turn, Sharon Kinsella has published several key books and articles on Japanese cuteness and girls’ culture, including the 1995 article “Cuties in Japan”—which remains a reference in many texts on kawaii aesthetics—along with Adult Manga: Culture and power in contemporary Japanese society (2000), Female Revolt in Male Cultural Imagination in Contemporary Japan (2007), and Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan (2013). Additionally, in 2010, anthropologist Marilyn Ivy penned “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo's Parapolitics,” published in the fifth volume of the animanga-centric academic journal Mechademia, an important paper examining the political significance of Japanese artist Nara Yoshitomo in light of kawaii aesthetics. Since then, during the span of the 2010s, there has been a general increase in papers focusing on Japanese cuteness, hailing from various academic fields.

In the second half of the 2020s, a notable contribution to the field of Cute Studies was the edited volume The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, published by Routledge in 2016, edited by Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony McIntyre, and Diane Negra. [Figure 7] This collection of essays offers a comprehensive view on the “explosion of cute commodities, characters, foods, fashions, and fandoms, leading to an inevitable expansion and dispersal of meanings and connotations”[27] in the twenty-first century. The authors put forth an understanding of cute affects, cultures, and aesthetics as “a repertoire that is made use of by a variety of constituencies and for a variety of purposes.”[28] The book breaks down the appeal of cute aesthetics in several elements: cuteness, coping, labour; cute consumption, nostalgia, and adulthood; cute communities and shifting gender configurations; cute compassion and communication; cute encounters: anthropomorphism and animals; spreadable cuteness: interspecies affect; political cuteness; cuteness and/as manipulation.[29] Dale, in particular, importantly argues that cuteness is fundamentally “aimed at disarming aggression and promoting sociality,”[30] and that “antagonistic qualities such as violence, aggression, and sadism are not intrinsic to the concept of cuteness” but “are frequently attached to cute objects in the aesthetic realm.”[31] Although, for instance, Ngai’s analyses of the aggressive impulses aroused by the cute object are firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory and ethnographic observation—and, therefore, contrary to what Dale’s argument may suggest, not a detached fabrication of the artistic sphere—Dale’s case nevertheless cautions us against the hasty association of cuteness with “darkness.”

Before advancing, one may raise the question: what is cuteness? Cuteness can be understood on two different, if necessarily interconnected, levels. On the one hand, from a psychophysiological point of view, cuteness is an “affective response—a feeling one may refer to as the ‘Aww’ factor”[32] serving as an evolutionarily advantageous trait. This “natural” cuteness, understood as a primal, protective instinct towards neonates, is also not exclusive to humans, intertwining with the broader evolution of animals on Earth. In the 1940s, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz was the first to describe what he called kinderschema, or “baby schema,” a set of features and behaviors found in animals, including humans, indexing youthfulness and vulnerability, that trigger our nurturing instinct. [Figure 8] Lorenz’s kinderschema included big eyes positioned low in large heads with tall foreheads, a small mouth and nose, round ears, small chin, soft limbs and body, and a waddling gait. The Aww-factor can impact biological capacities; for instance, a recent study suggests that the millennial-long coevolution of dogs and humans has resulted in the latter developing a forehead muscle to produce the proverbial puppy dog eyes, i.e., a sad, imploring, juvenile expression.[33] Nevertheless, many scientists today argue that “instead of stemming solely from helplessness and dependence, cuteness is… intimately linked to companionship, cooperation, play, and emotional reactivity,”[34] suggesting it plays a role in motivating prosocial behavior, empathy, and disarming aggression.[35]

On the other hand, cuteness exists as a socio-cultural concept and, by extension, as an aesthetic category. This “second nature” of cuteness is relatively recent in human history, relating to the word’s emergence at the dawn of the twentieth century—although its roots can be traced back further, for instance, to Rococo’s fascination with the small and playful against Baroque's grandeur, encapsulated in works like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s L'Escarpolette, [Figure 9] or some Edo period paintings and prints in Japan.[36] According to historian Gary Cross,

Thus, as Sianne Ngai suggests, the word “cute exemplifies a situation in which making a word smaller, more compact, or more cute results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite.”[38] Here, the cute indexes various meanings, including that which is attractive by means of smallness prettiness, or quaintness. In this sense, cuteness evokes the “toy-like or pet-like,”[39] tameness aligned with the limiting of the physical, formal, and philosophical scope of objects. For instance, the small is that whose size is less than average, and this “less than” or “lack” evokes another set of features that Ngai lists as “compactness, formal simplicity, softness or pliancy.”[40] [Figure 10] In fact,  the kinderschema are, in and of themselves, a kind of “deformity” or “distortion” in relation to the “standard,” i.e., the adult, connoting immaturity, innocence, and dependence. On the other hand, the pretty is a “desintensification” or domestication of the beautiful, something which is appealing in a delicate and graceful way but removed from the solemnity of beauty as a central category in classical art—one could argue that the pretty is a cutification of the beautiful. In turn, the quaint “declaws” strangeness into that which is quirky, i.e., unusual or idiosyncratic in non-threatening, often adorable, sometimes, old-fashioned, ways.

Moreover, and albeit in an entirely different context (referring to sound), Bradon LaBelle’s account of weakness as, potentially, a euphoric and erotic (in the sense of a life-inducing impulse) condition, which “reveals us at our most vulnerable, a body without and in need,”[41] echoes Ngai’s definition of cuteness as “an aesthetization of powerlessness,”[42] i.e., as the depiction of “helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency”[43] as artistically or sensually pleasing, in ways that evoke our tender love and care. In this light, one can think of the cute as an intersection where the life instinct to nurture, protect, an love meets the minor, insignificant body and object. This structural disenfranchisement applies to the category of cuteness itself in relation to the Western art canon, as “a minor aesthetic concept that is fundamentally about minorness.”[44]

Cross also suggests that cuteness can “weaponize” these features as charm contrived with a view to desired ends. Here, the cute becomes entangled with sentimentality and the self-indulgent appeal to tenderness and nostalgia. The iconic Crying Boys painting series by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin, an icon of kitsch mass-market art, epitomizes this relationship, but it could also refer to Margaret Keane’s paintings of big-eyed women and children, or the kitty and puppy calendars hanging in homes all over the world. [Figure 11a, b] These associations have put cute aesthetics squarely on the “dumb” side of what art and literary critic Andreas Huyssen famously called “the Great Divide”[45] between “high art” and lowly mass culture, a contested conceptual trope emerging in nineteenth-century Europe that has nevertheless proved to be amazingly resilient throughout the twentieth century.[46] Indeed, Cross argues that cuteness is intimately related to the birth of consumer culture, as it became “a selling point (especially when associated with the child in ads) and an occasion for impulse spending”[47] in emerging child-oriented festivities like Christmas, Halloween, and birthday parties. These were the beginnings of the cute as a commodity form, which over the twentieth and twenty-first century grew to enormous proportions, to the point that it has been called a “cuteness-industrial complex.”[48] The idea that, as argued by Ngai, cuteness has become one of “capitalism’s most binding processes,”[49] and therefore is no longer “merely” an aesthetic but an authoritative economic interest and value system, allied with the consumer goods sector, is essential throughout my dissertation, especially in regards to the development of the kawaii in Japanese society. It is at the core of all sorts of negativity and ambiguities spiraling from the cute commodity.

Cuteness is also the fruit of modern psychology, replacing the passive Victorian child with mischievous rascal boys or cheeky coquette girls.[50] The fact that “children were no longer imagined as miniature adults or as naturally virtuous creatures”[51] resulted in a sociocultural shift that not only tolerated but encouraged them to express emotions and behaviors that would be considered antisocial in adults.[52] [Figure 12] Cross illustrates this uncanny, dual constructive and destructive nature of cuteness with examples of late nineteenth-century American trade cards, in which children using a sewing machine to stitch together the tails of cats and dogs, or getting hit in the face with a baseball ball,[53] are shown to be cute. But one could just as easily fetch the example of literary heroines like Charles Dickens’s Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield (1850). David Copperfield’s first wife, Dora, is described as “pretty,” “little” (“little voice,” “little laugh,” “little ways”), “rather diminutive altogether,” and “childish.” She baby talks and throws tantrums, and is always accompanied by her spunky lapdog, Jip. [Figure 13] Although commonly understood as an “empty-headed child,”[54] Dora is self-aware and even tells David that he should think of her as his “child-wife” (e.g., “When you are going to be angry with me, say to yourself, ‘it’s only my child-wife!’ When I am very disappointing, say, ‘I knew, a long time ago, that she would make but a child-wife!’”). By acting childish and vulnerable, Dora—much like the practitioners of Japanese fashion and subcultures related to the kawaii—evades the responsibilities of married life and enfolds David in “a playful, unserious anarchic moment”[55] which is ultimately unsustainable in family literature (Dora, therefore, dies shortly into their marriage). Characters like Dora portray a budding admiration for the “slightly manipulative and self-centered girl”[56] in nineteenth-century urban society. Likewise, Little Nemo, Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse, or Betty Boop, embody the moral and aesthetical ambiguity, even disruptiveness, of cuteness in early comics and cartoons, initially targeted not at children but an adult audience, imbued with a modern sensibility. As Dale puts it, “when Mickey Mouse debuted in the animated cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928) he was mischievous to the point of cruelty.”[57] [Video 1]

Disconnected from the biodeterminism of Konrad Lorenz’s kinderschema, the “minorness” of cuteness performs in ways which are fundamentally contingent and relational. This is not to say that everything is (or can be) cute—as I have discussed above, cuteness evokes a word cloud or arena in which “diminutive,” “negative,”  or “formless” attributes combine with benign qualities: small, weak, helpless, pitiful, dumb, manipulative, young, pretty, quaint, playful, tame, adorable, and so on. But in the artistic and pop-cultural realm, cuteness often reflects the fact that “social and subcultural groups have their own (rather specific) criteria for what sorts of manners and attitudes constitute ‘cute.’”[58] For instance, the character of Garrus from the video game series Mass Effect, who is an anthropomorphic alien with insectoid features, is a favorite among the female gamer community for his cute awkwardness and vulnerability.[59] [Figure 14] Likewise, while relying on an aesthetics of precarity and imperfection which is far from being “conventionally” cute (attractive, pretty, etc.), many artworks produced within the trend of provisional painting might be considered “cute” in defying the aesthetic grandeur traditionally expected from artworks. Even the ugly can be cute, to some extent: the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest is an example of such concoction of  cuteness and ugliness, or the blobfish, voted the world’s ugliest animal in 2013 by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society,[60] [Figure 15] or even the cutification of disability in Internet celebrity cats like the late Grumpy Cat or Lil Bub.[61] Indeed, according to scholar Kanako Shiokawa, the non-descriptiveness of cuteness is central to cuteness’s contemporary acceptation.[62] In many respect, the kawaii, i.e., the Japanese cute, is particularly elastic, and a fertile ground for investigating the phenomeno-poetics of cuteness and negativity—what Joshua Dale calls the “dark side of cute.” As Dale puts it,

In art and popular culture, cuteness is entangled with a variety of other aesthetic categories and concepts, such as the abject, the formless, the uncanny, the eerie, the weird, the obscene, the grotesque, or the disgusting, with their own history and range. These share a “trajectory towards negation”[64] and alterity that aligns them more than separates them, prompting many overlaps. Abjection is a crucial concept in art theory, and one that underlines and manifests in many (if not all) of the enclyclopedia entries and papers in this dissertation—albeit in radically different ways, from the eruption of cuteness in the Dark Web to the internalized foreigness of global manga, or the nonhumanity (the otherness) of cute characters and people. The word “abjection” comes from the Latin abicio, meaning “throw or hurl down or away, cast or push away or aside,” “give up, abandon; expose; discard,” or “humble, degrade, reduce, lower, cast down.”[65] At its most fundamental, the abject signals “the otherness in us,”[66] permeating both our mental processes and the social-cultural order.[67] Julia Kristeva’s 1980 Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai Sur l'Abjection (in English, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) remains the definitive theory of abjection; but there have been many significant contributions to its study, such as Hal Foster’s essay “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” published in the art journal October in 1996.

Bodily waste like urine, feces, and other “excretions” (in the sense of substances excreted from our bodies) like blood, semen, or breast milk, are prototypically abject. But the concept also refers to marginalized persons or groups that deviate from the norms of a society at a given moment in space or time, based on their appearance (gender, age, race, ethnicity, disabilities) or living standards (sexual orientation, class, religion, legal status). The duality creates a tension between the “abject” as a noun and “to abject” as a verb. According to scholar Rina Arya, author of Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature, “While the operation (of abjection) seeks to stabilize, the condition (of the abject) is inherently disruptive, meaning that there is a constant tension of drives.” And continues: “The concept is both constructive (in the formation of identities and relationship to the world) and destructive (in what it does to the subject).”[68] The abject is therefore disruptive and unassimilable, threatening the stability of individual, social, and moral boundaries, as it undoes the distinction between the Self and Other.

Moreover, “the operation of abject-ing involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability,”[69] applying not just to bodies or social groups but also to art. For instance, “high culture” gatekeeps artistic purity by abjecting the “others” of taste and originality, like the kitsch or the plagiarized. Ngai argues that cuteness is abject in relation to the avant-garde, representing its greatest fear: powerlessness, “its smallness (of audience as well as membership), incompleteness (the gap between stated intentions and actual effects), and vulnerability (to institutional ossification).”[70] Still, according to her, the real power of both the cute object and of art itself ultimately resides in its powerlessness. In other words, the insistence on its radical uselessness is the condition sine qua non for the emergence of the avant-garde.

The extent to which the formless and the abject intersect has been the subject of debate. In 1994, the arts journal October published “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the ‘Abject’” by Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Helen Molesworth,[71] a roundtable on the formless and the abject, discussing their differences and similarities. Krauss points out how the abject is often reified into “a thematics of essences and substances,”[72] while the formless resists reification and therefore cannot be signified. Arguably, this interpretation of abjection is reductionistic—for Kristeva, the abject draws us “toward the place where meaning collapses,”[73] which aligns with Bataille’s declaration that “What it [the informe]designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.”[74] Still, one may trace a distinction of emphasis between the abject and the formless; the former, drawing from Kristeva's reading of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, emphasizes the in-betweenness of I and not-I, while the latter emphasizes the no-thing, the “matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance” [75] inferred through its effects on outside observers. While the ties of cuteness to the formless are less obvious, I suggest it can be traced, for instance, in the “gleams and reflections”[76] of the big eyes of Japanese girls’ comics, whose wet and sparkly masses, enclosed by long lashes akin to a Bataillean spider, defunctionalize the eye as an organ of the visual system. [Figure 16]

There is a cluster of concepts that orbit the abject (or the other way around), namely, the unheimlich, as immortalized in Freud’s 1919 essay. Meaning “unhomely” in German, the unheimlich indexes an intimate alienation, which “can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.”[77] The unheimlich connects with Lacan’s “extimacy” (extimité), i.e., “intimate exteriority,”[78] which is not contrary to intimacy but instead posits that “that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”[79] In the posthumous The Weird and the Eerie (2017), Mark Fisher argues that, because “Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange,”[80] it is unreconcilable with related concepts, such as the weird and the eerie, that rely on that which “does not belong.”[81] Or, in the case of the eerie, that catches the human “in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces,”[82] an idea whose possible intersection with the cute I explore in the encyclopedia entry “Paradog.” [Figure 17]

The concept of unheimlich was famously used by Japanese robotics professor Mori Masahiro to describe the uncanny valley (bukimi no tani), a hypostasized “shift from empathy to revulsion” as a humanlike robot “approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance.”[83] As Dale points out, domestication is a crucial element in cuteness, and therefore the cute is always, in one way or another, about the tame and familiar, even when artists negate or subvert these qualities to an “unhomely” effect. The realization that such unsettling feelings do not necessarily detract from the “Aww-factor” further complexifies the interplay of the cute and the uncanny. For instance, the Japanese therapeutic baby seal robot Paro, designed to calm patients and treat depression at hospitals and nursing homes,[84] is quintessentially cute but also carries unsettling qualities—both in the mechanical-automaticness of its movements and utterances, and the ethical implications of replacing “real” human or animal love with a robotic “illusion of a relationship.”[85]

Other concepts encapsulating a sense of wrongness, such as the disgusting, the obscene, or the grotesque, have been given various degrees of importance either individually, or within the context of abjection. In art and literature, the grotesque has come to be associated with the carnivalesque and the macabre, the excessive, and metamorphosis. In Japan, the interwar art movement ero guro nansensu (sometimes shortened to ero-guro) that celebrated decadence, violence, parody, and perversion, has been highly influential throughout the twentieth century, including in manga and anime.[86] Many subtypes of alternative kawaii culture, like guro-kawaii (“grotesque-cute”), kimo-kawaii (“gross-cute”), busu-kawaii (“ugly-cute”),  yami-kawaii (“sick-cute”), itami-kawaii (“pain-cute”), or the more recent mukikawa—a combination of mukimuki (“buff”) and kawaii headed by muscled idols like Saiki Reika[87] and Japan-based Australian singer Ladybeard [Figure 18]—drink from this tradition, combining cute aesthetics with violent, depressing, burlesque, or otherwise contradictory imagery.[88] There is, however, also another sense in which cuteness can become grotesque. The word “grotesque,” from the Italian “grotto” (cave), originated in the fifteenth century when excavations of Emperor Nero’s ancient Roman palace Domus Aurea revealed bizarre paintings fusing human, animal, vegetable, and mineral.[89] Cute aesthetics often enables that kind of grotesquery. Take, for instance, Lisa Frank’s colorful illustrations of puppies, unicorns, dolphins, stars, hearts, rainbows, patterns, and whatnot. In these pictures, rather than appearing to be “proper” characters, all these clichéd, ossified formations seem to be molded out of the same nondescript, rainbowny substance, regardless of their being animals or objects, background or foreground, filling the entire surface in innervating visual amalgamations. [Figure 19] The cute yet outlandish allure of her figures and environments may explain why, although her company mostly produces stationary and stickers, Frank was selected to represent the United States at the forthcoming 2021 Venice Biennale.[90]

In turn, the transgression of social prohibitions and taboo links more closely to the obscene. The obscene evokes moral outrage and offense, in the form of objectionable practices, sexual (like incest, pedophilia, and necrophilia) or otherwise (war, poverty, racism, murder, and so on).[91] According to scholar Kerstin Mey, author of Art and obscenity (2007), the “‘obscene’ has been linked to the Greek term ob skene (‘off stage’), as violent acts in Greek theatre were committed away from the eyes of the audience: offstage, behind the scenes,” and it has come “to describe expressions that deviate from prevalent norms especially of ‘sexual morality.’”[92] It is important to note that the obscene is, among all these concepts, the one with a legal existence in the form of “obscenity laws that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century across Europe, followed by the USA towards the end of that century.”[93] Obscenity laws regulate and suppress materials such as images or speech that violate community standards of taste and decency. Their existence remains controversial, tackling with the limits of free speech, and bringing forth the question of who gatekeeps the “redeeming” value of obscene art.[94] Many artworks have been subjected to notorious obscenity trials, like William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the 1960s, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment in 1990. The most notorious intersection of cuteness and the obscene are the many forms of “erotic cute” in Japan, ranging from erocawa (or ero-kawaii) women’s fashion[95] to lolicon (“Lolita complex”) comics. [Figures 20 & 21] Possession of this kind of drawn erotica or pornography, which depicts minors in animanga style, has originated several court cases and convictions in countries such as the United States and Canada. It has also resulted in the banning of anime series like A Kite (1998) in Norway, Puni Puni Poemy (a 2001 spin-off of the popular Excel Saga) in New Zeeland, or Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (2013) in Russia.

