Kawaii ( かわいい) is a japanese word means ‘cute’ in English. This word is used throughout the country, it’s a very popular word for girls and women below thirty. Kawaii is reflexively said when girls see anything cute but that can go for anything such as a dog, a baby, a car, a bag, a lingerie. You read it correctly, a lingerie, this is how the word Kawaii is used, everything could be cute in Japanese people’s eyes. But it’s not a bad thing because at least when people see things cute, they are happy and that is good enough for themselves.
Here is 5 things that you didn’t know about Kawaii and the Culture of Cute which is originally written by Manami Okazaki.
1. Kawaii is not about perfection - Though kawaii design is usually associated with a roundness of composition, pastel colors and childlike facial proportions, aesthetic perfection is actually undesirable. Kazuhiko Hachiya, the designer of character goods PostPet, points out that if characters are too perfect, consumers greet them suspicion and unease.
A character from a Japanese anime
You can see no one looks like that girl in the picture in reality but this kind of cuteness is widely spreaded all over the country and gradually spreaded outside Japan. You can see no perfection in the picture, the sizes are all wrong, the coloring is too neat but this is Kawaii in their point of view.
2. Kawaii is not anything new - Kawaii culture developed largely as a result of the convergence of traditions adapting to modern times, and the appropriation and influence of Western culture, particularly after World War II. But its roots go even deeper: Many people consider its birth to be the beginning of the Taisho era (1912-1926), when designer Takehisa Yumeji made feminine items specifically marketed toward girls.
Kawaii items from the Taisho era
3. Kawaii isn’t supposed to be sexy - In the 1990s, with the rise of Harajuku youth fashion and the influence of shojo (girls) manga and illustrators, kawaii became an ideal, something girls wanted to be. Rather than be pretty, sexy or glamorous, Japanese girls prefer to be called kawaii. As an adjective, the word commonly implies that something or someone is cute, sweet, endearing and innocent, but it can be used in a mind-boggling array of ways. In fact, girls in Japan will exclaim “kawaii!” so many times a day, and apply it in so many different contexts – often ironic – that to a foreigner it may seem like their repertoire in vocabulary is somewhat limited!
4. Kawaii is not static - While kawaii culture has been around in Japan for roughly a hundred years, it is constantly mutating into new directions, thus retaining its appeal to a fickle consumer demographic. Increasingly, kawaii is teamed with words that might seem like its antithesis: take ero-kawaii(erotic cute), kimo-kawaii (creepy cute) and guro-kawaii (grotesque cute). In the past five years or so, hit products such as Gloomy, a pink homicidal bear often depicted attacking his owner, are the opposite of what we might commonly consider cute.
Ero-Kawaii item
Gloomy, pink homicidal bear
5. Kawaii is not confined to Japan - These days it isn’t just Japanese people that have an all-encompassing love of kawaii: fans of the culture are popping up globally, from the Japan Expo in Paris, HARAJUKU KAWAii!! at London’s HYPER JAPAN event, and San Francisco’s J-Pop Summit Festival. As for whether it will become more than a subculture overseas, we’ll have to wait and see. You can catch a glimpse of international kawaii appeal here.
Japan Expo, One of the most popular international Japanese culture exhibition