CUTIE INC.
What can you say about a high-powered exec with an Elmo charm on his cell phone? He gets it.
Over the last year and a half, the Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways spent upwards of a million dollars in licensing fees and paint to decorate the exterior of three Boeing 747s with colorful, 20-foot-high Pocket Monsters from Pokémon, the Nintendo Game Boy phenomenon-slash-hit cartoon-slash-just released Warner Bros. movie-slash-merchandising blitz. The assumption is that Japanese men and women will line up for the opportunity to ride a jet whose fuselage, headrests, and beverage cups are decorated with the adorable yellow whatever-he-is, Pikachu.
To anyone who knows Japan, the assumption seems apt. There, the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force. The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up to save money with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), to have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey, a condom stretched over his body, entreating, “Would you protect me?”).
They see backhoes painted to look like giraffes and police kiosks fixed up like gingerbread houses. Each of Japan’s 47 prefectures has its own adorable mascot, as do the Tokyo police and the government television station. Home-run-swatting ball players are handed a plush stuffed animal when they cross the plate. Well-heeled city women are dropping yen by the millions on a Kansai Yamamoto couture line called Super Hello Kitty. Teenage boys tattoo themselves with Badtz-Maru, the Sanrio company’s mischievous, lumpy-headed penguin. Salarymen otherwise indistinguishable with their gray suits and cigarettes buy novelty cell phone straps adorned with plastic charms of their favorite cute characters: Thunder Bunny, Cookie Monster, Doraemon the robot cat. Cute is everywhere. They’re soaking in it.
At the intersection of Japan’s consumer-electronics powerhouses and its character-goods industry lie the rare examples of global cute - billion-dollar sellers like Tamagotchi and Pokémon, which combine appealing aesthetics with an addictive computer-game experience. Though in Japan you may be able to convince high-functioning, self-respecting adults that they can’t live without a toaster that browns an image of Barbapapa into their morning slice or that a Hello Kitty wedding is a swell idea, in the rest of the world, thus far, it takes a high tech hook.
This may change. Fueled by Internet subcultures, ecommerce (Hello Kitty alone has hundreds of entries on eBay), and the globalization of large corporations like Sanrio, cute is making planetary inroads. Hello Kitty and other Sanrio perennials are selling briskly in more than 30 countries, including Argentina, Bahrain, and Taiwan, where a recent merchandising tie-in with McDonald’s caused scuffles among diners waiting in line to buy Hello Kitty plush toys. A Nintendo press release titled “It’s a Pokémon Planet” informs us that worldwide revenues from the computer game and its merchandising peripherals are closing in on $5 billion - thanks in no small part to the Internet. US fans regularly visit Japanese Pokémon Web sites to download new Pocket Monsters, which typically appear Stateside a year after they debut in Japan.
The maiden voyage of ANA flight 007 leaves for Tokyo from San Francisco International Airport in one hour. On board the plane, a half-hour delay is atoned for with free terry-cloth Pikachu beanie-stuffies. The Japanese man in the seat beside me, who does something involving industrial drill bits, has unwrapped his Pikachu and set it in his lap, so it appears to be resting contentedly on his balls. From my seat I look out a window situated within the giant Pikachu that wraps around the plane’s nose. If you stood on the tarmac and looked up, it would appear as though I am inside the giant cute thing. That - kind of - is the plan.
The Japanese word for cute is kawaii. You often hear it spoken alone, a sentence and a sentiment unto itself. I heard it first in a Tokyo train station in a small shop devoted almost entirely to a penguin named Pingu, a superstar of cute who began life as a Swiss clay animated figure and in Japan exploded into a diversified line that includes pens, washcloths, and toilet-paper covers.
“Kawaiiiiiiii!” The sound came from a girl of perhaps 14, a plaintive, drawn-out keening, equal parts joy (”Look how cute!”) and desire (”I want him!”). Minutes later, I heard it again, from a twentysomething OL (”office lady,” a uniformed corporate secretary/beverage server). This time it was more of a low groan, as though the longing to possess was causing a tangible ache.
The Japanese teen magazine CREA called kawaii “the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese.”
According to Sharon Kinsella, a Cambridge University researcher who has written on the subject, the cute craze began around 1970, when a fad for writing notes and letters in rounded, childish characters began to catch on among teenage Japanese girls. Scholars who studied the phenomenon dubbed it Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting. Kids called it burikko-ji, translated as “kitten-writing” or “fake-child writing.” At one point in the mid-’80s, some 55 percent of 12- to 18-year-old girls were using it.