Finally, disgust is primarily an emotional response to aversive stimuli that “helps to ensure the safety of the organism by inhibiting contact with what is foul, toxic, and thereby.”[96] Nevertheless, as Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith argue in their introduction to philosopher Aurel Kolnai’s 1927 On Disgust (Der Ekel, the first phenomenological treatise on this topic), disgust “is in fact a highly cognitive emotion, which provides information about features of the outer world not readily available by other means, and which also reveals something about the complexities and shadows of our inner psychic life.”[97] As such, disgust is not only a reaction to “decay and foulness in the sensory realm,” for instance, putrefaction or excessive vitality, “but also to moral decay and foulness of character.”[98] According to Kolnai’s view, disgust connects strongly to one’s ethical judgment, and, interestingly, one of his most distinctive object of disgust is “sentimentality, moral stupor, and even dull-witted gushing and reveling, the whole range of insolidity of the intellectual and moral life.”[99] This aspect is relevant to cuteness considering that, as Dale suggests, the surplus affect triggered by cuteness is redirected towards the beholder, who “takes pleasure in the intensity of this assault upon its sovereignty… in a form of linguistic or behavioral self-limitation”[100] manifesting as “cooing, squealing, exclamations of ‘Aww,’ and so on.”[101] Ngai also analyses the  “deverbalizing effect” of the cute in terms of a quasi-retributive movement. As she puts it, “in soliciting a response along the line of a murmur or coo, the cute object shows its ability to infantilize the language of its infantilizer, dissolving syntactic divisions and reducing one’s lexicon to onomatopoeia.”[102]

Ngai also points out that this “soft gushing type”[103] of language (as Kolnai puts it) opposes the firmness and constancy privileged in the Western, post-Enlightenment construction of knowledge and meaning, and therefore—although generally a source of warm and fuzzy feelings—may elicit the moral disgust from those whose appreciation of art and culture operates within a phallogocentric framework.[104] In this sense, the aww-factor of cuteness and the yuck-factor of disgust share a prelinguistic move, whose bodily, subsemiotic effect on audiences results in their often being associated with inferior cultural positions. In pop culture, “pure” disgust tends to be overridden by the scary, the grotesque, or the ugly, namely in the horror genre (e.g., in films like Gremlins, 1984, and Child’s Play, 1988, staring the Chucky doll). I find the newborn Alien of Alien Resurrection (1997) to be an excellent example of “purer” disgusting cute. The Newborn is a human/xenomorph hybrid in which the alien is cutified with kinderschema. Its big dewy eyes and snub nose add an aww-factor to the film’s emotional narrative, as Ripley 8 is forced to destroy a creature who recognizes her as their mother, while maintaining the yuck-factor in full force. [Figure 22a, b] The visceral sequence of live birth from a xenomorphic womb and the fact that the Newborn had hermaphrodite genitalia (removed in post-production for being too shocking[105]) heightens the disgust attached to the baby alien.

In the end, all these categorical declinations of cuteness and negativity amount to unsettling or “bad encounters”[106] with works of art or pop culture in which the cute plays a significant role in shaping our thoughts, impressions, and feelings. As stated before, my encyclopedia focuses on the aesthetics of kawaii because it offers the most advantageous site for exploring the dark and antagonistic qualities instilled in or aroused by cute objects. In part, this is a result of the kawaii, as an aesthetic of consumption or consumer aesthetics, being particularly entangled with Japan “as an improper nation-state.” As anthropologist Marilyn Ivy puts it, Japan’s “self-identification… with economic prosperity alone (and the identification by national others of Japan with that prosperity) is perhaps unprecedented,”[107] plunging the country into a state of (self-) abjection once it hit a wall of economic stagnation. Other aspects, such as gender roles and the strength of Japan’s comics and animation industry, likewise factor into the uniqueness of Japanese cute. For this reason, I will expand on the history of the kawaii, from its etymology to its roots in post-war and postmodern Japan.

The setting of kawaii

etymology, history, culture

The kawaii today is present in a broad range of cultural commodities, not just Japanese comics and animation. For instance, aidoru and tarento (Japanese singers and television entertainers), purikura (photos with cute filters and stamps), kyaraben (meals arranged to look like cute characters), high fashion and street fashion like lolita and decora, videogames from Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog to classic visual novels like Clannad, and even in the work of videogame music by composers like Nintendo’s Kondo Koji, known for the iconic Super Mario Bros theme. [Video 3] In this section, I will address the roots of the word kawaii in Japan and the historical events that shaped the emergence of Japanese cute culture in the postwar decades, as well as the context of Japanese postmodernism, the Superflat art movement, and Cool Japan in the 2000s.

Like the “cute,” the kawaii carries a similar etymological ambiguity. Despite the phonological resemblance to the Chinese word kě'ài (可愛, “lovable”), the adjective kawaii (かわいい) is a modern form of kawayui (かわゆい), which in turn derives from the archaic Japanese expression kao hayushi (顔映し) or kawayushi, meaning “red-faced,” in the sense of embarrassed or guilty of conscience.[108] The term first appeared in late Heian sources like Konjaku Monogatari, an anonymous anthology of Buddhist and secular tales collected in the early twelfth century, and early eleventh century Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) by Murasaki Shikibu. In these texts, the word is used to describe a sentiment of empathy and pity,[109] which is still observable today in the adjective kawaisōna, with the same root as kawaii, meaning “poor,” “pitiable,” “pathetic,” or “pitiful.”

During the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), the meaning of the kawaii shifted to describe “animals and persons of a lesser standing, with an emphasis on their helpless state,”[110] growing a gendered association with women who fit the neo‑Confucian ideals of demureness and obedience.[111] The words kawayuishi and kawayui were printed in dictionaries from the Taishō period (1912-26) to the end of World War II,[112] but it was not until the 1970s that kawaii gained its contemporary meaning. Shiokawa Kanako argues that this shift coincides with the transformation of kawaii from a closed concept applicable to a small number of things, to an umbrella term that “soon… achieved today’s status of a very useful, pleasantly positive, but strangely nondescript expression.”[113] Today, other Japanese words whose meanings orbit around the kawaii include sunao (“obedient,” “meek,” “docile,” “honest,” “frank”), enryogachi (“shy,” “reserved”), kodomoppoi (“childish,” “childlike,” “immature,” “infantile”), mujaki (“innocence,” “simple-minded”), or musenkinin (“irresponsible”). On the contrary, terms such as kibishii (“severe,” “strict,” “rigid,” “harsh,” “though”), kitsui (“rigid,” “sharp”), or nikui (“hateful,” “poor‑looking,” “detestable”) serve as antonyms of kawaii.

Scholars like Joshua Dale contest whether the word kawaii, today, retains any negativity beyond this “pleasantly positive” ring. Dale argues that while “The modern kawaii comes from the word for pitiable (kawaisō)… at present the word has no negative connotations.”[114] Still, Kinsella’s research on cute culture in the 1980s and 1990s Japan makes a strong case that the “cute and pitiful were often the same thing,” suggesting that “a sense of weakness and disability—which is a part of childishness—was a very important constituent of the cute aesthetic.”[115] On a similar note, in the 2000s, Miura Jun, a cultural critic and illustrator who introduced the term yuru kyara for Japanese local mascots with unsophisticated designs, stated that these characters display “a sense of instability that makes them all the more lovable, and one’s heart feels healed just by looking at them.”[116] [Figure 23] For Miura, then, the mascots’ “internal instability”[117] i.e., their weakness both in terms of artistry (of design) and the soundness of construction (of the 3D costumes), intensifies their cuteness. Additionally, the fact that, in everyday life, kawaii is in the eye of the beholder, results in it being used to challenge the boundaries of the social (and antisocial), as in the case of Japanese high school students surprising their teacher by describing a drawing of a girl impaled on a merry-go-round as “cute.”[118] It seems that, at least in some instances, contemporary kawaii does maintain a nuance of pity, helplessness, and embarrassment, distinct from the manipulation in “cute,” and the term’s flexibility makes it is readily applicable to the aesthetics of negativity.

The pervasiveness of cute culture and aesthetics in Japan is often linked to the country’s “long postwar.”[119] As historian Harry Harootunian puts it, “what lasted a few years as military occupation became the trope of lasting experience Japanese have lived for a half-century.”[120] Artist Murakami Takashi, who masterminded the postmodern art movement Superflat, has advocated this discourse on the kawaii as a symptom of “cultural schizophrenia,”[121] the manifestation of repressed feelings of emasculation and infantilization resulting from Japan’s passage from colonizer to colonized at the end of World War II. His Little Boy (2005) group exhibition and book manifesto cemented this connection with a pun on the image of a child and the code name of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima.

While Portuguese missionaries were the first Europeans to arrive on Japanese shores in 1543, it was not until Commodore Matthew Perry’s expeditions of 1852–53 and 1854 that Japan established diplomatic relations with Western countries, after 220 years of sakoku (“closed country”) isolationism enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate.[122] The end of this policy of national isolation brought about vast political and social changes inspired by Western models during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and continued throughout the Taishō Democracy (1912–26), a period which spanned the time before and after World War I. In turn, Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, became the symbol of a historical moment in which, in the eyes of the Japanese, “the West—which essentially meant the United States—was extraordinarily rich and powerful, and Japan was incredibly weak and vulnerable.”[123] [Video 4] The 1951 congressional hearings of Douglas MacArthur, the American general who led Japan’s military occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1952, crystallized this inferiority complex for posterity when he declared that Japan was “like a boy of twelve” who stumbled into war somewhat inadvertently.[124] As argued by historian John Dower,

In the wake of World War II, Japan entered a period of kyodatsu (“exhaustion,” “despondency”), immortalized in Takahata Isao’s 1988 anti-war anime feature film Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), in which the task of physical survival was seemingly impossible. [Figure 24] This hurdle was overcome with distinction by the Japanese economic miracle from the post-war era to the end of the Cold War, in which the country achieved unprecedented levels of economic growth and material prosperity. The world fair held in Osaka in 1970, with the motto “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” symbolized by Okamoto Tarō’s building-sculpture Taiyō no Tō (Tower of the Sun), encapsulated this period’s celebratory mood. [Figure 25] Nevertheless, a “politically depressed position”[126] gradually set in. The 1973 oil crisis and the recessions of the second half of the 1980s culminated in the Tokyo stock market crash in 1987, and the bubble burst in 1991. The “lost decade” (ushinawareta jūnen) of the 1990s exposed the hefty social and environmental costs of Japan’s economic growth: air and soil pollution, the karōshi (“death by overwork”) epidemic,[127] corruption and fraud, child prostitution, rising suicide rates, among others.[128] Over the second half of the 1990s, the Tokyo subway sarin attack by Aum Shinrikyo—a doomsday cult that was popular among university students for its use of anime and pop imagery [Figure 26a, b]—the Kobe earthquake in 1995, and the Tokaimura nuclear accidents of 1999 aggravated the atmosphere of precarity as Japan entered into the new millennium.

This postwar political depression can be traced back, for instance, to the sense of disappointment at the civil and student uprisings of the 1960s, which failed to block the United States-Japan Security Treaty, reform the universities or produce a lasting political movement.[129] [Figure 27] Instead, the riots strayed toward violent internal conflicts among the Japanese New Left (a period known as uchi-geba, “inner violence”), followed by a surge of left-wing terrorism in the late 1970s.[130] These groups’ radicalism and antisocial behavior prompted a general retreat from activism, as students became more concerned with grades and practical matters like impressing prospective employers.[131] In art, too, avant-garde collectives like Gutaï, Kyushu-ha, Neo-Dada Organizers, Zero Jigen, Hi Red Center, or the Expo ’70 Destruction Co-struggle Group, that rebelled against the Japanese art establishment and traditional master-disciple relations, captured the Japanese public imagination with their scandalous performances but were interpreted as a part of the eccentric lifestyle of new generations, more than bona fide artistic actions.[132] [Figure 28]

The 1970s shirake sedai, or “spoilt generation,” perceived to be apathetic about social issues, was followed by the shinjinrui (“new humanity”) in the 1980s, a cohort of young people “feted and feared for their misplaced, though voracious, consumer appetites.”[133] Of particular importance at this time was the generational epithet “moratorium people” (moratoriaum ningen), coined by Okonogi Keigo in 1978 to characterize these apathetic and consumerist youths who refused to grow up and enter the world of adults. [Figure 29] According to Kinsella, the moratorium people embodied the contradiction between the new ideas and sensibilities of post-war generations on love, sexuality, friendship, freedom, and happiness, and their lives still organized in terms of hierarchy, authority, and social obligation (in Japanese, giri).[134] This contradiction was especially pronounced for young women, relegated to secretarial duties and expected to become “professional wives” and mothers supporting their overworked husbands and children.[135] In this sense, the younger Japanese generations did not fully enjoy the civic rights acquired during the Occupation, translating into a mistrust felt by young adults in the face of society, beginning with the adoption of children’s culture, like manga, by college students in the 1960s, as a rebellion against traditional Japanese values.[136] Even today, the idea that Japan’s youth fails at “adulting” underlines panics related to NEETs (“Not in Education, Employment, or Training”), hikikomori shut-ins, otaku nerds, enjo-kōsai school girls into “compensated dating” (going on dates with older men in exchange for money and gifts), parasite singles (unmarried career women who live with their parents throughout their 30s and 40s), and herbivore men (with no interest in sex or relationships), who often emerge as scapegoats for the country’s demographic crises.

Ironically, while the Japanese society at large condemns the “moratorium people,” in the eyes of the world, Japan has become “one nation under cute.”[137] From the 1970s onwards, kawaii culture rose to unprecedented heights, transforming into “a living entity that pervades everything.”[138] From the grassroots emergence of maru-moji (“round letters”) cute handwriting among school girls[139] [Figure 30] to the booming “fancy goods” industry, epitomized by the launch of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty in 1975.[140] [Figure 31] From the stratosphere of pop stars like Matsuda Seiko, [Figure 32] the “eternal idol,” or the likes of AKB48, [Figure 33] Hatsune Miku, or Babymetal, to everyday consumer behavior, like eating ice cream and sweets, or the making of kyaraben lunch boxes, arranged to look like cute characters by dedicated homemakers [Figure 34]. The kawaii is used by subcultures rebelling against the establishment, [Figure 35] and by the establishment itself—the government, the police, the military, and all sorts of private and public institutions, which employ stylized animal mascots or cute anime girls as a tool for strategic communication with the public. [Figures 36 & 37]  In the 2010s, even the “moratorium people” themselves have been cutified in a new wave of beloved characters from companies like Sanrio and the San-X, in kawaii mascots for the millennial generation like the lethargic, genderless egg yolk Gudetama (Sanrio, 2013) or the OL (“office lady”) red panda Aggressive Retsuko, an accountant in here mid-twenties who vents her deep-seated labor frustrations by singing death metal in karaoke at night (Sanrio, 2015). [Videos 5 & 6]

Ultimately, the dissemination of kawaii reacts against the “tremendous tension”[141] of interpersonal relationships in Japan, resulting from the Confucian public sphere and collective capitalism where “relative status differences define nearly all social interactions.”[142] The Japanese language itself reflects this: verbal tenses, personal pronouns, nouns, and adjectives have specific endings applied according to superior/inferior relations, and the list of honorifics is long (-san, -chan, -kun, and -sama are some examples). According to Kinsella, “This underlying ideology is another reason why rebellion against society in Japanese youth culture has developed into a rebellion against adulthood”; it also explains why “intellectuals, ascetics and artistic outsiders from Japanese society have long carried the stigma of infantilism, and some have possibly even played up to the image of being childlike eccentrics”[143] (e.g., Murakami Takashi—more on this shortly). Contrary to the Western tradition where adulthood equals emancipation, in Japan “maturity is commonly considered as the ability to cooperate well in a group, to accept compromises, to fulfill obligations to parents, employers, and so on, and carry out social responsibilities.”[144] This aspect has shaped kawaii culture at large, as an “indolent little rebellion rather than a conscious, aggressive and sexually provocative rebellion of the sort that has been typical of western youth culture.”[145] Although Western countercultures have also incorporated what Bradon LaBelle calls “weak-strength,”[146] for instance, in Flower Power and other movements of passive resistance, kawaii culture rarely takes on the form of a counterculture sensu stricto, i.e., it may gnaw at prevailing social norms, but it is seldom formulated, openly, as anti-establishment.

Japanese “postmodernism” is a contested site, so much so that, according to Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, “to confuse Japan’s non-modernity with the West’s ‘postmodernism’ is perhaps a serious error.”[147] Japanese postmodernism entails not just the “local expressions of postmodern and global transformations of late capitalist society that have developed over decades”[148] but an historical and geographic displacement (e.g., the Middle and the Far East are only so in relation to Western countries), in which the West becomes the telos of non-Westerners, who can only ever be its imitator.[149] Ironically, even as the authenticity of Japan’s modernity and postmodernity came under scrutiny, Japan seemed to fulfill its destiny as the place where (Western) history came to an end.[150] For instance, in a footnote to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1968), philosopher Alexandre Kojève claimed that Japan is a “totally formalized” society whose encounter with the West will “lead not to a rebarbarization of the Japanese but to a ‘Japanization’ of the Westerners”[151]; while Roland Barthes famously called Japan L'empire des signes (Empire of Signs) in 1970. [Figure 38] The Japanese themselves have been complicit with the exoticization and commodification of Japaneseness,[152] not least postmodern Japaneseness, or the Japaneseness of the postmodern. Murakami Takashi, too, taps into such portrayals of depthless Japan by Western philosophers in “The Super Flat Manifesto,” published in 2000, which opens with the promise-threat that “The world of the future might be like Japan is today—super flat.”[153] [Figure 39] In such discourses, like in the techno-orientalist dystopias of sci-fi films such as Blade Runner (1984), Japan occupies, as Marilyn Ivy puts it, “an almost comforting figure of danger and promise,”[154] a thrilling menace to Western reason and individualism.  

In 1980s Japan, “postmodernism” itself became a new kind of informational commodity, fuelled by the boom of “new academicians” or “postacademicians” like Asada Akira, author of Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics (Kōzō to chikara: Kigō-ron o koete, 1983)—an elaborate investigation on European postmodern and post-structuralist philosophy which became an overnight bestseller in Japan. [155] [Figure 40] Postmodernism offered an opportunity to celebrate Japan’s “triumph over modernity and over history itself,”[156] intersecting with the discourses of nihonjinron, i.e., books written by Japanese authors for Japanese audiences on the uniqueness of Japanese identity. As Yoda Tomiko puts it,

In the recessionary 1990s, the celebration of Japanese postmodernism deflated as new critics, like Miyadai Shinji, Ōtsuka Eiji, and Azuma Hiroki, turned their attention to Japanese subcultures, like the otaku. [Figure 41] Asada and other new academicians criticized them for what, in their view, was a return to Japanese parochialism opposed to cosmopolitan postmodernity.[158] For Asada, “Alphabetized and contracted, J is Japan as a site if the trashy pop culture of otaku, video games and animations.”[159] But as Murakami goes to great lengths to explain in his 2000 book Superflat, in late-modern Japan, there is a more fluid relationship between art and entertainment  when compared to European and American concepts of “high culture.”[160] Respected artists, like Okamoto Tarō or cult director Kitano Takeshi, have doubled as televisions entertainers—a path that Murakami also pursued with various appearances in game shows[161] and the clownish nature of his public presence, which is often consistent with the trope of the infantilized intellectual (mentioned in the previous section). [Figure 42] Likewise, in the 1980s press, Asada and other “new academicians” became part of a broader star system of young Japanese creatives, in which their hard-line theoretical work did not differ fundamentally from that of advertisers like Itoi Shigesato.[162] The fact that it is not uncommon for department stores like PARCO to host prestigious art shows further contributes to this blurring of art and mass culture in Japan[163]; in fact, the first Superflat exhibition was held at Parco Gallery in Tokyo, in 2000.

In Superflat, Murakami also underlines that, in Japan, “art” and “craft” did not exist as discrete categories until the late ninetieth century. Therefore, the slippery definition of “art” dates back to the Meiji period and “the difficulties that were experienced in transplanting the (Western) concept of art into Japan, including the classification, training and exhibition of art, without the European post-Romantic concept of individual subjectivity and the ideology of original expression.”[164] Because Japanese words like geijutsu (芸術, emphasizing “technique” or “craft”) or bijutsu (美術, emphasizing “beauty”) failed to account for the Western concept of avant-garde, this resulted, as Murakami puts it, in “the frustrating ‘non-art’ status that much of Japanese art bears, both within, and outside of the country.”[165] To be sure, not only did the “traditional” art world in Japan (art schools, galleries, art markets, museums) not compare to the country’s big, well-oiled entertainment industry,[166] but Japanese comics and animation proved capable of producing some of the most innovative and influential artworks, both domestically and on a global scale. Likewise, radical ideas continued to pop up in unlikely places, such as the subcultures of cuteness, girlishness, amateurs, or pornography, that captured the interest and admiration of international audiences.

