Clothes, handwriting, gestures, even a nation’s tourism strategy are drawn toward a single adjective: kawaii. The feeling directed at what is small, young, and in need of protection passed beyond Japanese to become the international word kawaii. Yet inside its soft sound, the urge to protect and the urge to desire are inseparably dissolved.

Kawaii is the feeling of affection directed at smallness, youth, innocence, and weakness, and the word that describes such an object. One of the representative concepts of Japanese aesthetics, it spread from 1970s girls’ culture to society at large and is now borrowed into English and other languages as kawaii.

Overview

At the core of kawaii lie the smallness, immaturity, and defencelessness of the object. Children, small animals, rounded forms, and faltering gestures are typically called kawaii, sharing the quality of rousing in the viewer an urge to protect and cherish. Where beauty carries a sublimity that keeps its distance, cuteness draws the object into one’s own reach and calls up the wish to care for it. The range of kawaii has kept expanding: a word once directed at children and small animals now applies to fashion, handwriting (rounded script), characters, young women, even adult men and the states of things, covering almost the whole field of positive evaluation in present-day Japanese.

Word history

Kawaii derives from the older kawayushi, in turn from kawohayushi (“unbearable to look at, pitiable”), a word of sympathy and pity. At its source, then, kawaii held a feeling of compassion for the weak and the protectable. The “adorable things” section of the Heian Pillow Book, listing a baby sparrow, a small child, and small things, shows the old layer of the sensibility that runs on to kawaii. The sense shifted over time from pity toward affection and likeableness, becoming the modern kawaii through the early-modern and modern periods.

Development in postwar culture

Modern kawaii culture spread explosively in the 1970s. The rounded script popular among schoolgirls, the character goods of Sanrio, and the aesthetic of girls’ manga pushed kawaii to the centre of youth culture. From the 1980s, the performed cuteness of the burikko, idol culture, and later moe culture made kawaii an aesthetic running through subculture as a whole. From the 2000s, kawaii became an exported culture: through the international circulation of anime, characters, and fashion, the word spread to many countries and served as a banner of Japan’s pop-culture diplomacy. Today it is established as an international vocabulary pointing at a particular formal style and aesthetic.

Kawaii in sexual contexts

Kawaii is originally a feeling of affection for innocence, at a distance from sexual desire. But in adult expression, a distinctive consumption has formed in which this “affection for innocence” joins with sexual desire. In works centred on the bishoujo, cuteness as a defencelessness one wishes to protect functions directly as an object of desire, a structure where the urge to protect and the urge to dominate, cherishing and possession, overlap on the same object.

This overlap exposes the ambivalence the concept carries. A sensibility that cherishes weakness, youth, and defencelessness can take the object both as “something to protect” and as “something one can do as one likes with.” The burikko, deliberately performing cuteness to draw out another’s protective urge, is a case of turning that dynamic to one’s own use. Where affection for youth turns toward actual children, it is a problem to be strictly distinguished; the kawaii aesthetic is discussed only in the field of signs aimed at fictional works and adults.

See also

• Bishoujo