Magazines, ads, even computer software picked up the style, which soon broadened into a general fashion for talking, dressing, and acting like a child, a practice that spawned a new verb: burikko suru, “to fake-child-it.”
Sanrio’s Hello Kitty character, which first appeared on accessories for kitten-writing, has grown into a 50-creature line of in-house characters and goods grossing more than $1 billion a year from sales and licensing. Though the company faces competition from firms that crank out Japanese goods bearing foreign cutesters (Mickey, Pingu, the Teletubbies) and from a handful of smaller character-design houses like San-X and Super Planning Company, it continues to hold its place as top dog in the empire of cute.
The most obvious appeal of cute to the Japanese is, in large part, the appeal of childhood. “There seems to be this feeling of always wanting to be at that level, of never wanting to move on, to grow up and leave it behind,” says Yuuko Yamaguchi, assistant general manager of Sanrio’s character-design department. Small wonder. Japanese adulthood is, perhaps more so than in most cultures, a time of onerous responsibility and pressure to conform.
“Childhood, in Japan, is a time when you were given indulgences of all kinds - mostly by your mother, but by society too,” says Boston University anthropology professor Merry White, author of The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America. “We in the US are said to be a youth society, but what we really are is an adolescence society. That’s what everyone wants to go back to. In Japan, it’s childhood, mother, home that is yearned for, not the wildness of youth.”
Japanese men, on whom the pressure is strongest, also feel the cuteness tug. Takeshi Ochi, vice president of planning, products, and licensing at Sony Creative Products in Tokyo, spoke of the tendency of Japanese men to suffer from Peter Pan syndrome and referred to the common practice among businessmen of reading manga on the subway. There is, he told me, a common Japlish expression for arrested-development grown-ups: adaluto chiluduren. Ochi did not exclude himself from this category, and made no attempt to hide the Elmo on his cell phone strap or his passion for the national broadcasting company’s new fuzzy TV-head character, Mr. Hi!
Some Japanese men are drawn more to the typical owner of cute merchandise than to the merchandise itself. The cuteness of a giggling girl clad in a Hello Kitty jumper isn’t entirely innocent. It ties in to what is well known in Japan as Lolicom, the Lolita complex. The phenomenon of the little girl as sexual object abounds in Tokyo: Vending machines sell schoolgirls’ used panties, which the girls sell to middlemen. “Image bars” specialize in escorts dressed in school uniforms. Telephone clubs feature bored adolescent girls earning spending money by talking dirty. Sex shops sell a porn magazine called Anatomical Illustrations of Junior High School Girls.
The cute characters themselves often display elements of passivity and little-girl helplessness. They frequently lack a mouth, for example, and have tiny, rounded stumps for limbs. According to Sharon Kinsella, the connotative meanings of kawaii include helplessness and vulnerability.
In Japan, even self-respecting adults will consider a Hello Kitty wedding. Now kawaii (cute) is making planetary inroads. At a Taiwan McDonald’s, scuffles broke out among diners buying Sanrio plush toys.
This is not to say that cute is an elaborate front for girlie porn - an estimated 90 percent of Tokyo’s character designers are women, so a lot of it is about cute for cute’s sake - but designers of cute seem to have an innate sense of the titillation factor. “It’s not just being cute.
There is something different - a relaxed look, powerless,” says Hikaru Suemasa, head designer at the Tokyo character-goods company San-X. Suemasa is the creator of Tarepanda (”droopy panda”), a genderless sandbag of a bear so weak that it cannot walk, but has to roll slowly from place to place (at 2.75 meters per hour, according to company literature).
“At first we worried because it doesn’t look like it’s alive,” Suemasa recalls. “But this turned out to be one of the elements that made it sell.” Earnings from Tarepanda will likely top $3 million by the end of the year. And one of San-X’s latest designs is a huddled, visibly quivering puppy with the slogan “Anoko dakewa nigatenano” (”That kid is hard to deal with”).
Cute appeals to product manufacturers as a form of window dressing for the uncute. Children’s prescription-drug bags and dentists’ offices usually have a cute character somewhere in evidence. Sanrio licensed rights to make Hello Kitty children’s fireproof evacuation gear and first-aid kits. In a similar vein, Hello Kitty miniwieners have the appealing little cat head branded into the casings. Cuting up the icky and the scary seems to work equally well with Japanese adults. I bought yogurt one day that had drawings on the label depicting adorable acidophilus-bacteria guys (in white) chasing evil, horned-but-still-adorable fecal germs (in black) out the end of a winding Chutes and Ladders colon.