Moreover, the rise of Superflat in the contemporary art scene during the 2000s fuelled and was fuelled by Cool Japan, a governmental policy to promote Japan’s “indigenous” pop culture abroad, prompted by the 2002 article “Japan’s Gross National Cool” by American journalist Douglas McGray—even if Murakami himself has been critical of it.[167] Artists affiliated with Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki art production company, like Mr., Takano Aya, Aoshima Chiho, Ban Chinatsu, or Kunikata Mahomi, and those associated with the broader Neo-pop movement, like Nara Yoshitomo, Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, Odani Motohiko, Kudo Makiko, Aoki Ryoko, Murata Yuko, Tabaimo, Yanobe Kenji,  or Ando Hiro, among many others, put anime, manga, and kawaii in the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums. [Figures 43 & 44] As sociologist Adrian Favell points out, Superflat practically became synonymous with Japanese postmodern art, muffling a variety of other styles, trends, and concepts of artists like Yanagi Yukinori, Nakamura Masato, and Sone Yukata, or those belonging to The Group 1965 (Shōwa 40 nen kai), like Ozawa Tsuyoshi, Matsukage Hiroyuki, Kinoshita Parco, Tosa Masamichi, or American-Brazilian Oscar Oiwa of Japanese descent.[168] [Figures 45 & 46] Even pioneering Japanese pop artists, like Ohtake Shinro, were to some extent overlooked, but have begun surfacing as Superflat’s popularity wears off in the Western art world, if not in the global art market.[169] Ohtake, for instance, was featured in the dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and the Venice Biennale in 2013. [Figure 47a, b]

In the 2000s, kawaii became a vital cog in the Cool Japan machine, leading to what anthropologist Christine Yano has coined the term “pink globalization” to address the “spread of kawaii (cute) goods and related media from primarily Japan throughout much of the industrial world,”[170] for instance, cute icons like Hello Kitty or Sailor Moon. In 2009, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs even began to appoint kawaii ambassadors, tasked with publicizing Japan’s culture of cuteness around the world, such as lolita fashion model Aoki Misako or creepy-cute aidoru Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.[171] [Figure 48] While, in the 1990s, Japanization was mostly framed within a discourse of hybridism, indigenization, or domestication of foreign culture—one in which, as Ivy puts it, “The image of Japan as the great assimilator arises to explain away any epistemological snags or historical confusions”[172]—the Cool Japan trend signals a new project of cultural re-nationalization.[173] According to media theorist Iwabuchi Kōichi, then, the rise in the twenty-first century of manga, anime, Japanese videogames, and kawaii culture to the status of soft powers, capable of rivaling the hegemony of American culture, aligns with the tenets of “glocalization” and an “inter-nationalist” (instead of genuinely international) cultural diplomacy.[174]

Cuteness and manga

Cuteness in Japanese comics and animation has evolved across different demographics and in close relation—sometimes, opposition—to orbiting concepts such as kirei (“pretty”), utsukushii (“beautiful”), jojō (“lyricism”), tanbi (“aesthetics”), or even “undesirable” traits like creepy, ugly, and grotesque, among others. The kawaii permeates both lyrical girls’ comics and action-packed boys’ comics, it seeps into the realm of erotic and pornographic manga, like boys’ love and lolicon, and blends seamlessly with the imagery of horror and psychedelia. Beloved creepy-cute characters from the 1960s, like Mizuki Shigeru’s Kitarō or Umezu Kazuo’s Cat Eyed Boy, Hino Hideshi’s Hell Baby (Gaki Jigoku, 1984), or girls’ manga like Mizuno Junko’s Pure Trance (1996-98), [Figure 49] attest to the vitality of such encounters. In this section, I present an overview of the pivotal role of Japanese comics and animation in the creation, development, and dissemination of kawaii cultures and aesthetics, from its origins in the Interwar period throughout the 2000s.

While kawaii culture boomed in the 1970s, its emergence can be traced back much earlier, to the beginning of the twentieth century and the worldwide rise of children’s consumer culture and entertainment. Norakuro (1931–81), Bōken Dankichi (1933–39), or Tank Tankuro (1934), were popular comic strips or episodic manga featuring human and non-human characters (a dog, a boy, and a robot, respectively) published in boys’ magazines like Shōnen Club during the interwar era. [Figure 50] Much like funny animals in Western children’s books (e.g., The Wind in the Willows), newspaper comic strips (e.g., Krazy Kat), and animated cartoons (e.g., Silly Symphony, Talkartoons, Looney Tunes, or Merrie Melodies), these relied on humor and cute aesthetics to entertain modern adults and children alike. In Japan, later works such as Kasei Tanken (“Expedition to Mars,” 1940), employed cuteness in longer, more sophisticated narratives, reminiscent of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, [Figure 51] but for the most part, manga remained targeted at children until the 1950s. Matsumoto Katsuji, a late addition to the manga history canon whose work has been rediscovered in two important exhibitions at the Yayoi Museum in Tokyo, in 2006 and 2014,[175] was one of the essential kawaii pioneers. He published comics and illustrations in girls’ magazines—including the ground-breaking shōjo manga Nazo no Clover (“Mysterious Clover,” 1934) [Figure 52a, b]—until he retired in 1955 to illustrate children's fiction, and founded a company specializing in baby goods, that created the widely popular kawaii characters Haamu and Monii.[176] [Figure 53]

Matsumoto’s most popular manga, Kurukuru Kurumi-chan, serialized in the girl’s magazine Shōjo no Tomo (“Girl’s Friend”) from 1938 to 1940, followed the domestic exploits of a spunky little girl called Kurumi (“walnut”). [Figure 54] Kurumi was influenced by the “cute kids”[177] popularized by American and British illustrators of children’s and women’s books, magazines, and ephemera in the early 1900s: Grace Drayton’s Campbell Soup Kids and Dolly Dimples, Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie [Figure 55]—which became widely counterfeited in Japan in the 1920s—and Mabel Lucie Attwell.[178] Kurumi’s formal attributes changed drastically over the decades,[179] from a “roughly four heads tall” preadolescent girl in the manga’s early episodes to “an extremely stylized character no more than two heads high, and of unknown age”[180] by the 1950s. [Figure 56] Alongside other artistic, social, and historical contexts underlying the shift, Kurumi’s evolution may reflect the “iconic, stylized, kyara-like look”[181] that emerged after World War II, for instance, in characters like the popular Tetsuwan Atomu (or Astro Boy, in the English translation).

Matsumoto impacted the development of Japanese cuteness, especially where his comics diverged from the style of jojō-ga (“lyrical drawing”) developed by prominent modern painters and designers like Takehisa Yumeji, [Figure 57] Nakahara Jun'ichi, [Figure 58] or Kashō Takabatake, that dominated Japanese girls’ and women’s magazine covers and illustrations during the interwar era.[182] Unlike the lively characters in Matsumoto’s manga,[183] jojō-ga was lyrical and romantic, decadent and sentimental, with a taste for affluent beauties with big, melancholic eyes.[184] These “Yumeji beauties” (as they became known, after Takehisa Yumeji’s art) became the archetype for the slender heroines of post-war shōjo manga. Nakahara, in particular, “depicted girls with big wet eyes and long eyelashes as opposed to the traditional hikime-kagibana concept of facial beauty,”[185] which featured slit eyes and hook noses (present, for instance, in Edo-period woodblock prints and paintings). As manga artist Hanamura Eiko puts it, Nakahara’s Westernized girl characters, resulting from a cocktail of influences from global and domestic sources including art deco, silent film-era Hollywood actresses, and the Japanese all-female musical theater troupe Takarazuka Revue, introduced cuteness to an element of “no-nationality… as it wasn’t clear which country they were from.”[186]

Jojō-ga artists also illustrated Class S literature, i.e., stories about romantic friendships between girls, like Yoshiya Nobuko’s Hana Monogatari (“Tales of Flowers,” 1916-1924) or Kawabata Yasunari and Nakazato Tsuneko’s Otome no Minato (“Port of Maidens,” 1938).[187] Takahashi Macoto continued the jojō-ga tradition in the post-war, mostly in illustrations and covers,[188] but also in shōjo manga like Sakura Namiki (“Rows of Cherry Trees,” 1957) and Tokyo-Paris (1959), which introduced innovative panel and page layouts oriented towards the expression of feelings and atmospheres.[189] [Figure 59] Takahashi’s drawings of starry-eyed foreign princesses were influential in the creation of lolita fashion,[190] and have enjoyed continued popularity among its practitioners.[191] [Figure 60] Takahashi, along with female authors like Nishitani Yoshiko (Mary Lou, 1965), Hanamura Eiko (Kiri no Naka no Shōjo, “Girl in the Fog,” 1968), Hideko Mizuno (Fire!, 1969–1971, the first girls’ manga with a male protagonist and a sex scene), and Maki Miyako—who also created Japan’s famous Barbie-like doll, Licca-chan, in 1967 [Figure 61]—were instrumental in developing shōjo manga visually, narratively, and thematically throughout the 1960s. Drawing from Masubuchi Sōichi’s Kawaii Shokogun (“Cute Syndrome,” 1994), Shiokawa Kanako explains that:

Shiokawa also notes the “nearly complete avoidance of secondary sexual features, especially breasts”[193] during this period, that kept heroines in safe girl‑child territory and assured they were cute girls instead of beautiful, grown-up women.

In the postwar period, kodomo manga (children’s comics) continued to prosper, with characters in the tradition of interwar children’s mascots like Norakuro and Tank Tankuro. Here, the unavoidable reference is Tezuka Osamu (1928-89), the author whose centrality to the postwar manga and anime canon and industry earned him the monikers “father of manga,” “god of manga,” or “the Walt Disney of Japan.”[198] Tezuka is the author of cute characters which have raised to the status of Japanese national mascots, such as Leo and Tetsuwan Atomu—known, in the West, as Kimba the White Lion and Astro Boy, respectively, a lion cub and a boy robot. The latter was also the first anime television series, produced by Tezuka’s animation studio Mushi Production and aired from 1963 to 1966. [Figure 62] Although Tezuka dabbled in shōjo manga with Ribbon no Kishi (Princess Knight, 1953-56), a fantasy adventure following in the footsteps of Nazo no Clover’s tomboy (otenba) heroine,  Tezuka’s main contribution to kawaii culture was his borrowing of  Disneyesque cuteness to create kyara, i.e., a very stylized character, often with cute features and proportions.[199] As noted by scholar Marco Pellitteri, although Tezukian kyara were kawaii, they were often “involved in stories where their substance is not abstract but solid, vulnerable, and at times mortal.”[200] However, in the case of later kyara that took inspiration from Tezuka, like the beloved robotic cat Doraemon, [Figure 63], the body of the cute mascot typically becomes “dehumanized and superhumanized, abstract and inanimate,”[201] and thus no longer subject to vulnerability and death.

In the 1970s, authors like Igarashi Yumiko (Candy Candy, 1975-79) or Yamato Waki (Haikara-san ga Tōru, 1975-77, Asakiyumemishi, 1979) helped revitalize the shōjo demographic with strong female leads, while sticking to traditional themes (e.g., heart-warming stories about orphans). [Figure 62] Moreover, the 1970s cemented an influential trope that contrasted ordinary cute heroines with the more mature‑looking, utsukushii (“beautiful”) nemesis. Shiokawa exemplifies the cute vs. beauty trope, for instance, by comparing Marie Antoinette, the protagonist of Ikeda Ryoko’s manga hit Versailles no Bara (The Rose of Versailles, 1972-73), with her nemesis, Madame Du Barry. As she puts it,

Ikeda Ryoko was part of the Year 24 Group (Nijūyo-nen Gumi), a group of female manga artists that revolutionized the shōjo genre in the 1970s. Along with Ikeda, authors such as Hagio Moto (Thomas no Shinzō, The Heart of Thomas, 1974-75), Takemiya Keiko (Kaze to Ki no Uta, “Ballad of the Wind and the Trees,” 1976-84), and Aoike Yasuko’s Eroica Yori Ai wo Komete (From Eroica With Love, 1976-2012) transformed Japanese girls’ comics and its image with the public and the critics.[195] The Year 24 Group breathed a new depth and expanded the scope of what cuteness can express. Ikeda’s Versailles no Bara, for instance, experimented with gender and class roles and introduced a political flavor into the love narrative, namely, with the iconic character of Lady Oscar, an androgynous female lead who joins the French Revolution. [Figure 63] In turn, Hagio and Takemiya pioneered the shōnen-ai genre in manga with stories about same-sex love between bishōnen, i.e., doe-eyed “pretty boys” with angelic faces and androgynous bodies. Thomas no Shinzō and Kaze to Ki no Uta are both dark, existential stories set in “exotic,” decidedly non-Japanese backgrounds, namely, nineteenth-century European Catholic boarding schools, dealing with difficult topics like suicide, sexual abuse, racism, homophobia, and pedophilia. [Figures 64 & 65]

In the 1980s, the majority of bishōnen characters morphed from Hagio and Takemiya’s genderless cherubs to incorporate more masculine features, already found in characters like Oscar and Andre from Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles or Dorian and Klaus from Aoike’s From Eroica with Love. Bishōnen characters also became associated with the rise of the dōjinshi (“self-published” or “niche” magazines) or amateur manga movement and girls’ comics magazines like June, that published tanbi (“aesthetic”) gay erotica “fusing together beauty, romance, and eroticism, along with a dash of decadence.”[196] In amateur manga, female fans began to self-publish pornographic parodies of their favorite (male-oriented) shows, such as Captain Tsubasa, Uchū Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato), or Saint Seiya, where they “liked to do silly things with manly male characters, like putting them in ballet tunics or giving them kitty ears,” or even “put the manly males in bed together.”[197] The self-deprecating term yaoi—an acronym of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, meaning “no climax, no point, no meaning”—emerged to describe these plotless gay dramedies or over-the-top melodramas. Yaoi characters from the 1980s and 1990s were often bishōnen with elongated faces, pointy chins, wide and sparkly rectangular eyes, flowy hair, and slender bodies with long legs and well-developed torsos. In Ozaki Minami’s iconic Zetsuai 1989 (1989-91), that started as a Captain Tsubasa fanzine before transitioning to commercial publication, the characters are so stylized that at times they look more like alien creatures than men. [Figure 66]

While tanbi was never entirely divorced from kawaii, the late 1990s and 2000s brought back a cuter sensibility to boys’ love or BL (the dominant term for this genre today). Popular series like Nakamura Shungiku’s Junjō Romantica (Pure Romance, 2003-present) or Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi (“The World's Greatest First Love,” 2006-present) retain tanbi elements but are populated with chibi “cute caricatures,” adorable animal mascots, round-eyed blushing boys, and lots of pink in covers and illustrations. [Figure 67] Contemporary bishōnen designs, both in yaoi and “regular” (heterosexual) shōjo manga like Fruits Basket (1998-2006) or Ōran Kōkō Host Club (Ouran High School Host Club, 2002-10), tend to have slighter body frames, larger heads with delicate jawlines and necks, and bigger eyes than the majority of their 1980s and early 1990s predecessors (e.g. Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask or Mars’ Rei Kashino). Anime also contributed to the cutification of characters, as television adaptations of manga tended to make characters rounder and more standardized (see, for instance, the difference between the Sailor Moon manga and its 1990s anime adaptation). More recent titles like Free! or Yuri!!! on Ice draw on this “cute continuum” to deliver sports anime (swimming and figure skating, respectively) catering to female audiences with “passionate friendships” between male protagonists and fanservice for women. [Figure 68]

Cuteness played an equally crucial role in the development of boys’ comics, or shōnen manga. During the 1970s and 1980s, many heroines in shōnen manga morphed into what Japanese psychologist Saitō Tamaki calls the sento bishōjo or “beautiful fighting girl.”[202] This new breed of cute female character was perky with a childlike face, and wore increasingly revealing outfits “that emphasized their smallish but well-developed breasts.”[203] [Figure 69] She was also powerful enough to fight alongside male heroes, or become the protagonist herself. [Figure 70] These characteristics distinguished the sento bishōjo from the virtuous madonnas and passive sidekicks abounding thus far,[204] fluctuating between empowerment and sexual objectification in a challenge to “easy categorization as either (or simply) a feminist or sexist script.”[205] Indeed, one of the most iconic sento bishōjo, appearing in the Daicon IV Opening Animation—a 6-minute anime made for the 1983 Nihon SF Taikai convention in Osaka, by an amateur group that went on to form the influential animation studio Gainax—is a cute girl in a Playboy bunny outfit, who singlehandedly fights an endless array of famous sci-fi and fantasy characters while air surfing in a magical sword. Moreover, the sento bishōjo spread across male and female demographics, from Miyazaki Hayao’s animated feature films (e.g., Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) to magical girl animanga like Takahashi Rumiko’s Urusei Yatsura, Nagai Gō’s Cutie Honey, or Takeuchi Naoko’s Sailor Moon.

The sento bishōjo contributed to the appearance of lolicon during the early 1980s, in specialized comics magazines like Lemon People or Manga Burikko, as well as dōjinshi and home video animations. Lolicon, from “Lolita complex,” is a genre of pornographic manga, anime, or videogames in which underage characters engage in sexual acts, ranging from soft eroticism to violent or “perverse” (hentai) scenarios, often with techno-fetishist elements.[206] [Figure 71] While aimed at a male adult audience, lolicon magazines in the 1980s often featured the work of female shōjo manga artists, male artists mimicking the style of girls’ comics, or other forms of cuteness.[207] In fact, “the first blatantly lolicon work in Japan”[208] was published in 1979 by the “father of lolicon,” Azuma Hideo, in a contribution to the manga fanzine Cybele that featured erotic depictions of kawaii Tezuka-style characters. Other heroines, like Miyazaki’s sento bishōjo or magical girls like Minky Momo, became lolicon icons portrayed by fans in erotic and pornographic amateur manga. As scholar Shigematsu Setsu suggests, in lolicon manga, “it is not the age of the girl that is attractive, but a form of ‘cuteness’ (kawaii‑rashii) that she represents.”[209] In this same vein, Patrick Galbraith argues that lolicon cannot be reduced to a male power fantasy, as its imagery is diverse in terms of style, content, reception, and its place in the broader crossgender flows at play in Japanese comics.[210]

In 1989, the incident of serial killer Miyazaki Tsutomu, the “otaku murderer,” who killed several children, originated a nation-wide obscenity debate that targeted “hazardous comics” and the anime and manga superfans known as otaku (a term roughly equivalent to “nerd” or “geek” in the West). In the early 1990s, the police raided bookstores selling dōjinshi and filled obscenity charges against authors, and large-scale self-publishing events, like the Comic Market (or Comiket)—Japan’s largest fan convention, mostly dedicated to amateur manga—were put under scrutiny by the authorities.[211] While the infatuation with bishōjo characters did not waver and was reignited by the success of series like Shinseiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Tokimeki Memorial,  a new trend in male-oriented manga and anime rose in popularity that remains strong to this day: moé. Moé replaced the explicit sexuality in lolicon with feelings of tenderness and rooting for characters that fit “little sister” (imōto) or “daughter” (musume) types, sometimes round and adorable to the point of blobishness, known as a loli. The origins of moé overlap with the lolicon tradition, wavering between or combing, as Murakami Takashi puts it, “an innocent fantasy” and “distorted sexual desires.”[212] [Figure 72] However, other series within the moé anime and manga genre, like the iconic Yotsuba&! by Azuma Kiyohiko, present wholesome slice of life comedies, in which cuteness is the central affect in sophisticated storytelling and artwork. [Figure 73] For a more in-depth analysis of moé, read the encyclopedia entries “It Girl” and “,” or the paper “She’s Not Your Waifu; She’s an Eldritch Abomination.”

Coda

Feeling Cute, Might Delete Late

i.

A sticky film of protein forms over hot milk—white milk, sweet milk, a signifier of childhood, and baby schema. Kristeva’s words emphasize the minorness of the lactoderm. Harmless, thin, and pitiful. A fragile, volatile surface entangled with the realm of abject phenomeno-poetics, of the primal impulse to spit out and expel the Other in us.

How far can you stretch the cute, until it is nothing but insignificant?

How cute is a nail paring?

ii.         

In its apparent immediacy and “dumbness,” cuteness resists, even repels, the seriousness expected from art and the academia. No matter how much thought one puts into analyzing cute things, there remains an impression of an academic hoax.

(Do we really need a paper on cat videos?)

The expression “Cute Studies” captures this contradiction. Do Cute Studies study cuteness, or are the studies themselves cute? The “cute” before the “studies” adjectivizes less than it classifies.

iii.        

In “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the Abject,” Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh refer to the scatological and “scatterological” impulses in art,[213] the latter suggesting a Bataillean collapse of the structure. Like the formless, the cute is seldom informal. Instead, as Sianne Ngai puts it, it “bears the look of an object not only formed but all too easily de-formed under the pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude towards it.”[214]

My encyclopedia explores how cuteness’s dark side ties in with these de-forming drives. To which one may add—an eschatological drive toward the end of human history. Enantiodromia: the unconscious opposite of the kinderschema is death; and, of beginnings, the end.

iv.        

Cute filth (a), cute others (b), cute outbreaks (c), cute scatters (d). My encyclopedia maps the entanglement of cuteness with,

(a)  Dirty or disgusting matters—from physical pollution to pollutive formations in mediatic milieus;

(b)  Instances in which alterity is rendered cute, including “abject” human others (women, lgbtqia+), abhuman (supernatural, alien, monstrous), and nonhuman entities (animals, robots);

(c)   The collapsing boundaries of the political, legal, institutional, or stylistic—that is, the perceived contagiousness of cute aesthetics;

(d)  The cutification of form and composition, the way that cuteness shapes, and sometimes disrupts, the whole.

v.         

The cute is a valuable, although undervalued, tool for navigating issues of time and scale, critical in topical debates like the Anthropocene—or, as Jen Boyle and Wan-Chao Kao point out, “the study of cuteness, at its heart, is an investigation of the problematics of temporality.”[215]

Cuteness “facilitates a kind of aesthetic time travel backward and forward,”[216] an out-of-jointness in which the Child works as a time-traveling device between the far-off past and the distant future. Our childhood (or even, ancestral) memories are put on a continuum with the discourse of “reproductive futurism,”[217] projecting our species into the future. After all, as Lee Edelman puts it, “the future is kid stuff.”[218] But in the face of our present social, technological, and environmental crises, survival is not a simple thing to do.

Far from removed from reality, the “minor” aesthetic category of cuteness has factored, and continues to factor, into the evolution of humans and nonhumans. For instance, dogs, cats, and other “companion species” have been selectively bred to create cute pets, often with terrible consequences for their health.[219] Other species are killed in favor of cuter ones—like the grey squirrels in England, in favor of the native, and quainter, reds.[220] Studies also suggest that the strong presence of cute animals like giraffes, tigers, elephants, or pandas in popular culture creates a ‘virtual population’ in the public’s mind, “actively contributing to the false perception that these animals are not at risk of extinction, and therefore not in need of conservation.”[221] Moreover, plush toys, used by green organizations to raise awareness for environmental issues, often contain non-biodegradable materials like polyester, undermining their causes.[222]

vi.        

Against this backdrop, the global dissemination of kawaii culture may index a broader “crisis of the future that modern capitalist societies such as Japan know,”[223] suggesting that the West is just catching up to the state of political depression in which Japan has lived for several decades.

The image of Japan’s social order as one of harmony and consensus, “effectively solving the problems of advanced industrial societies through group cooperation,”[224] has translated into—to use Lauren Berlant’s formulation—a form of “cruel optimism.” That is, it has become a “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”[225] The phenomeno‑poetics of kawaii negotiate this complex web of impossible or too possible desires regarding gender, nature, society, and techno-science.  

vii.       

While the kawaii (and the cute in general) is entangled with the systemic violence of capitalism, it does not inevitably submit to it. In “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics” (2010), Marilyn Ivy produces the concept of parapolitics to indicate an alternative form of political engagement which often goes unrecognized but can “produce forms of solidarity resistant to right-wing politics, the justification of war, and neonationalist movements in Japan (and elsewhere).”[226] For Ivy, works like Nara’s, in their refunctioning of the kawaii with an activist sensibility, enact a parapolitics of cuteness that hovers outside the arena of mainstream politics, as an “expressive means to identify… experiences of advanced capitalist everydayness and the mysteries of psychic maturation.”[227]

The “weak-strength” (Bradon LaBelle) of the kawaii, with all its negotiations and contradictions, can potentially resist the subjugation and control of living bodies, human or otherwise, through the joy of connectedness, of losing ourselves in the anarchic (para)politics of play.[228]

viii.      

Tackling with the cute and the kawaii entails a constant reckoning with their ambiguity. Cuteness thrives in the crevices of dialectic oppositions. Man, woman; adult, child; Western, non‑Western; human, nonhuman, sexed, asexual; animate, inanimate; reality, fantasy; art, craft. Sometimes these oppositions are clouded, sometimes reinforced, but always knotty, as cute objects are “both amenable to manipulation by authoritarian structures and available as a tool to critique such institutions.”[229]

Often, cuteness works as an ambiguous image akin to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck illusion, slipping between two ways of reading it that seem to be mutually exclusive but coexist in the same formation: avant-garde or reactionary, subversive or complacent, engaged or escapist and apathetic, capable of destabilizing conservative patriarchal power or aligned with its chauvinist fantasies.

ix.        

As Sianne Ngai suggests, “it is not just that cuteness is an aesthetic oriented toward commodities” but that “something about the commodity form itself already seems permeated by its sentimentality.”[230] The contrived charm of the cute, seen in adorable blobjects and smiling mascots begging us to take them home, wraps us in the warm and fuzzy feelings of self-indulgent tenderness and nostalgia, domesticity and romance.

Here, cuteness is arguably at its darkest: embedded in the industrial-complex, working as an affective apparatus for binding humans to a social and economic order that fails us and the Earth we inhabit.

x.         

Two impulses coexist in contemporary art and pop culture as far as cuteness is concerned. On the one hand, the impulse to wildify the cute. On the other, the desire to cutify the wild and dangerous.

The first takes something that is considered adorable, harmless or otherwise “prosocial” and infuses it with qualities liable to cause shock, disgust, or discomfort. The trends of guro-kawaii, kimo-kawaii, or busu-kawaii, among others, capture this stretching of the limits of the cute to the disturbing ends of antagonism and aversion. The wildification of cuteness ranges from the “soft” creepiness of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Kobitodukan to bloodier incarnations like Happy Tree Friends or Gloomy Bear, or even the sexualization of cuteness in lolicon, guro, and ero-kawaii.

In turn, the cutification of the wild is “connected to domestication in its broadest sense: the taming of the wild and dangerous”[231] found, for instance, in Japanese alternative idols like Babymetal or BiS, that take music genres characterized by violent imagery and mainstream inaccessibility, like metal or punk, and cutify them with the aesthetics of Japanese idol groups (e.g., Babymetal’s “Gimme Chocolate!!” or BiS’s “Idol Is Dead”). Likewise, the Superflat movement seeks to cutify the tropes of Western modernism and postmodernism. In such cases, “cuteness is raising deep-rooted anxieties towards authenticity and originality in art, and the appropriation of negativity by a sanitizing embrace of ‘cute capitalism.’”[232]

Perhaps contrary to expectations, then, the cutification of the wild—epitomized by Murakami Takashi’s cutification of the atomic bomb in Little Boy—often comes off as more unsettling than the wildification of the cute.

xi.        

In Logique de la Sensation (The Logic of Sensation, 1981), Gilles Deleuze writes that Francis Bacon considered himself to be “cerebrally pessimistic” but “nervously optimistic.”[233] The former relates to his figurative side, his painting the horrors of the world; the latter, to his faith in the intensity of life and sensation.

Bacon, of all artists, is decidedly not cute. But there may be something to take home, here, in relation to cute aesthetics. In the realm of the spectacle, the benign cute object evokes the violence inherent to the commodity form; as Ngai puts it, “what we love because it submits to us.”[234] But archaic cuteness, the “natural” cute, manifests the love of life—a shameless enjoyment of pretty colours and cuddly characters, of the fluffy, soothing, and playful. Regardless of how minor these may be with respect to the Western art canon, the aww-factor is a violent enough sensation to bleed through the spectacle, to disarticulate our sense of self and the narrative of our desires—to fall open to play, and insist on a boundless compassion.

This thesis is an “encyclopedia” of essays exploring the links between cuteness and negativity in the contemporary milieu, with a focus on the Japanese cute, known as the kawaii. I present this encyclopedia both on paper, in the form of a Ph.D. dissertation, and online, in the form of the website https://www.heta.moe/, where it comes to its full potential as an interactive, nonlinear work—thus, I suggest “using” the encyclopedia as available online. Because my creative juices as an artist and an academic are fundamentally the same, I regard this encyclopedia as an (ongoing) art project in and of itself. Therefore, my research question is not articulated in the terms traditionally found in Ph.D. dissertations, i.e., there is no overarching problem to be dissected, no cutting its internal parts, believing that totality exists even if it is unattainable. Instead, it is an exercise in hermeneutics, applying a quasi-Talmudic method of study that takes a core prompt or statement (“kawaii and negativity”) and explores its declensions of content, form, expression, and association. Each entry in the encyclopedia comes with its own set of hypothesis and deductions, weaving an intricate meaning-making fabric in which, ideally, each piece sheds light on the others.

Apart from my artist statement in Part III, this thesis does not take a descriptive or explanatory approach to my artworks but seeks to develop their aesthetic principles and thought processes (e.g., kawaii or anime and manga, the assemblage) through the medium of writing. The choice of form, structure, and themes captures the central idea that my artworks and writings world-build an authorial universe together with or alongside each other. If there is an overarching question, then, it should be: what can a Ph.D. dissertation do, what and how can it perform, to reflect my artistic identity? That is, idiosyncratic and constantly changing, sometimes obscure—hopefully—capable of the unexpected; a bit skittish, nervy. The answer, or one possible answer, or the answer I came up with, is that it can serve as a stimulus to encourage the creative exploration of everyday objects, to engage with that which enters my mind and my eyes, now and in the future. A reason to focus my attention (for a short time), and to play with ideas as one does with a ball of string, twisting and untangling. Here, the cute is on my side: as “a dumb aesthetic”[1] indexing everything that academic discourse (traditionally) is not, cuteness can conduct certain “acts of sabotage against the academic world and the spirit of system.”[2] Tackling the cute as an aesthetic category suggests, even demands, a deviation from traditional dissertation models, valuing attributes opposed to forms of phallogocentrism, e.g., the childish, the small, the playful, the fragmented, the sentimental, or the feminine.

In other words, I want my Ph.D. dissertation to be like a playing partner. Instead of a single question and a single text, I present a cluster of short entries relating to kawaii phenomeno-poetics, i.e., one’s experience of the affective, imaginative, and aesthetic meanings exuding from cute objects. I have divided this document into three parts: “Part I – Encyclopedia,” “Part 2 – Three Papers,” and “Part III – Artist’s Statement.” Part I consists of twenty-two shorter entries of 2500 to 4000 words. In entries such as “Absolute Boyfriend,” “Fairies,” or “END, THE” I focus on a single work—respectively, a manga by Watase Yū, the animated television series Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, and Shibuya Keiichiro’s video opera THE END—by delving into their thematic, conceptual, and aesthetic substance. Other entries, like “Gesamptcutewerk,” “Pastel Turn,” or “Zombieflat” lack a central object, instead weaving an analysis of various cultural artifacts, connected by an underlying motif, e.g., the “total work of art,” “pastel colors,” and “undeadness.” All the entries in Part I have in common a freer, more speculative discourse, considering a broad range of objects including pop-cultural artifacts like manga, anime, or videogames, but also painting, sculpture, video art, performance, and so on.[3]

Part II follows the “three papers” Ph.D. thesis format, a more recent alternative to the traditional dissertation, with a decentralized structure and shorter length. Contrary to the encyclopedia entries in Part I, these papers have about 8000 words and follow the proper format of a humanities research paper, with an abstract, introduction, discussion, and fewer pictures. The three papers presented in this part are “Gaijin Mangaka. The boundary-violating impulse of Japanized “art comics,’” “Nothing That’s Really There: Hatsune Miku’s Challenge to Anthropocentric Materiality,” and “She’s Not Your Waifu; She’s an Eldritch Abomination: Saya no Uta and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels.” The first paper focuses on š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka,’ a special issue of the celebrated pocket-sized comic anthology š! in which I have participated, addressing the question of Japanized contemporary art by Western artists. The second investigates the Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku as hyperobject (a concept by philosopher Timothy Morton) from a feminist new materialist perspective. Finally, the third paper delves into Saya no Uta (“Song of Saya”), a Lovecraftian-Cronenbergian adult visual novel, examining it in light of Queer Game Studies and antisocial queer theory. Although on the website, I make no distinction between Part I and II—all entries belong to my imaginary collection of art and pop-cultural objects—these three papers attest to my capacity to navigate different theoretical frameworks and write according to the standard format of academic journals. At the time of this dissertation’s completion, I have submitted all three articles to international journals with blind peer review. Moreover, “Gaijin Mangaka” relates directly to my artistic “tribe,” i.e., non-Japanese artists using Japanese pop-cultural references in their works, and therefore is suited for a lengthier analysis in the context of this dissertation.

Part III consists of my artist’s one-page statement, a short statement, and bio. The artist statement, to be used in my professional practice as an artist, presents an overall vision of my work, situating it in contemporary art practice. Part III is to be complemented by the Appendix III – Portfolio, consisting of my portfolio of works produced during the duration of my Ph.D., and the final exhibition of my artworks, which will take place at my faculty on the day of the thesis defense.

In addition, I include a Glossary (Appendix I) of Japanese and fandom terms which appear throughout my dissertation—for instance, “manga,” “anime,” “otaku” or “moé”—whose meaning and history is of importance to better grasp many of the encyclopedia entries. Every time that a term in the glossary appears for the first time in each chapter, it is underlined. Still in the realm of specific words, I would like to stress that throughout this dissertation I use the term “animanga” to indicate the joint products and culture of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics), as well as directly related products that are often adapted and informed by them, such as light novels (novels with anime-style illustrations) and visual novels (anime-style videogames). I have also decided to present the names of people and characters originating from Japan in the Japanese order (e.g., Murakami Takashi, not Takashi Murakami), in which the surname comes before the given name (unless they manifest a preference otherwise). Moreover, while I maintain the Japanese titles of anime, manga, and videogames, I offer their official translated titles (or unofficial, in case of untranslated works) in English. On the other hand, in what concerns non-Japanese names or words used in titles of Japanese works under their Romanized form, I kept their original spelling (e.g., Ikeda Ryoko’s Versailles no Bara, or The Rose of Versailles, not Berusaiyu no Bara; Hagio Moto’s Thomas no Shinzō, or The Heart of Thomas, not Tōma no Shinzō).

In the remainder of this introduction, I will detail some aspects concerning my dissertation’s methodology, namely, its “encyclopedic” format. I offer a brief observation of the field of Cute Studies and make a general introduction to the question of cuteness and negativity, in which I pre-emptively tackle a set of “negative” concepts which will recur in Parts I and II (such as the abject, the formless, the uncanny, the eerie, the weird, the obscene, the grotesque, or the disgusting). After that, I turn my attention to this dissertation’s main topic, the Japanese cute or the kawaii, addressing its etymology, history, and culture. In the same vein, I present an overview of cuteness and manga—including the Interwar period, girls’ comics (shо̄jo manga) and boys’ comics (shо̄nen manga)—as their coevolution is especially relevant not only to grasp the aesthetics of the kawaii but as a primer to various encyclopedia entries. Finally, I close this introduction with a few concluding remarks (“Coda: Feeling Cute, Might Delete Later”), suggestive of loose ends and future prompts to be explored about cuteness and negativity.

While the dictionary and the encyclopedia are at odds with the Ph.D. dissertation in many ways—the adjective “encyclopedic” can be used to negatively pass judgment on a thesis, highlighting a propensity for quantity over quality or an excess of the content itself—they are all, at heart, teleological formations. The dissertation culminates in a thesis, in which all parts (literature review, methodology, results) converge towards a theory to be proved, aiming for the specialization of students in one field of knowledge. Even when opening new lines of inquiry in “future work” sections, it entails a sense of conclusion of a research phase with everything else lying beyond its scope, and Ph.D. students, often suffering from academic fatigue, fantasize about writing the last word in their dissertation. In turn, dictionaries and encyclopedias seek to collect the entirety of knowledge or branch of knowledge. Their alphabetical order is a strategy to organize that which has no inherent ordering, as no word or entry is more important than the other. So too, in my dissertation, the entries are ordered alphabetically, and therefore “randomly,” evading a logical chain in favor of non-sequentiality.

Although, while compiling the final dissertation document, the pieces seemed to fall into place. In particular, the last entry, “Zombieflat,” wraps things up almost as a concluding remark. Still, one is in no way obligated to read my encyclopedia in alphabetical order. If anything, I urge the readers to dive in and find their way down the rabbit hole, to pursue whatever catches their attention. Or, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (or even a Japanese visual novel), to make choices and build different “routes” or “branches” as they go. To make this remapping or rerouting on the part of the reader easier, I offer, at the end of each entry, a few suggestions on what entries to read next, in the form of “See also.”  

In the making of this dissertation, I wish to continue a lineage— whose roots one can be traced back as far as Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580)—initiated by heterodox (or even, heterological) “dictionaries” like George Bataille’s Dictionnaire Critique in the Documents (1929-30) magazine and continued by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in L’Informe: mode d’emploi (Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996). [Figures 1 & 2] The latter, resulting from the homonymous exhibition that the pair curated at the Centre Georges Pompidou from May 22 to August 26, 1996, was translated to English in 1997 as Formless: A User's Guide (1997). Both subvert the dictionary as a tool that objectively describes the meaning of words, mocking its aspirations to totality, replaced by a collection of short, idiosyncratic essays. Indeed, Bataille’s dictionary “is not much of one.” As Krauss and Bois put it:

It is incomplete, not because Bataille stopped editing the magazine at the end of the 1930s, but because it was never thought of as a possible totality (moreover, the articles do not appear in alphabetical order); it is written in several voices (there are three different entries under ‘Eye’ and under ‘Metamorphosis,’ for example); it does not rule out redundancy.[4]

In Formless, the book’s division clashes with its alphabetical order: because all 28 entries are organized from A to Z, the book’s four parts (“Base Materialism,” “Horizontality,” “Pulse,” “Entropy”) seem subject to chance or, at least, conditional to the dictionary’s deterministic order. Like Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972), Krauss and Bois also write their book using four hands—indeed, as the former state, “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”[5]

My encyclopedia, which is also “not much of one” and “crowded” with heterogeneous characters and contents, uses Bataille’s dictionaries and Formless as models for the dissertation, not just in structure and length, but in their engagement with what Ernest Boyer calls a “scholarship of integration” or “connectedness.”[6] As Boyer writes, “By integration, we mean making connections across disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context, illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating nonspecialists, too.” And continues: “In calling for a scholarship of integration, we do not suggest returning to the ‘gentleman scholar’ of earlier time, nor do we have in mind the dilettante. Rather, what we mean is serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear original research.”[7] To Krauss and Bois, this connectedness is a way “not only to map certain trajectories, or slippages, but in some small way to ‘perform’ them.”[8] In my case, these “trajectories” and “slippages” draw together Western and Japanese objects and frameworks. Indeed, I was first interested in the Japanese cute, the kawaii, because of the way that Japanese comics, animation, and videogames reflect many topics present in Western art and theory in fresh, unexpected ways.

Another crucial feature of dictionaries and encyclopedias is their provisional nature, as language and knowledge are continually shifting and evolving. Ironically, encyclopedias like the online Wikipedia, that incorporate provisionality and open-endness, are often scorned by the gatekeepers of knowledge and referencing them remains, for the most part, an academic no-no. In my encyclopedia, I deliberately insist on the interplay of “high” and “low” sources of information, using books, monographs and papers alongside Tumblr posts and collaborative websites like KnowYourMeme, TvTropes and fan wikis. In doing so, I seek to reflect my experience as a trained scholar and artist who is also a product of the Internet revolution, marked by the rise of user-generated content and social media. Indeed, my interest in the kawaii itself would not have been possible without the unprecedented circulation and accessibility of Japanese popular culture in the 2000s. After all, the millennials were the first generation to be brought up en masse on Japanese cartoons like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Evangelion, or Pokémon, thanks to globalization and the World Wide Web. In the spirit of provisionality, an essential aspect of my encyclopedia is that it will remain, on my website, as an open-ended collection of entries, subject to growth and change. Hence, the dissertation submitted to my school administrative services is but a momentary crystallization. After the conclusion of my Ph.D., I will continue to add new entries, and existing entries may be changed or removed, in a continual editing process of which I will keep track in the Blog section of the website.

My encyclopedia also employs the archetype of the cabinet of curiosities or wonder-room as an organizing principle, insofar as, like the curiosity cabinet, mine is also a compendium of artifacts. Renaissance wonder-rooms were collections of unusual objects organized in idiosyncratic categories, according to flexible guidelines and the collector’s imagination.[9] [Figure 3] As historian Stephanie Bowry puts it, “Far from being chaotic, cabinets attempted not only to represent, but to actively perform the entangled nature of objects through their selection and categorization of material, and to experiment with the limits of representation by creating new kinds of objects.”[10] The curiosity cabinet exists at the intersection of the encyclopedic and the “weird materialities”[11] of culture, bringing out the entanglement of theory and practice as products of the same world-building drive. What interests me in this model is that, like the dictionary and the encyclopedia, the curiosity cabinet is an open-ended collection subject to growth and change, negating the closure expected from Ph.D. dissertations. However, compared to the dictionary and encyclopedia, which tend towards abstraction (i.e., concepts, words, events), the cabinet of curiosities is endowed with an objectual nature. I identify with it more because each of my entries originates from “deep looking” (to borrow Pauline Olivero’s “deep listening”) at an object, artwork, or character, and mapping its connections to other artifacts and concepts. The artifacts in my dissertation range from the “fine arts” (painting, sculpture, video art, performance, installations, etc.) to pop and mass culture (comics, animation, merchandise, fashion, pop singers) to “objets trouvés” (“found objects”) such as computer viruses or posts on Tumblr. This diversity seeks to reflect the kawaii’s kaleidoscopic sprawling into every corner of contemporary art and culture. In a sense, in building my encyclopedia, I, too, am a collector of sorts, adding my treasures to an imaginary (virtual) room.