Japanese companies will also resort to cuteness when they can’t otherwise gain an edge over the competition. This is perhaps the reason ANA painted Pocket Monsters on its 747s. ANA’s prices and service closely match those of Japan Airlines, and JAL has Mickey. Banks are another good example, because interest rates - in other countries a bank’s main selling point - are controlled by the Japanese government. “If there were a difference in rates, no one would go to a bank just because it has Snoopy on the bank statements,” says Takeshi Ochi of Sony Creative Products. Or maybe they would. When Taiwan’s Makoto Bank put Hello Kitty on its checkbooks and ATM cards, lines of new depositors outside the bank grew so long that other customers panicked, fearing the bank was about to fold.
Many of the stubby little figures that wind up megalicensed got their start not on the sketch pads of hired character designers but in the heads of Japanese anime artists. They come from comic books, television cartoons, animated films - art that appeals aesthetically to a broad demographic. All age groups in Japan watch anime.
Animated shows air not only on Saturday morning but also during prime time. The appetite for manga also spans generations. Tokyo bookstores typically have three separate sections for manga: men’s (sex and violence), women’s (romance and sex), and children’s.
While the normal life span of a designer-drafted Sanrio or San-X character runs only a few years - 15 or so core characters have hung on much longer than average - some anime-spawned characters endure for decades. Hayao Miyazaki’s animated classic My Neighbor Totoro came out 12 years ago, but the character Totoro still appears in character-goods shops, adorning chopstick cases and socks. In some cases, the character endures because its TV show endures.
Doraemon has been a weekly cartoon since the days of black-and-white TV. Loopy superhero Anpanman, so named for the breakfast bun that is his head, stars in a children’s cartoon that counts hundreds of episodes. Though Pokémon began as a Game Boy title, it was the weekly TV cartoon that powered its hydraulic surge in popularity. Even the mighty Hello Kitty was juiced by recent appearances on the popular Tokyo TV series The Love Generation.
Sanrio Company Ltd. occupies the top nine floors of an uncute office tower five minutes from the Osaki train station in central Tokyo. Things don’t start to get cute until the 18th floor, where the design department is. To get to their desks, Sanrio’s staff designers must walk through “Kitty’s Room,” a mock-up of a studio apartment furnished with Hello Kitty appliances, foods, and toiletries - almost all of them pink.
At the moment, Kitty’s Room is sublet to a pair of live, caged hamsters. These arrived last year, when hamsters were very big. After hamsters came butterflies; next year dragons and possibly fish will be big again. Character designers follow trends in movies, fashions, news events. Tarepanda, for instance, came after the Tokyo Zoo’s panda acquisition brought on a nationwide craze a couple years back.
Each of Sanrio’s 50 staff artists is expected to come up with one or two new characters per year. Odds are they won’t be used, though, for only a couple of new product lines are introduced each season. Designers spend the bulk of their time making products to showcase existing characters. With the exception of some of the original sketches and drawings, almost all of this work is done on computers - Apple G3s. Designers sit at desks, not drafting tables. At all three of the biggest firms I visited - Sanrio, Sony Creative Products, and San-X - the look is that of a (cluttered) high tech office, not a design studio.
“Six hundred new items go out the door every month,” Doug Parkes, a manager in Sanrio’s international-licensing department, told me. About two-thirds of Sanrio’s profit comes from the products it designs and then subcontracts to a factory to produce (Sanrio owns no manufacturing plants). The remaining third comes from royalties paid by licensees who manufacture their own products with Sanrio characters on them. The design staff also spends time working with licensees. As Parkes puts it, “They may know how to build a bicycle, but they have no idea how to put Hello Kitty on it
Sanrio’s main competitors in the Japanese character industry - Walt Disney Enterprises Japan and Sony Creative Products - differ from Sanrio in that they don’t design their own characters, but rather act as brokers for existing imps, managing the licensing of dozens of US and European characters. Sony Creative handles Sesame Street’s denizens (who enjoy phenomenal popularity among Japanese adults), Pingu, Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit, and Thunder Bunny and other characters by New York illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat, as well as a couple of domestic designs - most notably (for now, anyway) Sony’s Momo the PostPet.
Momo the PostPet - a sort of hypercute version of the Eudora rooster - is the first Net-spawned character success story.