The cute and the curious share some common ground as aesthetic categories. On the one hand, the curious bears a suggestion of smallness, as it is often not surprising or impressive enough to be “astonishing” or “amazing,” thus hinting at a passing interest in things sufficiently tiny to fit into a cabinet. On the other, despite its strong influence in contemporary culture, cuteness remains, for the most part, a “curiosity” in aesthetic criticism, resisting the solemnity of established categories like the beautiful or sublime.[12] Exotic Japan has also been a cabinetizable curiosity in the eyes of the West, reduced to the decorative motif of Japonaiserie,[13] i.e., the porcelain, lacquerware, and screens eagerly sought after by seventieth-century collectors and onward—although this cabinetization was not a one-way road, as the Japanese shops exhibiting curiosities from foreign countries at the height of the country’s isolationist foreign policy show.[14] Even today, kawaii culture fits neatly into the discourse of “wacky orientalism,”[15] with lists of Japan’s most disturbing prefecture mascots (yuru kyara) amusing the Internet alongside news of Hello Kitty dildos and insane street fashion like gyaru or decora. [Figure 4] For better or worse, these stereotypical associations of “Japaneseness” hold a poetic significance in their transgression of the boundaries of nature and artifice, reality and fantasy, encouraging the formulation of playful connections between objects, concepts, and affects.

Moreover, while the portfolio and the encyclopedia exist separately on my website, the homepage is a section in which writings and artworks are mixed in with each other: the GRL KABINETT. Here, each entry (of the encyclopedia and portfolio) is represented by an AI-generated anime girl created with https://make.girls.moe, a website which uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create characters; and curated from a pool of several hundreds of automatically generated girls to best fit each entry. In the spirit of moé gijinka (or moé anthropomorphism), i.e., concepts or things converted into cute anime characters,[16] and Japanese bishōjo games, readers choose a girl and click the image to access her contents, then go back and choose another, and so on. Because the girls are unlabelled, accessing the entries from the GRL KABINETT also encourages visitors to engage playfully with the contents of the website. It not only intensifies the unpredictability (and memory) factor at play but transforms the reader’s affective inclinations towards one girl or another in a mediating element between them and the textual materials in the encyclopedia or artworks in the portfolio.

The choice to represent the curiosities in this virtual cabinet through moé anthropomorphism, instead of icons retaining a mimetic relationship to their content, hints at the contradictions of cute aesthetics in contemporary culture, namely, at cuteness’s permanent tension between reinforcing and subverting the existing social order, sometimes, in the same gesture. Indeed, as scholar  Thomas Lamarre puts it, “unless you’ve mastered easy flight to other planets, you’ve surely run up against signs of increasing anxiety about the effects of capitalism in today’s world… Regardless of what you think about capitalism, it’s hard to escape a sense of disparity between the creativity of consumer activity today… and the contemporary crisis of capitalism.”[17] I find this contrast both funny and unsettling in ways that reflect, quite efficiently, the contradictions in my own writings and artworks. After all, what does it mean to thread so intimately among the products of consumer culture? Regardless of analytical depth, in the end, what will my wonder-room look like? Perhaps not so much like a cabinet of curiosities, but like the figurine-encasing displays in the rooms of an otaku? [Figure 5]

In embracing the relational quality of the cabinet of curiosities, I do not rely on a hard definition of cuteness. Instead, my premise is that “cuteness itself is defined in relative terms, based on the available elements in each story,”[18] each chapter, each entry. This indeterminism aligns with the belief that, as scholar Joshua Dale argues, cuteness is “a potential… response to a definable (albeit not completely defined) set of stimuli,”[19] and therefore an overarching, ossified definition would cut against the methodological grain of my encyclopedia. This “case by case” approach, based on close reading and close looking, facilitates the temporal and geographical transitions arising throughout my encyclopedia, as I impose no time or space restrictions on the analyzed objects. But also, it allows me to explore cuteness in terms of content and representation through different theoretical frameworks, drawing from an array of knowledge fields including art studies, critical theory, Japanese studies, anime and manga studies, comics studies, media studies, queer studies, gender studies, feminist theory, new materialism, and so on. In the Talmudic spirit, I also assume a stance in which no object is undeserving of detailed attention, assuming that (consciously or unconsciously) its ideas and forms are meaningful, regardless of their smallness. In fact, in my experience and art practice alike, it is often from details and the more fleeting sensations that words and images are fleshed out, rather than from totalizing thought systems.

Finally, in examining the relationship between cuteness and negativity, I have made a deliberate effort to include art and pop culture that is not only Japanese but also Japanized—what scholar Casey Brienza has called Japanese pop culture “without Japan,”[20] meaning “products of a sometimes globalized, sometimes transnational, sometimes hyperlocal world… produced without any direct creative input at all from Japan”[21] but which nevertheless retain symbolic and stylistic markers associated with manga, anime, Japanese videogames, and so on. In Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (2011), scholars Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade endorse a similar view (with which I concur), writing that,

At the heart of any definition of Japanese popular culture are a number of contradictions. First, we believe that the use of a nation-state, such as Japan, as an organizing principle for the categorization of culture, especially contemporary popular culture, is ultimately untenable. We see Japanese popular culture as a study of information flows associated with Japan rather than anything “essentially” or “authentically” Japanese. In the case of Japan, this is sometimes less arbitrary because of the barriers of geography and language. Thus we demonstrate that the designation “Japanese” in Japanese popular culture is more an associative starting point than a marker of exclusivity or locus of origin for what are indeed a globalized set of phenomena.[22]

By expanding the objects of analysis to outside the boundaries of Japan’s territory (a particularly enclosed one, considering its insular position), I wish to emphasize that these essays are meant to reach a broader crowd beyond the niche of animanga fans and fellow weeaboos (“wapanese” or “wannabe Japanese,” obsessive Western fans of anime and manga). That is to say, the phenomenon of Japanization in the twenty-first century—and, increasingly, also of Koreanization, with the worldwide success of K-pop and K-drama—reflects the broader zeitgeist of postmodernity in art and beyond. In this sense, Yoda Tomiko has argued that the handle “J-” often accompanying the products of Japanese pop culture (e.g., J-pop) is useful precisely because of its degree of separableness from the national. As a part-object, “J-” embodies the contractions and contradictions of “Japan” (or any country, really) in globalized capitalism. As she puts it, “Rather than assuming that the Japanese popular culture today ultimately refers to some form of larger national frame, we may understand the prefix J- as inscribing the subculturation of the national.”[23] As such, the phenomenon of Japanization transcends my integration into a cultural group with the same interest in manga, anime, videogames, and so on. Instead, in its subculturized form, “Japan without Japan” becomes a kind of topographical McGuffin, i.e., a device that sets the “plot” (in this case, one’s imagination and desires) in motion, indexing the aporia of in-betweenness and impossibility, surplus and lack.

Presently, Japanese popular culture is an unavoidable “soft power,” which seeps into our everyday lives, and whose influence makes itself more and more visible in non-Japanese art schools and contemporary art. For instance, as the encyclopedia entry and paper “Gaijin Mangaka” addresses, in the 2020s, the realm of experimental graphic narratives, called “art comics,” has experienced a wave of non-Japanese authors openly influenced by manga. Likewise, references to Japanese popular culture, particularly comics and animation, have become a not uncommon occurrence in Western contemporary art, especially in the work of artists currently in their twenties and thirties. Sometimes, these can cause educators and students to clash and struggle, either to understand and accommodate these trends within their viewpoints (in the former’s case) or to present and navigate their preferences within a contemporary art world context (in the latter’s). I hope that my encyclopedia contributes, at some level, to a better understanding that the kawaii, anime, and manga operate beyond the boundaries of subcultures or “Japan” as a closed cultural and geopolitical unit and can be productively used to engage with all kinds of art and aesthetic criticism, including in educational contexts.

Likewise, I would like this thesis to be read not as a prescriptive or conclusive text on specific topics (the kawaii and animanga culture), but as a constellation of references to be appropriated by each reader, who is free to build their navigating chart for the strange, problematic, complicated, complex, and chaotic worlds unfolding from Japanese pop culture. More than “chapters,” each entry in the encyclopedia embodies a process, one which culminates in their inclusion in the final Ph.D. dissertation, but to some extent exists in parallel or independently from it. My “deep looking” at many of the artifacts is a journey in and of itself, with its history shaped over years of musings, contaminations, detours, and chance encounters. Their influence is not limited to these pages; it leaks into my life and my art practice. As such, in my encyclopedia, readers may unlock many of the recurring motifs that drive my artistic practice, forming a conceptual reservoir to be evoked when looking at and reading my artworks.

As an emerging academic field, Cute Studies or Cuteness Studies encompasses interdisciplinary scholarship from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.[24] The term was coined by scholar Joshua Dale, who has promoted its development and dissemination by launching the online resource Cute Studies Bibliography, co-editing The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and editing the “Cute Studies” special edition of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, both in 2016. To date, other cute-centric academic publications include an issue on Internet cute by the M/C Journal (2014) and The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (2017), edited by Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao. The study of cute aesthetics in Western scholarship was pioneered in the 1990s and 2000s by cultural theorists such as Daniel Harris (Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, released in 2000) and Sianne Ngai (starting with “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde” in 2005), along with Sharon Kinsella, a sociologist specializing in the kawaii, and Garry Cross, who wrote the landmark history of American cute culture The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture, in 2004. Ngai’s scholarship of cuteness culminated in Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (2012), [Figure 6] in which she argues that cuteness reveals “the surprisingly wide specter of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities.”[25]

Ngai’s integration of cuteness within her broader project of examining the “politically ambiguous work of… emotions”[26] contributed to establishing cute aesthetics as a valid topic of research. Ngai’s “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” (2005), her earliest article on cuteness later adapted into a chapter in Our Aesthetic Categories, focuses on Japanese contemporary artists like Murakami Takashi and Nara Yoshitomo as hallmarks of cuteness’s dark side. In turn, Sharon Kinsella has published several essential books and articles on Japanese cuteness and girls’ culture, including the 1995 article “Cuties in Japan”—which remains a reference in many texts on kawaii aesthetics—along with Adult Manga: Culture and power in contemporary Japanese society (2000), Female Revolt in Male Cultural Imagination in Contemporary Japan (2007), and Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan (2013). Additionally, in 2010, anthropologist Marilyn Ivy penned “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo's Parapolitics,” published in the fifth volume of the animanga-centric academic journal Mechademia, a key paper examining the political significance of Japanese artist Nara Yoshitomo in light of kawaii aesthetics. Since then, during the span of the 2010s, there has been a general increase in papers focusing on Japanese cuteness, hailing from various academic fields.

In the second half of the 2020s, a notable contribution to the field of Cute Studies was the edited volume The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, published by Routledge in 2016, edited by Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony McIntyre, and Diane Negra. [Figure 7] This collection of essays offers a comprehensive view on the “explosion of cute commodities, characters, foods, fashions, and fandoms, leading to an inevitable expansion and dispersal of meanings and connotations”[27] in the twenty-first century. The authors put forth an understanding of cute affects, cultures, and aesthetics as “a repertoire that is made use of by a variety of constituencies and for a variety of purposes.”[28] The book breaks down the appeal of cute aesthetics in several elements: cuteness, coping, labour; cute consumption, nostalgia, and adulthood; cute communities and shifting gender configurations; cute compassion and communication; cute encounters: anthropomorphism and animals; spreadable cuteness: interspecies affect; political cuteness; cuteness and/as manipulation.[29] Dale, in particular, argues that cuteness is fundamentally “aimed at disarming aggression and promoting sociality,”[30] and that “antagonistic qualities such as violence, aggression, and sadism are not intrinsic to the concept of cuteness” but “are frequently attached to cute objects in the aesthetic realm.”[31] Although, for instance, Ngai’s analysis of the aggressive impulses aroused by the cute object is firmly rooted in psychoanalytic theory and ethnographic observation—and, therefore, contrary to what Dale’s argument may suggest, not a detached fabrication of the artistic sphere—Dale’s case nevertheless cautions us against the hasty association of cuteness with “darkness.”

Before advancing, one may raise the question: what is cuteness? Cuteness can be understood on two different, if necessarily interconnected, levels. On the one hand, from a psychophysiological point of view, cuteness is an “affective response—a feeling one may refer to as the ‘Aww’ factor”[32] serving as an evolutionarily advantageous trait. This “natural” cuteness, understood as a primal, protective instinct towards neonates, is also not exclusive to humans, intertwining with the broader evolution of animals on Earth. In the 1940s, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz was the first to describe what he called kinderschema, or “baby schema,” a set of features and behaviors found in animals, including humans, indexing youthfulness and vulnerability, that trigger our nurturing instinct. [Figure 8] Lorenz’s kinderschema included big eyes positioned low in large heads with tall foreheads, a small mouth and nose, round ears, small chin, soft limbs and body, and a waddling gait. The Aww-factor can impact biological capacities; for instance, a recent study suggests that the millennial-long coevolution of dogs and humans has resulted in the latter developing a forehead muscle to produce the proverbial puppy dog eyes, i.e., a sad, imploring, juvenile expression.[33] Nevertheless, many scientists today argue that “instead of stemming solely from helplessness and dependence, cuteness is… intimately linked to companionship, cooperation, play, and emotional reactivity,”[34] suggesting it plays a role in motivating prosocial behavior, empathy, and disarming aggression.[35]

On the other hand, cuteness exists as a socio-cultural concept and, by extension, as an aesthetic category. This “second nature” of cuteness is relatively recent in human history, relating to the word’s emergence at the dawn of the twentieth century—although its roots can be traced back further, for instance, to Rococo’s fascination with the small and playful against Baroque's grandeur, encapsulated in works such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s L'Escarpolette, [Figure 9] or some Edo period paintings and prints in Japan.[36] According to historian Gary Cross,

Until the twentieth century, “cute” was merely a shortened form of “acute,” signifying “sharp, quick witted” and shrewd in an “underhanded manner.” In American slang of 1834, it came also to mean “attractive, pretty, charming” but was applied only to things. The original meaning of the “cute” person was interchangeable with “cunning,” a corruption of “can,” meaning clever or crafty. Significantly, both words shifted meaning by the 1900s (though only briefly for cunning), from the manipulative and devious adult to the lively charm of the willful child, suggesting anew tolerance for the headstrong, even manipulative youngster. Today, the little girl who bats her eyes to win favor or the little boy who gives his mother a long look of desire at the candy counter is called “cute.”[37]

Thus, as Sianne Ngai suggests, the word “cute exemplifies a situation in which making a word smaller, more compact, or more cute results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite.”[38] The cute indexes various meanings, including that which is attractive by means of smallness prettiness, or quaintness. In this sense, cuteness evokes the “toy-like or pet-like,”[39] tameness aligned with the limiting of the physical, formal, and philosophical scope of objects. For instance, the small is that whose size is less than average, and this “less than” or “lack” evokes another set of features that Ngai lists as “compactness, formal simplicity, softness or pliancy.”[40] [Figure 10] In fact, the kinderschema are, in and of themselves, a kind of “deformity” or “distortion” in relation to the “standard,” i.e., the adult, connoting immaturity, innocence, and dependence. On the other hand, the pretty is a “desintensification” or domestication of the beautiful, something which is appealing in a delicate and graceful way but removed from the solemnity of beauty as a central category in classical art—one could argue that the pretty is a cutification of the beautiful. In turn, the quaint “declaws” strangeness into that which is quirky, i.e., unusual or idiosyncratic in non-threatening, often adorable, sometimes, old-fashioned, ways.

Moreover, and albeit in an entirely different context (referring to sound), Brandon LaBelle’s account of weakness as, potentially, a euphoric and erotic (in the sense of a life-inducing impulse) condition, which “reveals us at our most vulnerable, a body without and in need,”[41] echoes Ngai’s definition of cuteness as “an aestheticization of powerlessness,”[42] i.e., as the depiction of “helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency”[43] as artistically or sensually pleasing, in ways that evoke our tender love and care. In this light, one can think of the cute as an intersection where the life instinct to nurture, protect, and love meets the minor, insignificant body and object. This structural disenfranchisement applies to the category of cuteness itself in relation to the Western art canon, as “a minor aesthetic concept that is fundamentally about minorness.”[44]

Cross also suggests that cuteness can “weaponize” these features as charm contrived with a view to desired ends. In this case, the cute becomes entangled with sentimentality and the self-indulgent appeal to tenderness and nostalgia. The iconic Crying Boys painting series by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin, an icon of kitsch mass-market art, epitomizes this relationship, but it could also refer to Margaret Keane’s paintings of big-eyed women and children, or the kitty and puppy calendars hanging in homes all over the world. [Figure 11a, b] These associations have put cute aesthetics squarely on the “dumb” side of what art and literary critic Andreas Huyssen famously called “the Great Divide”[45] between “high art” and lowly mass culture, a contested conceptual trope emerging in nineteenth-century Europe that has nevertheless proved to be amazingly resilient throughout the twentieth century.[46] Indeed, Cross argues that cuteness is intimately related to the birth of consumer culture, as it became “a selling point (especially when associated with the child in ads) and an occasion for impulse spending”[47] in emerging child-oriented festivities like Christmas, Halloween, and birthday parties. These were the beginnings of the cute as a commodity form, which over the twentieth and twenty-first century grew to enormous proportions, to the point that it has been called a “cuteness-industrial complex.”[48] The idea that, as argued by Ngai, cuteness has become one of “capitalism’s most binding processes,”[49] and therefore is no longer “merely” an aesthetic but an authoritative economic interest and value system, allied with the consumer goods sector, is essential throughout my dissertation, especially in regards to the development of the kawaii in Japanese society. It is at the core of all sorts of negativity and ambiguities spiraling from the cute commodity.

Cuteness is also a fruit of the modern mind, in particular, of modern developmental psychology, with its roots in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (namely, Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762) but emerging in the work of late-nineteenth-century psychologists, including Sigmund Freud. The fact that “children were no longer imagined as miniature adults or as naturally virtuous creatures”[50] resulted in a sociocultural shift in the public perceptions on childhood, replacing the passive Victorian child with mischievous rascal boys or cheeky coquette girls.[51] This shift meant that many emotions and behaviors which would be considered antisocial in adults—selfishness, jealousy, greed, manipulation, imitativeness, etc.—were not only tolerated but encouraged in the new “cute” kid.[52][Figure 12] Cross illustrates this uncanny, dual constructive and destructive nature of cuteness with examples of late-nineteenth-century American trade cards, in which children using a sewing machine to stitch together the tails of cats and dogs, or getting hit in the face with a baseball ball,[53] are shown to be cute.

But one could just as easily fetch the example of literary heroines such as Charles Dickens’s Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield (1850). David Copperfield’s first wife, Dora, is described as “pretty,” “little” (“little voice,” “little laugh,” “little ways”), “rather diminutive altogether,” and “childish.” She baby talks and throws tantrums, and is always accompanied by her spunky lapdog, Jip. [Figure 13] Although commonly understood as an “empty-headed child,”[54] Dora is self-aware and even tells David that he should think of her as his “child-wife” (e.g., “When you are going to be angry with me, say to yourself, ‘it’s only my child-wife!’ When I am very disappointing, say, ‘I knew, a long time ago, that she would make but a child-wife!’”). By acting childish and vulnerable, Dora—much like the practitioners of Japanese fashion and subcultures related to the kawaii—evades the responsibilities of married life and enfolds David in “a playful, unserious anarchic moment”[55] which is ultimately unsustainable in family literature (Dora, therefore, dies shortly into their marriage). Characters like Dora portray a budding admiration for the “slightly manipulative and self-centered girl”[56] in nineteenth-century urban society. Likewise, Little Nemo, Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse, or Betty Boop, embody the moral and aesthetical ambiguity, even disruptiveness, of cuteness in early comics and cartoons, initially targeted not at children but an adult audience, imbued with a modern sensibility. In Dale’s words, “when Mickey Mouse debuted in the animated cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928) he was mischievous to the point of cruelty.”[57] [Video 1]

Disconnected from the biodeterminism of Konrad Lorenz’s kinderschema, the “minorness” of cuteness performs in ways which are fundamentally contingent and relational. This is not to say that everything is (or can be) cute—as I have discussed above, cuteness evokes a word cloud or arena in which “diminutive,” “negative,”  or “formless” attributes combine with benign qualities: small, weak, helpless, pitiful, dumb, manipulative, young, pretty, quaint, playful, tame, adorable, and so on. But in the artistic and pop-cultural realm, cuteness often reflects the fact that “social and subcultural groups have their own (rather specific) criteria for what sorts of manners and attitudes constitute ‘cute.’”[58] For instance, the character of Garrus from the video game series Mass Effect, who is an anthropomorphic alien with insectoid features, is a favorite among the female gamer community for his cute awkwardness and vulnerability.[59] [Figure 14] Likewise, while relying on an aesthetics of precarity and imperfection which is far from being “conventionally” cute (attractive, pretty, etc.), many artworks produced within the trend of provisional painting might be considered “cute” in defying the aesthetic grandeur traditionally expected from artworks. Even the ugly can be cute, to some extent: the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest is an example of such concoction of  cuteness and ugliness, or the blobfish, voted the world’s ugliest animal in 2013 by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society,[60] [Figure 15] or even the cutification of disability in Internet celebrity cats like the late Grumpy Cat or Lil Bub.[61] Indeed, according to scholar Kanako Shiokawa, the non-descriptiveness of cuteness is central to cuteness’s contemporary acceptation.[62] In many respect, the kawaii, i.e., the Japanese cute, is particularly elastic, and a fertile ground for investigating the phenomeno-poetics of cuteness and negativity—what Joshua Dale calls the “dark side of cute.” As Dale puts it,

The rapid expansion of kawaii since the 1970s has resulted in repeated iterations and cycles that I argue make kawaii more complex and varied than other aesthetics of cuteness... This decade‑long expansion has seen many antagonistic elements attached to kawaii, resulting in substantial trends in Japan for ugly-cute, grotesque‑cute, and disgusting‑cute, to name a few.[63]

In art and popular culture, cuteness is entangled with a variety of other aesthetic categories and concepts, such as the abject, the formless, the uncanny, the eerie, the weird, the obscene, the grotesque, or the disgusting, with their own history and range. They share a “trajectory towards negation”[64] and alterity that aligns them more than separates them, prompting many overlaps. Abjection is a crucial concept in art theory, and one that underlines and manifests in many (if not all) of the encyclopedia entries and papers in this dissertation—albeit in radically different ways, from the eruption of cuteness in the dark web to the internalized foreignness of global manga, or the nonhumanity (the otherness) of cute characters and people. The word “abjection” comes from the Latin abicio, meaning “throw or hurl down or away, cast or push away or aside,” “give up, abandon; expose; discard,” or “humble, degrade, reduce, lower, cast down.”[65] At its most fundamental, the abject signals “the otherness in us,”[66] permeating both our mental processes and the social-cultural order.[67] While Julia Kristeva’s 1980 Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai Sur l'Abjection (in English, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) remains the definitive theory of abjection, there have been many significant contributions to its study, such as Hal Foster’s essay “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” published in the art journal October in 1996.

Bodily waste like urine, feces, and other “excretions” (in the sense of substances excreted from our bodies) like blood, semen, or breast milk, are prototypically abject. But the concept also refers to marginalized persons or groups that deviate from the norms of a society at a given moment in space or time, based on their appearance (gender, age, race, ethnicity, disabilities) or living standards (sexual orientation, class, religion, legal status). The duality creates a tension between the “abject” as a noun and “to abject” as a verb. According to scholar Rina Arya, author of Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature, “While the operation (of abjection) seeks to stabilize, the condition (of the abject) is inherently disruptive, meaning that there is a constant tension of drives.” And she continues: “The concept is both constructive (in the formation of identities and relationship to the world) and destructive (in what it does to the subject).”[68] The abject is therefore disruptive and unassimilable, threatening the stability of individual, social, and moral boundaries, as it undoes the distinction between the Self and Other.

Moreover, “the operation of abject-ing involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability,”[69] which apply not just to bodies or social groups but also art. For instance, “high culture” gatekeeps artistic purity by abjecting the “others” of taste and originality, like the kitsch or the plagiarized. Ngai argues that cuteness is abject in relation to the avant-garde, representing its greatest fear: powerlessness, “its smallness (of audience as well as membership), incompleteness (the gap between stated intentions and actual effects), and vulnerability (to institutional ossification).”[70] Still, according to her, the real power of both the cute object and of art itself ultimately resides in its powerlessness. In other words, the insistence on its radical uselessness is the sine qua non condition for the emergence of the avant-garde.

The extent to which the formless and the abject intersect has been the subject of debate. In 1994, the arts journal October published “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the ‘Abject’” by Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Helen Molesworth,[71] a roundtable on the formless and the abject, discussing their differences and similarities. Krauss points out how the abject is often reified into “a thematics of essences and substances,”[72] while the formless resists reification and therefore cannot be signified. Arguably, this interpretation of abjection is reductionistic; for Kristeva, the abject draws us “toward the place where meaning collapses,”[73] which aligns with Bataille’s declaration that “What it [the informe]designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.”[74] Nevertheless, one may trace a distinction of emphasis between the abject and the formless; the former, drawing from Kristeva's reading of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, emphasizes the shapeless in-betweenness of I and not-I, while the latter emphasizes the no-thing as itself kind of form(lessness), the “matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance” [75] inferred through its effects on outside observers. While the ties of cuteness to the formless are less obvious, I suggest it can be traced, for instance, in the “gleams and reflections”[76] of the big eyes of Japanese girls’ comics, whose wet and sparkly masses, enclosed by long lashes akin to a Bataillean spider, defunctionalize the eye as an organ of the visual system. [Figure 17]

There is a cluster of concepts that orbit the abject (or the other way around), namely, the unheimlich, as immortalized in Freud’s homonymous 1919 essay. Meaning “unhomely” in German, the unheimlich indexes an intimate alienation, which “can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.”[77] The unheimlich connects with Lacan’s “extimacy” (extimité), i.e., “intimate exteriority,”[78] which is not contrary to intimacy but instead posits that “that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”[79] In the posthumous The Weird and the Eerie (2017), Mark Fisher argues that, because “Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange,”[80] it is unreconcilable with related concepts, such as the weird and the eerie, that rely on that which “does not belong.”[81] Or, in the case of the eerie, that catches the human “in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces,”[82] an idea whose possible intersection with the cute I explore in the encyclopedia entry “Paradog.” [Figure 17]

The concept of unheimlich was famously used by Japanese robotics professor Mori Masahiro to describe the uncanny valley (bukimi no tani), a hypostasized “shift from empathy to revulsion” as a humanlike robot “approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance.”[83] As Dale points out, domestication is a crucial element in cuteness, and therefore the cute is always, in one way or another, about the tame and familiar, even when artists negate or subvert these qualities to an “unhomely” effect. The realization that such unsettling feelings do not necessarily detract from the “Aww-factor” further complexifies the interplay of the cute and the uncanny. For instance, the Japanese therapeutic baby seal robot Paro, designed to calm patients and treat depression at hospitals and nursing homes,[84] is quintessentially cute but also carries unsettling qualities—both in the mechanical-automaticness of its movements and utterances, and the ethical implications of replacing “real” human or animal love with a robotic “illusion of a relationship.”[85] [Video 2]

Other concepts encapsulating a sense of wrongness, such as the disgusting, the obscene, or the grotesque, have been given various degrees of importance either individually, or within the context of abjection. In art and literature, the grotesque has come to be associated with the carnivalesque and the macabre, the excessive, and the metamorphosis. In Japan, the interwar art movement ero guro nansensu (sometimes shortened to ero-guro) that celebrated decadence, violence, parody, and perversion, has been highly influential throughout the twentieth century, including in manga and anime.[86] Many subtypes of alternative kawaii culture, like guro-kawaii (“grotesque-cute”), kimo-kawaii (“gross-cute”), busu-kawaii (“ugly-cute”),  yami-kawaii (“sick-cute”), itami-kawaii (“pain-cute”), or the more recent mukikawa—a combination of mukimuki (“buff”) and kawaii headed by muscled idols like Saiki Reika[87] and Japan-based Australian singer Ladybeard [Figure 18a, b]—draw from this tradition, combining cute aesthetics with violent, depressing, burlesque, or otherwise contradictory imagery.[88] There is, however, another way in which cuteness can become grotesque. The word “grotesque,” from the Italian “grotto” (cave), originated in the fifteenth century when excavations of Emperor Nero’s ancient Roman palace Domus Aurea revealed bizarre paintings fusing human, animal, vegetable, and mineral.[89] Cute aesthetics often enables that kind of grotesquery. Take, for instance, Lisa Frank’s colorful illustrations of puppies, unicorns, dolphins, stars, hearts, rainbows, patterns, and whatnot. In these pictures, rather than appearing to be “proper” characters, all these clichéd, ossified formations seem to be molded out of the same nondescript, rainbowny substance, regardless of their being animals or objects, background or foreground, filling the entire surface in innervating visual amalgamations. [Figure 19] The cute yet outlandish allure of her figures and environments may explain why, although her company mostly produces stationery and stickers, Frank was selected to represent the United States at the forthcoming 2021 Venice Biennale.[90]

In turn, the transgression of social prohibitions and taboo links more closely to the obscene. The obscene evokes moral outrage and offense, in the form of objectionable practices, sexual (like incest, pedophilia, and necrophilia) or otherwise (war, poverty, racism, murder, and so on).[91] According to scholar Kerstin Mey, author of Art and obscenity (2007), the “‘obscene’ has been linked to the Greek term ob skene (‘off stage’), as violent acts in Greek theatre were committed away from the eyes of the audience: offstage, behind the scenes,” and it has come “to describe expressions that deviate from prevalent norms especially of ‘sexual morality.’”[92] It is important to note that the obscene is, among all these concepts, the one with a legal existence in the form of “obscenity laws that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century across Europe, followed by the USA towards the end of that century.”[93] Obscenity laws regulate and suppress materials such as images or speech that violate community standards of taste and decency. Their existence remains controversial, tackling with the limits of free speech, and bringing forth the question of who gatekeeps the “redeeming” value of obscene art.[94] Many artworks have been subjected to notorious obscenity trials, like William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the 1960s, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment in 1990. The most notorious intersection of cuteness and the obscene are the many forms of “erotic cute” in Japan, ranging from erocawa (or ero-kawaii) women’s fashion[95] to lolicon (“Lolita complex”) comics. [Figures 20 & 21] Possession of this kind of drawn erotica or pornography, which depicts minors in animanga style, has originated several court cases and convictions in countries such as the United States and Canada. It has also resulted in the banning of anime series like A Kite (1998) in Norway, Puni Puni Poemy (a 2001 spin-off of the popular Excel Saga) in New Zeeland, or Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (2013) in Russia.

Finally, disgust is primarily an emotional response to aversive stimuli that “helps to ensure the safety of the organism by inhibiting contact with what is foul, toxic, and thereby.”[96] Nevertheless, as Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry Smith argue in their introduction to philosopher Aurel Kolnai’s 1927 On Disgust (Der Ekel, the first phenomenological treatise on this topic), disgust “is in fact a highly cognitive emotion, which provides information about features of the outer world not readily available by other means, and which also reveals something about the complexities and shadows of our inner psychic life.”[97] As such, disgust is not only a reaction to “decay and foulness in the sensory realm,” for instance, putrefaction or excessive vitality, “but also to moral decay and foulness of character.”[98] According to Kolnai’s view, disgust connects strongly to one’s ethical judgment, and, interestingly, one of his most distinctive object of disgust is “sentimentality, moral stupor, and even dull-witted gushing and reveling, the whole range of insolidity of the intellectual and moral life.”[99] This aspect is relevant to cuteness considering that, as Dale suggests, the surplus affect triggered by cuteness is redirected towards the beholder, who “takes pleasure in the intensity of this assault upon its sovereignty… in a form of linguistic or behavioral self-limitation”[100] manifesting as “cooing, squealing, exclamations of ‘Aww,’ and so on.”[101] Ngai also analyses the  “deverbalizing effect” of the cute in terms of a quasi-retributive movement. She writes, “in soliciting a response along the line of a murmur or coo, the cute object shows its ability to infantilize the language of its infantilizer, dissolving syntactic divisions and reducing one’s lexicon to onomatopoeia.”[102]

Ngai points out that this “soft gushing type”[103] of language (as Kolnai puts it) opposes the firmness and constancy privileged in the Western, post-Enlightenment construction of knowledge and meaning, and therefore—although generally a source of warm and fuzzy feelings—may elicit the moral disgust from those whose appreciation of art and culture operates within a phallogocentric framework.[104] In this sense, the aww-factor of cuteness and the yuck-factor of disgust share a prelinguistic move, whose bodily, subsemiotic effect on audiences results in their often being associated with inferior cultural positions. In pop culture, “pure” disgust tends to be overridden by the scary, the grotesque, or the ugly, namely in the horror genre (e.g., in films like Gremlins, 1984, and Child’s Play, 1988, staring the Chucky doll). I find the newborn Alien of Alien Resurrection (1997) to be an excellent example of “purer” disgusting cute. The Newborn is a human/xenomorph hybrid in which the alien is cutified with kinderschema. Its big dewy eyes and snub nose add an aww-factor to the film’s emotional narrative, as Ripley 8 is forced to destroy a creature who recognizes her as their mother while maintaining the yuck-factor in full force. [Figure 22a, b] The visceral sequence of live birth from a xenomorphic womb and the fact that the Newborn had hermaphrodite genitalia (removed in post-production for being too shocking[105]) heightens the disgust attached to the baby alien.

In the end, all these declinations of the categories of cuteness and negativity amount to unsettling or “bad encounters”[106] with works of art or pop culture in which the cute plays a significant role in shaping our thoughts, impressions, and feelings. As stated before, my encyclopedia focuses on the aesthetics of the kawaii because it offers the most advantageous site for exploring the dark and antagonistic qualities instilled in or aroused by cute objects. In part, this is a result of the kawaii, as an aesthetic of consumption or consumer aesthetics, being particularly entangled with Japan “as an improper nation-state.” As anthropologist Marilyn Ivy puts it, Japan’s “self-identification… with economic prosperity alone (and the identification by national others of Japan with that prosperity) is perhaps unprecedented,”[107] plunging the country into a state of (self-) abjection once it hit a wall of economic stagnation. Other aspects, such as gender roles and the strength of Japan’s comics and animation industry, likewise factor into the uniqueness of Japanese cute. For this reason, I will expand on the history of the kawaii, from its etymology to its roots in post-war and postmodern Japan.

The setting of the kawaii: etymology, history, culture

The kawaii today is present in a broad range of cultural commodities, not just Japanese comics and animation. For instance, aidoru and tarento (Japanese singers and television entertainers), purikura (photos with cute filters and stamps), kyaraben (meals arranged to look like cute characters), high fashion and street fashion like lolita and decora, videogames from Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog to classic visual novels like Clannad, and even in the work of videogame music by composers like Nintendo’s Kondo Koji, known for the iconic Super Mario Bros theme. [Video 3] In this section, I will address the roots of the word kawaii in Japan and the historical events that shaped the emergence of Japanese cute culture in the postwar decades, as well as the context of Japanese postmodernism, the Superflat art movement, and Cool Japan in the 2000s.

Like the “cute,” the kawaii carries a similar etymological ambiguity. Despite the phonological resemblance to the Chinese word kě'ài (可愛, “lovable”), the adjective kawaii (かわいい) is a modern form of kawayui (かわゆい), which in turn derives from the archaic Japanese expression kao hayushi (顔映し) or kawayushi, meaning “red-faced,” in the sense of embarrassed or guilty of conscience.[108] The term first appeared in late Heian sources like Konjaku Monogatari, an anonymous anthology of Buddhist and secular tales collected in the early twelfth century, and early eleventh century Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) by Murasaki Shikibu. In these texts, the word is used to describe a sentiment of empathy and pity,[109] which is still observable today in the adjective kawaisōna, with the same root as kawaii, meaning “poor,” “pitiable,” “pathetic,” or “pitiful.”

During the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), the meaning of the kawaii shifted to describe “animals and persons of a lesser standing, with an emphasis on their helpless state,”[110] growing a gendered association with women who fit the neo‑Confucian ideals of demureness and obedience.[111] The words kawayuishi and kawayui were printed in dictionaries from the Taishō period (1912-26) to the end of World War II,[112] but it was not until the 1970s that the kawaii gained its contemporary meaning. Shiokawa Kanako argues that this shift coincides with the transformation of the kawaii from a closed concept applicable to a small number of things, to an umbrella term that “soon… achieved today’s status of a very useful, pleasantly positive, but strangely nondescript expression.”[113] Today, other Japanese words whose meanings orbit around the kawaii include sunao (“obedient,” “meek,” “docile,” “honest,” “frank”), enryogachi (“shy,” “reserved”), kodomoppoi (“childish,” “childlike,” “immature,” “infantile”), mujaki (“innocence,” “simple-minded”), or musenkinin (“irresponsible”). On the contrary, terms such as kibishii (“severe,” “strict,” “rigid,” “harsh,” “though”), kitsui (“rigid,” “sharp”), or nikui (“hateful,” “poor‑looking,” “detestable”) serve as antonyms of kawaii.

Scholars like Joshua Dale contest whether the word kawaii, today, retains any negativity beyond this “pleasantly positive” ring. Dale argues that while “The modern kawaii comes from the word for pitiable (kawaisō)… at present the word has no negative connotations.”[114] Still, Kinsella’s research on cute culture in the 1980s and 1990s Japan makes a strong case that the “cute and pitiful were often the same thing,” suggesting that “a sense of weakness and disability—which is a part of childishness—was a very important constituent of the cute aesthetic.”[115] On a similar note, in the 2000s, Miura Jun, a cultural critic and illustrator who introduced the term yuru kyara for Japanese local mascots with unsophisticated designs, stated that these characters display “a sense of instability that makes them all the more lovable, and one’s heart feels healed just by looking at them.”[116] [Figure 23] For Miura, then, the mascots’ “internal instability,”[117] i.e., their weakness both in terms of artistry (of design) and the soundness of construction (of the 3D costumes), intensifies their cuteness. Additionally, the fact that, in everyday life, the kawaii is in the eye of the beholder, results in it being used to challenge the boundaries of the social (and antisocial), as in the case of Japanese high school students surprising their teacher by describing a drawing of a girl impaled on a merry-go-round as “cute.”[118] It seems that, at least in some instances, contemporary kawaii does maintain a nuance of pity, helplessness, and embarrassment, distinct from the manipulation in “cute,” and the term’s flexibility makes it is readily applicable to the aesthetics of negativity.

The pervasiveness of cute culture and aesthetics in Japan is often linked to the country’s “long postwar.”[119] In historian Harry Harootunian’s words, “what lasted a few years as military occupation became the trope of lasting experience Japanese have lived for a half-century.”[120] Artist Murakami Takashi, who masterminded the postmodern art movement Superflat, has advocated this discourse on the kawaii as a symptom of “cultural schizophrenia,”[121] the manifestation of repressed feelings of emasculation and infantilization resulting from Japan’s passage from colonizer to colonized at the end of World War II—including both “hard” and “soft” traumas ranging from physical devastation to the country’s “defanging” in the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which forbids the use of state belligerency. His 2005 manifesto book and exhibition, Little Boy (significantly, held at the Japanese Society in New York) cemented this connection with a pun on the image of a child and the code name of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima.

While Portuguese missionaries were the first Europeans to arrive on Japanese shores in 1543, the country soon closed its frontiers to the outside world to resist both to the Chinese Celestial Empire ambitious imperialism and to the rise of European expansion. The 250 years of Sakoku (“closed country”) isolationism under the Tokugawa dynasty, based on a reinforced shogunate hierarchy, was a period of stability and prosperity, during which only Rangaku studies (Dutch/Western books and scientific and technical treaties) kept an effective channel of communication with Europe.[122] The re-opening of Japan to foreign trade and diplomatic relations (Treaty of Kanagawa) followed the arrival to the Edo bay of the American Black Ship flotilla led by Commodore Matthew Perry’s expeditions of 1852–53 and 1854.[123] The end of this policy of national isolation brought about vast political and social changes inspired by Western models during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and continued throughout the Taishō Democracy (1912–26), a period which spanned the time before and after World War I. In turn, Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, became the symbol of a historical moment in which, in the eyes of the Japanese, “the West—which essentially meant the United States—was extraordinarily rich and powerful, and Japan was incredibly weak and vulnerable.”[124] [Video 4] The 1951 congressional hearings of Douglas MacArthur, the American general who led Japan’s military occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1952, crystallized this inferiority complex for posterity when he declared that Japan was “like a boy of twelve” who stumbled into war somewhat inadvertently.[125] As argued by historian John Dower,

Although the old soldier himself might fade away in Japanese conscience, more quickly and gracelessly than he had ever imagined possible, the issue he unwittingly brought so floridly to the fore would not and could not be dispelled. After all, the Japanese had routinely spoken of themselves as MacArthur’s children… The entire occupation had been premised on acquiescing in America’s overwhelming paternalistic authority; and even as sovereignty drew near, even as the nation was being rehabilitated as a Cold War partner, the Americans never had any real expectation that an equitable relationship would be the result. The new military was a “little American army,” obviously destined to remain under U.S. control. The new economy was inordinately dependent on American support and indulgence. Much of the rest of the world—on both side of the Cold War divide—was, in fact, appalled and alarmed by the haste with which the democratization agenda had been abandoned, the old guard resurrected, and remilitarization promoted. In such circumstances, it was still difficult to imagine a sovereign Japan as anything other than dependent on and subordinate to the United States for the foreseeable future—a client in all but name.[126] 

In the wake of World War II, Japan entered a period of kyodatsu (“exhaustion,” “despondency”), immortalized in Takahata Isao’s 1988 anti-war anime feature film Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies), in which the task of physical survival was seemingly impossible. [Figure 24] This hurdle was overcome with distinction by the Japanese economic miracle from the post-war era to the end of the Cold War, in which the country achieved unprecedented levels of economic growth and material prosperity. The world fair held in Osaka in 1970, with the motto “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” symbolized by Okamoto Tarō’s building-sculpture Taiyō no Tō (Tower of the Sun), encapsulated this period’s celebratory mood. [Figure 25] Nevertheless, a “politically depressed position”[127] gradually set in. The 1973 oil crisis and the recessions of the second half of the 1980s culminated in the Tokyo stock market crash in 1987, and the bubble burst in 1991. The “lost decade” (ushinawareta jūnen) of the 1990s exposed the hefty social and environmental costs of Japan’s economic growth: air and soil pollution, the karōshi (“death by overwork”) epidemic,[128] corruption and fraud, child prostitution, rising suicide rates, among others.[129] Over the second half of the 1990s, the Tokyo subway sarin attack by Aum Shinrikyo—a doomsday cult that was popular among university students for its use of anime and pop imagery [Figure 26a, b]—the Kobe earthquake in 1995, and the Tokaimura nuclear accidents of 1999 aggravated the atmosphere of precarity as Japan entered into the new millennium.

The postwar political depression can be traced back, for instance, to the sense of disappointment at the civil and student uprisings of the 1960s, which failed to block the United States-Japan Security Treaty, reform the universities or produce a lasting political movement.[130] [Figure 27] Instead, the riots strayed toward violent internal conflicts among the Japanese New Left (a period known as uchi-geba, “inner violence”), followed by a surge of left-wing terrorism in the late 1970s.[131] These groups’ radicalism and antisocial behavior prompted a general retreat from activism, as students became more concerned with grades and practical matters like impressing prospective employers.[132] In art, avant-garde collectives like Gutaï, Kyushu-ha, Neo-Dada Organizers, Zero Jigen, Hi Red Center, or the Expo ’70 Destruction Co-struggle Group, that rebelled against the Japanese art establishment and traditional master-disciple relations, captured the Japanese public imagination. But their scandalous performances were interpreted more as a part of the eccentric lifestyle of new generations than bona fide artistic actions and failed to put down lasting roots in Japan—despite the considerable attention they have received from the Western art world and scholarship.[133] [Figure 28]

The 1970s shirake sedai, or “spoilt generation,” perceived to be apathetic about social issues, was followed by the shinjinrui (“new humanity”) in the 1980s, a cohort of young people “feted and feared for their misplaced, though voracious, consumer appetites.”[134] Of particular importance at this time was the generational epithet “moratorium people” (moratoriaum ningen), coined by Okonogi Keigo in 1978 to characterize these apathetic and consumerist youths who refused to grow up and enter the world of adults. [Figure 29]  According to Kinsella, the moratorium people embodied the contradiction between the new ideas and sensibilities of post-war generations on love, sexuality, friendship, freedom, and happiness, and their lives still organized in terms of hierarchy, authority, and social obligation (in Japanese, giri).[135] This contradiction was especially pronounced for young women, relegated to secretarial duties and expected to become “professional wives” and mothers supporting their overworked husbands and children.[136] In this sense, the younger Japanese generations did not fully enjoy the civic rights acquired during the Occupation, translating into a mistrust felt by young adults in the face of society, beginning with the adoption of children’s culture, like manga, by college students in the 1960s, as a rebellion against traditional Japanese values.[137] Even today, the idea that Japan’s youth fails at “adulting” underlines panics related to NEETs (“Not in Education, Employment, or Training”), hikikomori shut-ins, otaku nerds, enjo-kōsai schoolgirls into “compensated dating” (going on dates with older men in exchange for money and gifts), parasite singles (unmarried career women who live with their parents throughout their 30s and 40s), and herbivore men (with no active interest in pursuing sex or relationships), who often emerge as scapegoats for the country’s demographic crises.

Ironically, while the Japanese society at large condemns the moratorium people, in the eyes of the world, Japan has become “one nation under cute.”[138] From the 1970s onwards, kawaii culture rose to unprecedented heights, transforming into “a living entity that pervades everything”[139]; from the grassroots emergence of maru-moji (“round letters”) cute handwriting among schoolgirls[140] to the booming “fancy goods” industry, epitomized by the launch of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty in 1975[141] [Figure 30 & 31]; from the stratosphere of pop stars like Matsuda Seiko, the “eternal idol,” or the likes of AKB48, Hatsune Miku, or Babymetal, to everyday consumer behavior, like eating ice cream and sweets, or the making of kyaraben lunch boxes, arranged to look like cute characters by dedicated homemakers. [Figures 32, 33 & 34 ] The kawaii is used by subcultures rebelling against the establishment [Figure 35], and by the establishment itself—the government, the police, the military, and all sorts of private and public institutions, which employ stylized animal mascots or cute anime girls as a tool for strategic communication with the public [Figure 36 & 37].  In the 2010s, even the “moratorium people” themselves have been cutified in a new wave of beloved characters from companies like Sanrio and the San-X, in kawaii mascots for the millennial generation like the lethargic, genderless egg yolk Gudetama (Sanrio, 2013) or the OL (“office lady”) red panda Aggressive Retsuko, an accountant in her mid-twenties who vents her deep-seated labor frustrations by singing death metal in karaoke at night (Sanrio, 2015). [Videos 5 & 6]

Ultimately, the dissemination of the kawaii reacts against the “tremendous tension”[142] of interpersonal relationships in Japan, resulting from the Confucian public sphere and collective capitalism where “relative status differences define nearly all social interactions.”[143] The Japanese language itself reflects this: verbal tenses, personal pronouns, nouns, and adjectives have specific endings applied according to superior/inferior relations, and the list of honorifics is long (-san, -chan, -kun, and -sama are some examples). According to Kinsella, “This underlying ideology is another reason why rebellion against society in Japanese youth culture has developed into a rebellion against adulthood”; it also explains why “intellectuals, ascetics and artistic outsiders from Japanese society have long carried the stigma of infantilism, and some have possibly even played up to the image of being childlike eccentrics”[144] (e.g., Murakami Takashi—more on this shortly). Contrary to the Western tradition where adulthood equals emancipation, in Japan “maturity is commonly considered as the ability to cooperate well in a group, to accept compromises, to fulfill obligations to parents, employers, and so on, and carry out social responsibilities.”[145] This aspect has shaped kawaii culture at large, as an “indolent little rebellion rather than a conscious, aggressive and sexually provocative rebellion of the sort that has been typical of western youth culture.”[146] Although Western countercultures have also incorporated what Bradon LaBelle calls “weak-strength”[147] in their protests, for instance, in Flower Power and other movements of passive resistance, kawaii culture rarely takes on the form of a counterculture sensu stricto, i.e., it may gnaw at prevailing social norms, but it is seldom formulated, openly, as anti-establishment.

Japanese “postmodernism” is a contested site, so much so that, according to Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, “to confuse Japan’s non-modernity with the West’s ‘postmodernism’ is perhaps a serious error.”[148] Japanese postmodernism entails not just the “local expressions of postmodern and global transformations of late capitalist society that have developed over decades”[149] but an historical and geographic displacement (e.g., the Middle and the Far East are only so in relation to Western countries), in which the West becomes the telos of non-Westerners, who can only ever be its imitator.[150] Ironically, even as the authenticity of Japan’s modernity and postmodernity came under scrutiny, Japan seemed to fulfill its destiny as the place where (Western) history came to an end.[151] For instance, in a footnote to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1968), philosopher Alexandre Kojève claimed that Japan is a “totally formalized” society whose encounter with the West will “lead not to a rebarbarization of the Japanese but to a ‘Japanization’ of the Westerners”[152]; while Roland Barthes famously called Japan L'empire des signes (Empire of Signs) in 1970. [Figure 38] The Japanese themselves have been complicit with the exoticization and commodification of Japaneseness,[153] not least postmodern Japaneseness, or the Japaneseness of the postmodern. Murakami Takashi taps into such portrayals of depthless Japan by Western philosophers in his artist’s books and manifestos, Superflat (2000) and Little Boy (2005); indeed, “The Super Flat Manifesto” opens with the promise-threat that “The world of the future might be like Japan is today—super flat.”[154] [Figure 39a, b] In such discourses, like in the techno-orientalist dystopias of sci-fi films such as Blade Runner (1984), Japan occupies, as Marilyn Ivy puts it, “an almost comforting figure of danger and promise,”[155] a thrilling menace to Western reason and individualism. 

In 1980s Japan, “postmodernism” itself became a new kind of informational commodity, fueled by the boom of “new academicians” or “postacademicians” like Asada Akira, author of Kōzō to Chikara: Kigōron o koete (“Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics,” 1983)—an elaborate investigation on European postmodern and post-structuralist philosophy which became an overnight bestseller in Japan. [156] [Figure 40] Postmodernism offered an opportunity to celebrate Japan’s “triumph over modernity and over history itself,”[157] intersecting with the discourses of nihonjinron, i.e., books written by Japanese authors for Japanese audiences on the uniqueness of Japanese identity. As Yoda Tomiko puts it,

Japan’s establishment as an economic superpower, superseding the majority of Western nations in the contest of capital accumulation, therefore, unleashed a powerful sense that Japan had finally reached its ultimate national aspiration by not only completing but also going beyond modernization, becoming freed from the historical scenario of modernity that has consistently precluded it from a full-fledged subject position and historical agency.[158]

In the recessionary 1990s, the celebration of Japanese postmodernism deflated as new critics, like Miyadai Shinji, Ōtsuka Eiji, and Azuma Hiroki, author of Dobutsuka suru Postmodern: Otaku kara mita nihon shakai (“Animalizing Postmodern: Japan Society from the viewpoint of the otaku,” translated to English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals), oft-cited in my encyclopedia,turned their attention to Japanese subcultures, like the otaku. [Figure 41] Asada and other new academicians criticized them for what, in their view, was a return to Japanese parochialism opposed to cosmopolitan postmodernity.[159] For Asada, “Alphabetized and contracted, J is Japan as a site if the trashy pop culture of otaku, video games and animations.”[160] But as Murakami goes to great lengths to explain in his 2000 book Superflat, in late-modern Japan, there is a more fluid relationship between art and entertainment  when compared to European and American concepts of “high culture.”[161] Respected artists, like Okamoto Tarō or cult director Kitano Takeshi, have doubled as televisions entertainers—a path that Murakami also pursued with various appearances in game shows[162] and the clownish nature of his public presence, which is often consistent with the trope of the infantilized intellectual (mentioned in the previous section). [Figure 42] Likewise, in the 1980s press, Asada and other “new academicians” became part of a broader star system of young Japanese creatives, in which their hard-line theoretical work did not differ fundamentally from that of advertisers like Itoi Shigesato.[163] The fact that it is not uncommon for department stores like PARCO to host prestigious art shows further contributes to this blurring of art and mass culture in Japan[164]; in fact, the first Superflat exhibition was held at Parco Gallery in Tokyo, in 2000.[165]

In Superflat, Murakami also underlines that, in Japan, “art” and “craft” did not exist as discrete categories until the late ninetieth century. Therefore, the slippery definition of “art” dates back to the Meiji period and “the difficulties that were experienced in transplanting the (Western) concept of art into Japan, including the classification, training, and exhibition of art, without the European post-Romantic concept of individual subjectivity and the ideology of original expression.”[166] Because Japanese words like geijutsu (芸術, emphasizing “technique” or “craft”) or bijutsu (美術, emphasizing “beauty”) failed to account for the Western concept of avant-garde, this resulted, as Murakami puts it, in “the frustrating ‘non-art’ status that much of Japanese art bears, both within, and outside of the country.”[167] To be sure, not only did the “traditional” art world in Japan (art schools, galleries, art markets, museums) not compare to the country’s big, well-oiled entertainment industry,[168] but Japanese comics and animation proved capable of producing some of the most innovative and influential artworks, both domestically and on a global scale. Likewise, radical ideas continued to pop up in unlikely places, such as the subcultures of cuteness, girlishness, amateurs, or pornography, that captured the interest and admiration of international audiences.

Moreover, the rise of Superflat in the contemporary art scene during the 2000s fueled and was fueled by Cool Japan, a governmental policy to promote Japan’s “indigenous” pop culture abroad, prompted by the 2002 article “Japan’s Gross National Cool” by American journalist Douglas McGray (even if Murakami himself has been critical of it).[169] Artists affiliated with Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki art production company, such Mr., Takano Aya, Aoshima Chiho, Ban Chinatsu, or Kunikata Mahomi, and those associated with the broader Neo-pop movement, like Nara Yoshitomo, Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, Odani Motohiko, Kudo Makiko, Aoki Ryoko, Murata Yuko, Tabaimo, Yanobe Kenji,  or Ando Hiro, among many others, put anime, manga, and the kawaii in the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums. [Figures 43 & 44] As sociologist Adrian Favell points out, Superflat practically became synonymous with Japanese postmodern art, muffling a variety of other styles, trends, and concepts of artists as Yanagi Yukinori, Nakamura Masato, and Sone Yukata, or those belonging to the Group 1965 (Shōwa 40 nen kai)—Ozawa Tsuyoshi, Matsukage Hiroyuki, Kinoshita Parco, Tosa Masamichi, or American-Brazilian Oscar Oiwa of Japanese descent.[170] Even pioneering Japanese pop artists, e.g., Ohtake Shinro, were to some extent overlooked, but have begun surfacing as Superflat’s popularity wears off in the Western art world, if not in the global art market.[171] Ohtake, for instance, was featured in the dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and the Venice Biennale in 2013. [Figure 47a, b]

In the 2000s, the kawaii became a vital cog in the Cool Japan machine, leading to what anthropologist Christine Yano has coined the term “pink globalization” to address the “spread of kawaii (cute) goods and related media from primarily Japan throughout much of the industrial world,”[172] for instance, cute icons like Hello Kitty or Sailor Moon. In 2009, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs even began to appoint kawaii ambassadors, tasked with publicizing Japan’s culture of cuteness around the world, such as lolita fashion model Aoki Misako or creepy-cute aidoru Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.[173] [Figure 48] While, in the 1990s, Japanization was mostly framed within a discourse of hybridism, indigenization, or domestication of foreign culture—one in which, as Ivy puts it, “The image of Japan as the great assimilator arises to explain away any epistemological snags or historical confusions”[174]—the Cool Japan trend signals a new project of cultural re-nationalization.[175] According to media theorist Iwabuchi Kōichi, then, the rise in the twenty-first century of manga, anime, Japanese videogames, and kawaii culture to the status of soft powers, capable of rivaling the hegemony of American culture, aligns with the tenets of “glocalization” and an “inter-nationalist” (instead of genuinely international) cultural diplomacy.[176]

Cuteness and manga

Cuteness in Japanese comics and animation has evolved across different demographics and in close relation—sometimes, opposition—to orbiting concepts such as kirei (“pretty”), utsukushii (“beautiful”), jojō (“lyricism”), tanbi (“aesthetics”), or even “undesirable” traits like creepy, ugly, and grotesque, among others. The kawaii permeates both lyrical girls’ comics and action-packed boys’ comics, it seeps into the realm of erotic and pornographic manga, like boys’ love and lolicon, and blends seamlessly with the imagery of horror and psychedelia. Beloved creepy-cute characters from the 1960s, like Mizuki Shigeru’s Kitarō or Umezu Kazuo’s Cat Eyed Boy, Hino Hideshi’s Hell Baby (Gaki Jigoku, 1984), or girls’ manga like Mizuno Junko’s Pure Trance (1996-98), [Figure 49] attest to the vitality of such encounters. In this section, I present an overview of the pivotal role of Japanese comics and animation in the creation, development, and dissemination of kawaii cultures and aesthetics, from its origins in the Interwar period throughout the 2000s.

While kawaii culture boomed in the 1970s, its emergence can be traced back much earlier, to the beginning of the twentieth century and the worldwide rise of children’s consumer culture and entertainment. Norakuro (1931–81), Bōken Dankichi (1933–39), or Tank Tankurō (1934), were popular comic strips or episodic manga featuring human and non-human characters (a dog, a boy, and a robot, respectively) published in boys’ magazines like Shōnen Club during the interwar era. [Figure 50] Much like funny animals in Western children’s books (e.g., The Wind in the Willows), newspaper comic strips (e.g., Krazy Kat), and animated cartoons (e.g., Silly Symphony, Talkartoons, Looney Tunes, or Merrie Melodies), these relied on humor and cute aesthetics to entertain modern adults and children alike. In Japan, later works such as Kasei Tanken (“Expedition to Mars,” 1940), employed cuteness in longer, more sophisticated narratives, reminiscent of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, [Figure 51] but for the most part, manga remained targeted at children until the 1950s. Matsumoto Katsuji, a late addition to the manga history canon whose work has been rediscovered in two important exhibitions at the Yayoi Museum in Tokyo, in 2006 and 2014,[177] was one of the essential kawaii pioneers. He published comics and illustrations in girls’ magazines—including the ground-breaking shōjo manga Nazo no Clover (“Mysterious Clover,” 1934) [Figure 52a, b]—until he retired in 1955 to illustrate children's fiction, and founded a company specializing in baby goods, that created the widely popular kawaii characters Haamu and Monii.[178] [Figure 53]

Matsumoto’s most popular manga, Kurukuru Kurumi-chan, serialized in the girl’s magazine Shōjo no Tomo (“Girl’s Friend”) from 1938 to 1940, followed the domestic exploits of a spunky little girl called Kurumi (“walnut”). [Figure 54] Kurumi was influenced by the “cute kids”[179] popularized by American and British illustrators of children’s and women’s books, magazines, and ephemera in the early 1900s: Grace Drayton’s Campbell Soup Kids and Dolly Dimples, Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie [Figure 55]—which became widely counterfeited in Japan in the 1920s—and Mabel Lucie Attwell.[180] Kurumi’s formal attributes changed drastically over the decades,[181] from a “roughly four heads tall” preadolescent girl in the manga’s early episodes to “an extremely stylized character no more than two heads high, and of unknown age”[182] by the 1950s. [Figure 56] Alongside other artistic, social, and historical contexts underlying the shift, Kurumi’s evolution may reflect the iconic, stylized, kyara-like look[183] that emerged after World War II, for instance, in characters like the popular Tetsuwan Atomu (or Astro Boy, in the English translation).

Matsumoto’s comics impacted the development of Japanese cuteness, notably, when they diverged from the style of jojō-ga (“lyrical drawing”) developed by prominent modern painters and designers like Takehisa Yumeji, [Figure 57] Nakahara Jun’ichi, [Figure 58] or Kashō Takabatake, that dominated Japanese girls’ and women’s magazine covers and illustrations during the interwar era.[184] Unlike the lively characters in Matsumoto’s manga,[185] jojō-ga was lyrical and romantic, decadent and sentimental, with a taste for affluent beauties with big, melancholic eyes.[186] These “Yumeji beauties” (as they became known, after Takehisa Yumeji’s art) became the archetype for the slender heroines of post-war shōjo manga. In particular, Nakahara “depicted girls with big wet eyes and long eyelashes as opposed to the traditional hikime-kagibana concept of facial beauty,”[187] which featured slit eyes and hook noses (present, for instance, in Edo-period woodblock prints and paintings). As manga artist Hanamura Eiko puts it, Nakahara’s Westernized girl characters, resulting from a cocktail of influences from global and domestic sources including art deco, silent film-era Hollywood actresses, and the Japanese all-female musical theater troupe Takarazuka Revue, introduced cuteness to an element of “no-nationality… as it wasn’t clear which country they were from.”[188]

Jojō-ga artists also illustrated Class S literature, i.e., stories about romantic friendships between girls, like Yoshiya Nobuko’s Hana Monogatari (“Tales of Flowers,” 1916-1924) or Kawabata Yasunari and Nakazato Tsuneko’s Otome no Minato (“Port of Maidens,” 1938).[189] Takahashi Macoto continued the jojō-ga tradition in the post-war, mostly in illustrations and covers,[190] but also in shōjo manga like Sakura Namiki (“Rows of Cherry Trees,” 1957) and Tokyo-Paris (1959), which introduced innovative panel and page layouts oriented towards the expression of feelings and atmospheres.[191] [Figure 59] Takahashi’s drawings of starry-eyed foreign princesses were influential in the creation of lolita fashion,[192] and have enjoyed continued popularity among its practitioners.[193] [Figure 60] Takahashi, along with female authors like Nishitani Yoshiko (Mary Lou, 1965), Hanamura Eiko (Kiri no Naka no Shōjo, “Girl in the Fog,” 1968), Hideko Mizuno (Fire!, 1969–1971, the first girls’ manga with a male protagonist and a sex scene), and Maki Miyako—who also created Japan’s famous Barbie-like doll, Licca-chan, in 1967 [Figure 61]—were instrumental in developing shōjo manga visually, narratively, and thematically throughout the 1960s. Drawing from Masubuchi Sōichi’s Kawaii Shokogun (“Cute Syndrome,” 1994), Shiokawa Kanako explains that:

The most significant feature of this particular art style in the late sixties was the overwhelmingly large eyes of just about all the characters, many taking up nearly half of the faces…. Specifically (and often derisively) known as shōjo manga eyes, characters in such girls’ comics had huge eyes made of enormous, dilated orbs of black pupils filled with numerous stars, sparkles, and glittering dots… These large-eyed girls were always accompanied by highly stylized drawings of blooming flowers that crowded the background. These flowers were so abundant and so consistent in girls’ comics that their presence became the signature feature, an icon, of the girls’ comics style.[194]

Shiokawa also notes the “nearly complete avoidance of secondary sexual features, especially breasts”[195] during this period, that kept heroines in safe girl‑child territory and assured they were cute girls instead of beautiful, grown-up women.

In the postwar period, kodomo manga (children’s comics) continued to prosper, with characters in the tradition of interwar children’s mascots like Norakuro and Tank Tankuro. The unavoidable reference is Tezuka Osamu (1928-89), the author whose centrality to the postwar manga and anime canon and industry earned him the monikers “father of manga,” “god of manga,” or “the Walt Disney of Japan.”[196] Tezuka is the author of cute characters which have raised to the status of Japanese national mascots, such as Leo and Tetsuwan Atomu—known, in the West, as Kimba the White Lion and Astro Boy, respectively, a lion cub and a boy robot. The latter was also the first anime television series, produced by Tezuka’s animation studio Mushi Production and aired from 1963 to 1966. [Figure 62] Although Tezuka dabbled in shōjo manga with Ribbon no Kishi (Princess Knight, 1953-56), a fantasy adventure following in the footsteps of Nazo no Clover’s tomboy (otenba) heroine, Tezuka’s main contribution to kawaii culture was his borrowing of  Disneyesque cuteness to create kyara, i.e., a very stylized character, often with cute features and proportions.[197] As noted by scholar Marco Pellitteri, although Tezukian kyara were kawaii, they were often “involved in stories where their substance is not abstract but solid, vulnerable, and at times mortal.”[198] However, in the case of later kyara that took inspiration from Tezuka, like the beloved robotic cat Doraemon, [Figure 63] the body of the cute mascot typically becomes “dehumanized and superhumanized, abstract and inanimate,”[199] and thus no longer subject to vulnerability and death.

In the 1970s, authors like Igarashi Yumiko (Candy Candy, 1975-79) or Yamato Waki (Haikara-san ga Tōru, 1975-77, Asakiyumemishi, 1979) helped revitalize the shōjo demographic with strong female leads, while sticking to traditional themes (e.g., heart-warming stories about orphans). [Figure 64] Moreover, the 1970s cemented an influential trope that contrasted ordinary cute heroines with the more mature‑looking, utsukushii (“beautiful”) nemesis. Shiokawa exemplifies the cute vs. beauty trope, for instance, by comparing Marie Antoinette, the protagonist of Ikeda Ryoko’s manga hit Versailles no Bara (The Rose of Versailles, 1972-73), with her nemesis, Madame Du Barry. As she puts it,

This particular formula implicitly leaves a message that being ‘cute’ is a virtue and, in an oddly paradoxical way, strength. However, cuteness in this instance is not in direct opposition to ugliness or neatness. It is clear by the characteristics of the heroine’s nemesis that cuteness in the girls’ comics convention battles against “beauty,” that is, perfection and maturity… Masubuchi argues that physical beauty is a fatefully determined state of perfection, unlike the states indicated by such expressions as kirei (pretty, neat), suteki (dashing), or kakko ii (cool, good‑looking)… In other words, even conventionally ‘ugly’ or ‘plain’ persons, as many girls’ comics heroines are supposed to be, can make themselves ‘cute’ by working hard at it.[200]

Ikeda Ryoko is part of the Year 24 Group (Nijūyo-nen Gumi), a group of female manga artists that revolutionized the shōjo genre in the 1970s. Along with Ikeda, authors such as Hagio Moto (Thomas no Shinzō, The Heart of Thomas, 1974-75), Takemiya Keiko (Kaze to Ki no Uta, “Ballad of the Wind and the Trees,” 1976-84), or Aoike Yasuko’s Eroica Yori Ai wo Komete (From Eroica With Love, 1976-2012),[201] changed the form and content of Japanese girls’ comics. As well, their work rehabilitated the genre in the eyes of the critics and a broader crowd (beyond the target audience of teenage girls), that up to that point had generally held a negative view on girls’ comics.[202] The Year 24 Group breathed a new depth and expanded the scope of what cuteness can express. Ikeda’s Versailles no Bara, for instance, experimented with gender and class roles and introduced a political flavor into the love narrative, namely, with the iconic character of Lady Oscar, an androgynous female lead who joins the French Revolution. [Figure 65] In turn, Hagio and Takemiya pioneered the shōnen-ai genre in manga with stories about same-sex love between bishōnen, i.e., doe-eyed “pretty boys” with angelic faces and androgynous bodies. Thomas no Shinzō and Kaze to Ki no Uta are both dark, existential stories set in “exotic,” decidedly non-Japanese backgrounds, namely, nineteenth-century European Catholic boarding schools, dealing with difficult topics like suicide, sexual abuse, racism, homophobia, and pedophilia. [Figures 66 & 67]

In the 1980s, the majority of bishōnen characters morphed from Hagio and Takemiya’s genderless cherubs to incorporate more masculine features, already found in the characters of Oscar and Andre from Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles or Dorian and Klaus from Aoike’s From Eroica with Love. Bishōnen characters also became associated with the rise of the dōjinshi (“self-published” or “niche” magazines) or amateur manga movement and girls’ comics magazines (e.g., June) that published tanbi (“aesthetic”) gay erotica “fusing together beauty, romance, and eroticism, along with a dash of decadence.”[203] In amateur manga, female fans began to self-publish pornographic parodies of their favorite (male-oriented) shows, such as Captain Tsubasa, Uchū Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato), or Saint Seiya, where they “liked to do silly things with manly male characters, like putting them in ballet tunics or giving them kitty ears,” or even “put the manly males in bed together.”[204] The self-deprecating term yaoi—an acronym of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, meaning “no climax, no point, no meaning”—emerged to describe these plotless gay dramedies or over-the-top melodramas. Yaoi characters from the 1980s and 1990s were often bishōnen with elongated faces, pointy chins, wide and sparkly rectangular eyes, flowy hair, and slender bodies with long legs and well-developed torsos. In Ozaki Minami’s iconic Zetsuai 1989 (1989-91), that started as a Captain Tsubasa fanzine before transitioning to commercial publication, the characters are so stylized that at times they look more like alien creatures than men. [Figure 68]

While tanbi was never entirely divorced from the kawaii, the late 1990s and 2000s brought back a cuter sensibility to boys’ love or BL (the dominant term for this genre today). Popular series like Nakamura Shungiku’s Junjō Romantica (Pure Romance, since 2003) or Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi (“The World’s Greatest First Love,” since 2006) retain tanbi elements but are populated with chibi “cute caricatures,” adorable animal mascots, round-eyed blushing boys, and lots of pink in covers and illustrations. [Figure 69] Contemporary bishōnen designs, both in yaoi and “regular” (heterosexual) shōjo manga like Fruits Basket (1998-2006) or Ōran Kōkō Host Club (Ouran High School Host Club, 2002-10), tend to have slighter body frames, larger heads with delicate jawlines and necks, and bigger eyes than the majority of their 1980s and early 1990s predecessors (e.g. Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask or Mars’ Rei Kashino). Anime also contributed to the cutification of characters, as television adaptations of manga tended to make characters rounder and more standardized (see, for instance, the difference between the Sailor Moon manga and its 1990s anime adaptation). More recent titles like Free! or Yuri!!! on Ice draw on this “cute continuum” to deliver sports anime (swimming and figure skating, respectively) catering to female audiences with “passionate friendships” between male protagonists and fanservice for women. [Figure 70]

Cuteness played an equally crucial role in the development of boys’ comics, or shōnen manga. During the 1970s and 1980s, many heroines in shōnen manga morphed into what Japanese psychologist Saitō Tamaki calls the sento bishōjo or “beautiful fighting girl.”[205] This new breed of cute female character was perky with a childlike face, and wore increasingly revealing outfits “that emphasized their smallish but well-developed breasts.”[206] [Figure 71] She was also powerful enough to fight alongside male heroes, or become the protagonist herself. [Figure 72] These characteristics distinguished the sento bishōjo from the virtuous madonnas and passive sidekicks abounding thus far,[207] fluctuating between empowerment and sexual objectification in a challenge to “easy categorization as either (or simply) a feminist or sexist script.”[208] Indeed, one of the most iconic sento bishōjo, appearing in the Daicon IV Opening Animation—a 6-minute anime made for the 1983 Nihon SF Taikai convention in Osaka, by an amateur group that went on to form the influential animation studio Gainax—is a cute girl in a Playboy bunny outfit, who singlehandedly fights an endless array of famous sci-fi and fantasy characters while air surfing in a magical sword. [Video 7] Moreover, the sento bishōjo spread across male and female demographics, from Miyazaki Hayao’s animated feature films (e.g., Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) to magical girl animanga like Takahashi Rumiko’s Urusei Yatsura, Nagai Gō’s Cutie Honey, or Takeuchi Naoko’s Sailor Moon.

The sento bishōjo contributed to the appearance of lolicon during the early 1980s, in specialized comics magazines like Lemon People or Manga Burikko, as well as dōjinshi and home video animations. Lolicon, from “Lolita complex,” is a genre of pornographic manga, anime, or videogames in which underage characters engage in sexual acts, ranging from soft eroticism to violent or “perverse” (hentai) scenarios, often with techno-fetishist elements.[209] [Figure 73] While aimed at a male adult audience, lolicon magazines in the 1980s often featured the work of female shōjo manga artists, male artists mimicking the style of girls’ comics, or other forms of cuteness.[210] In fact, “the first blatantly lolicon work in Japan”[211] was published in 1979 by the “father of lolicon,” Azuma Hideo, in a contribution to the manga fanzine Cybele that featured erotic depictions of kawaii Tezuka-style characters. Other heroines, like Miyazaki’s sento bishōjo or magical girls like Minky Momo, became lolicon icons portrayed by fans in erotic and pornographic amateur manga. As scholar Shigematsu Setsu suggests, in lolicon manga, “it is not the age of the girl that is attractive, but a form of ‘cuteness’ (kawaii‑rashii) that she represents.”[212] In this same vein, Patrick Galbraith argues that lolicon cannot be reduced to a male power fantasy, as its imagery is diverse in terms of style, content, reception, and its place in the broader crossgender flows at play in Japanese comics.[213]

In 1989, the incident of serial killer Miyazaki Tsutomu, the “otaku murderer,” who killed several children, originated a nation-wide debate on obscenity that targeted “hazardous comics” and the anime and manga superfans known as otaku (a term roughly equivalent to “nerd” or “geek” in the West). In the early 1990s, the police raided bookstores selling dōjinshi and filled obscenity charges against authors, and large-scale self-publishing events, like the Comic Market (or Comiket)—Japan’s largest fan convention, mostly dedicated to amateur manga—were put under scrutiny by the authorities.[214] While the infatuation with bishōjo characters did not waver and was reignited by the success of series like Shinseiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Tokimeki Memorial,  a new trend in male-oriented manga and anime rose in popularity that remains strong to this day: moé. Moé replaced the explicit sexuality in lolicon by feelings of tenderness and rooting for characters that fit “little sister” (imōto) or “daughter” (musume) types, sometimes round and adorable to the point of blobishness, known as a loli. The origins of moé overlap with the lolicon tradition, wavering between or combing, as Murakami Takashi puts it, “an innocent fantasy” and “distorted sexual desires.”[215] [Figure 74] However, other series within the moé anime and manga genre, like the iconic Yotsuba&! by Azuma Kiyohiko, present wholesome slice of life comedies, in which cuteness is the central affect in sophisticated storytelling and artwork. [Figure 75] For a more in-depth analysis of moé, read the encyclopedia entries “It Girl” and “CGDCT,” or the paper “She’s Not Your Waifu; She’s an Eldritch Abomination.”

CODA

Feeling Cute, Might Delete Later

i.

When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.

- Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection

A sticky film of protein forms over hot milk—white milk, sweet milk, a signifier of childhood, and baby schema. Kristeva’s words emphasize the minorness of the lactoderm. Harmless, thin, and pitiful. A fragile, volatile surface entangled with the realm of abject phenomeno-poetics, of the primal impulse to spit out and expel the Other in us.

How far can you stretch the cute, until it is nothing but insignificant?

How cute is a nail paring?

ii.

In its apparent immediacy and “dumbness,” cuteness resists, even repels, the seriousness expected from art and the academia. No matter how much thought one puts into analyzing cute things, there remains an impression of an academic hoax.

(Do we really need a paper on cat videos?)

The expression “Cute Studies” captures this contradiction. Do Cute Studies study cuteness, or are the studies themselves cute? The “cute” before the “studies” adjectivizes less than it classifies.

iii.

In “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the Abject,” Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh refer to the scatological and “scatterological” impulses in art,[216] the latter suggesting a Bataillean collapse of the structure. Like the formless, the cute is seldom informal. Instead, as Sianne Ngai puts it, it “bears the look of an object not only formed but all too easily de-formed under the pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude towards it.”[217]

My encyclopedia explores how cuteness’s dark side ties in with these de-forming drives. To which one may add—an eschatological drive toward the end of human history. Enantiodromia: the unconscious opposite of the kinderschema is death; and, of beginnings, the end.

iv.

The cute is a valuable, although undervalued, tool for navigating issues of time and scale, critical in topical debates like the Anthropocene—or, as Jen Boyle and Wan-Chao Kao point out, “the study of cuteness, at its heart, is an investigation of the problematics of temporality.”[218]

Cuteness “facilitates a kind of aesthetic time travel backward and forward,”[219] an out-of-jointness in which the Child works as a time-traveling device between the far-off past and the distant future. Our childhood (or even, ancestral) memories are put on a continuum with the discourse of “reproductive futurism,”[220] projecting our species into the future. After all, as Lee Edelman puts it, “the future is kid stuff.”[221] But in the face of our present social, technological, and environmental crises, survival is not a simple thing to do.

Far from removed from reality, the “minor” aesthetic category of cuteness has factored, and continues to factor, into the evolution of humans and nonhumans. Dogs, cats, and other “companion species” have been selectively bred to create cute pets, often with terrible consequences for their health.[222] Other species are killed in favor of cuter ones—like the grey squirrels in England, in favor of the native, and quainter, reds.[223] Studies suggest that the strong presence of cute animals like giraffes, tigers, elephants, or pandas in popular culture creates a ‘virtual population’ in the public’s mind, “actively contributing to the false perception that these animals are not at risk of extinction, and therefore not in need of conservation.”[224] Moreover, plush toys, used by green organizations to raise awareness for environmental issues, often contain non-biodegradable materials like polyester, undermining their causes.[225]

v.

Against this backdrop, the global dissemination of kawaii culture may index a broader “crisis of the future that modern capitalist societies such as Japan know,” suggesting that the West is just catching up to the state of political depression in which Japan has lived for several decades.

The image of Japan’s social order as one of harmony and consensus, “effectively solving the problems of advanced industrial societies through group cooperation,”[226] has translated into—to use Lauren Berlant’s formulation—a form of “cruel optimism.” That is, it has become a “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”[227] The phenomeno‑poetics of the kawaii negotiate this complex web of impossible or too possible desires regarding gender, nature, society, and techno-science.  

vi.

While the kawaii (and the cute in general) is entangled with the systemic violence of capitalism, it does not inevitably submit to it. In “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics” (2010), Marilyn Ivy produces the concept of parapolitics to indicate an alternative form of political engagement which often goes unrecognized but can “produce forms of solidarity resistant to right-wing politics, the justification of war, and neo-nationalist movements in Japan (and elsewhere).”[228] Works like Nara’s, in their re-functioning of the kawaii with an activist sensibility, enact a parapolitics of cuteness that hovers outside the arena of mainstream politics, as an “expressive means to identify… experiences of advanced capitalist everydayness and the mysteries of psychic maturation.”[229]

The “weak-strength” (Brandon LaBelle) of the kawaii, with all its negotiations and contradictions, can potentially resist the subjugation and control of living bodies, human or otherwise, through the joy of connectedness, of losing ourselves in the anarchic (para)politics of play.[230]

vii.

            Tackling with the cute and the kawaii entails a constant reckoning with their ambiguity. Cuteness thrives in the crevices of dialectic oppositions. Man, woman; adult, child; Western, non-Western; human, nonhuman, sexed, asexual; animate, inanimate; reality, fantasy; art, craft. Sometimes these oppositions are clouded, sometimes reinforced, but always knotty, as cute objects are “both amenable to manipulation by authoritarian structures and available as a tool to critique such institutions.”[231]

Often, cuteness works as an ambiguous image akin to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck illusion, slipping between two ways of reading it that seem to be mutually exclusive but coexist in the same formation: avant-garde or reactionary, subversive or complacent, engaged or escapist and apathetic, capable of destabilizing conservative patriarchal power or aligned with its chauvinist fantasies.

viii.

As Sianne Ngai suggests, “it is not just that cuteness is an aesthetic oriented toward commodities” but that “something about the commodity form itself already seems permeated by its sentimentality.”[232] The contrived charm of the cute, seen in adorable blobjects and smiling mascots begging us to take them home, wraps us in the warm and fuzzy feelings of self-indulgent tenderness and nostalgia, domesticity and romance.

Here, cuteness is arguably at its darkest: embedded in the industrial-complex, working as an affective apparatus for binding humans to a social and economic order that fails the Earth we inhabit and us.

ix.

Two impulses coexist in contemporary art and pop culture as far as cuteness is concerned. On the one hand, the impulse to wildify the cute. On the other, the desire to cutify the wild and dangerous.

The first takes something that is considered adorable, harmless or otherwise “prosocial” and infuses it with qualities liable to cause shock, disgust, or discomfort. The trends of guro-kawaii, kimo-kawaii, or busu-kawaii, among others, capture this stretching of the limits of the cute to the disturbing ends of antagonism and aversion. The wildification of cuteness ranges from the “soft” creepiness of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Kobitodukan to bloodier incarnations like Happy Tree Friends or Gloomy Bear, or even the sexualization of cuteness in lolicon, ero guro, and ero-kawaii.

In turn, the cutification of the wild is “connected to domestication in its broadest sense: the taming of the wild and dangerous”[233] found, for instance, in Japanese alternative idols like Babymetal or BiS, that take music genres characterized by violent imagery and mainstream inaccessibility, like metal or punk, and cutify them with the aesthetics of Japanese idol groups (e.g., Babymetal’s “Gimme Chocolate!!” or BiS’s “Idol Is Dead”). Likewise, the Superflat movement seeks to cutify the tropes of Western modernism and postmodernism. In such cases, “cuteness is raising deep-rooted anxieties towards authenticity and originality in art, and the appropriation of negativity by a sanitizing embrace of ‘cute capitalism.’”[234]

Perhaps contrary to expectations, then, the cutification of the wild—epitomized by Murakami Takashi’s cutification of the atomic bomb in Little Boy—often comes off as more unsettling than the wildification of the cute.

x.

In Logique de la Sensation (The Logic of Sensation, 1981), Gilles Deleuze writes that Francis Bacon considered himself to be “cerebrally pessimistic” but “nervously optimistic.”[235] The former relates to his figurative side, his painting the horrors of the world; the latter, to his faith in the intensity of life and sensation.

Bacon, of all artists, is decidedly not cute. But there may still be something to take home in relation to cute aesthetics. In the realm of the spectacle, the benign cute object evokes the violence inherent to the commodity form; as Ngai puts it, “what we love because it submits to us.”[236] But archaic cuteness, the “natural” cute, manifests the love of life—a shameless enjoyment of pretty colors and cuddly characters, of the fluffy, soothing, and playful. Regardless of how minor these may be with respect to the Western art canon, the aww-factor is a violent enough sensation to bleed through the spectacle, to disarticulate our sense of self and the narrative of our desires—to fall open to play, and insist on boundless compassion.

xi.

My encyclopedia maps the relationship between cuteness and negativity through cute filth, cute outbreaks, cute others, and cute scatters. It follows the entanglement of kawaii aesthetics with dirty or disgusting matters, from physical pollution to pollutive formations in mediatic milieus; instances in which alterity is rendered cute, including “abject” human others (women, LGBT+), abhuman (supernatural, alien, monstrous), and nonhuman entities (animals, robots); the collapsing boundaries of the political, legal, institutional, or stylistic, that is, the perceived contagiousness (miasma?) of cute aesthetics. Cuteness shapes and sometimes disrupts the Whole, by enacting a cutification of form and composition.

As pop-cultural artifacts associated with Japan become a central feature of twenty-first century mediatic milieus—reaching from the heights of contemporary fine arts to the netherworlds of mass culture and the “wrong side” of the Internet—the kawaii (as a corner piece of the broader cute aesthetics framework), anime, manga, visual novels, and so on  may be used as privileged analytical tools to explore these liaisons dangereuses in contemporary society at large, as they are very far from being a Japanese predicament.

The shared territories between Japanese and Western art (and societies, for that matter) in today’s globalized world become a fluid common ground that continuously shapes contemporary worldviews.