The naughty-sweet pink bear - a sort of hypercute version of the Eudora rooster - is the first Internet-spawned character-licensing success story. He has of late made the leap to fax memos, mousepads, and, of course, cell phone straps. Sanrio used to handle Japanese licensing of Betty Boop and the Pink Panther, among others, and if Hello Kitty hadn’t proved to be the juggernaut she is, no doubt Sanrio would have continued doing so.
I’ve come to Sanrio to meet Yuuko Yamaguchi, the designer in charge of Hello Kitty for 19 of the character’s 25 years. We are not meeting in her office, for she has no office. No one on her floor does; nor do they have cubicles. As is typical of Japanese corporations, employees work in clusters of open desktops, the elbow of one woman jutting into the airspace of her neighbor. Whatever space remains after the G3 and the mousepad take their bite is given over to an eye-assaulting welter of cute-character stuff - some of it practical (staplers, erasers), most just cute. They are stuck on monitor frames, crowded three deep on shelf edges, hung on strings from desk lamps.
Yamaguchi and I are talking in a small conference room, accompanied by Doug Parkes, who serves as our interpreter, and a blue-suited man from the General Affairs office, whose role is unclear to me. The atmosphere is a good deal more sober than I’d anticipated. I take solace in the chair cushions, which are red and printed to read, “Hello, lovely to meet you. I’m Kitty. I’ve invited all my best friends to come and play.”
I have asked Yamaguchi why so many cute Japanese characters have no mouth. At Sanrio alone, the muted legions include Hello Kitty, Pochacco, Cathy the bunny, Nutz, Chococat, and Cookie-Bau.
Might this fit in with the helpless aspect of kawaii? If submissiveness is part of the appeal of cute, what better than to have no mouth at all?
“Kitty has a mouth,” Yamaguchi states flatly. Spread open on the table is an issue of the glossy magazine/catalog Kitty Goods Collection. I look again: The damn cat has no mouth.
“It’s hidden in the fur,” Yamaguchi insists.
“But -”
“She has one.”
The women who create cute are nothing like the women you see buying it. San-X’s Hikaru Suemasa, when we meet, is dressed in black bell-bottoms and a T-shirt, her bare feet slipped into plastic sandals. Yamaguchi, easily 40, is wearing kneesocks, but they’re black. Her hair is infused with strands of a deep Goth red you will find on no Sanrio product. She doesn’t giggle. Beneath her skirt, she wears a kind of black woven pantaloons, a fact I am privy to because she sits with her legs planted well apart.
Satoshi Tajiri, 33-year-old creator of Pikachu and pals, is apparently cut from the same cloth. (Nintendo bought rights to the Pokémon story from Tajiri’s Tokyo-based company, Game Freaks.) Officials at Nintendo of America’s corporate affairs office describe Tajiri as “reclusive,” which is their way of saying I can’t talk to him. Tajiri grants no interviews, but is generally reported to have drawn his inspiration for Pokémon from monster movies and an insect-collecting hobby in his youth. A Nintendo flack says Tajiri is “probably the most creative person in the world” and “equally eccentric.”
Yamaguchi and her bland, benign Kitty make a decidedly odd couple. And a couple they clearly are. She describes a phase several years back during which “Kitty and I were basically parts of each other.” Whatever Yamaguchi did or dreamed of doing - she briefly wanted to be a model, for instance - Kitty would also do, and vice versa. “At one point, Kitty started collecting teddy bears. I found I had to, too,” she says. These days, Yamaguchi sees the relationship as one of idol and manager.
Indeed, teenage girls in Japan treat characters the way they do celebrities, writing them fan letters and covering their walls with the icons’ images. Yamaguchi tells me she modeled Kitty’s boyfriend, Dear Daniel, after 16-year-old Japanese pop cover boy Takizawa. Apparently it worked. Saleswise, since his launch in April, Daniel has been coming on strong. “The girls are idolizing him,” Yamaguchi says.
Yamaguchi explains why Sanrio characters tend to lack necks and mouths and sport near-vestigial arms and legs: Cute is as cute does. If a character needs to do nothing more than increase the appeal of a hair clip or wallet, it has no need for legs or neck or anything to dilute the basic elements of cute: round, little, simple, lovable. The current look of Hello Kitty merchandise takes this basic formula a step further, reducing the feline to a bow-bedecked head.
“What’s happening is, it’s becoming more of a logo,” interjects the General Affairs man, Kazuo Tohmatsu. “We are using this for the new line of Hello Kitty um …” He blinks. I lean closer, eager to hear what the newest line might be. Having burned through the kitchen (Hello Kitty eggs, ice-cube trays, coffeemakers), the office (Hello Kitty laminators, postage scales, paper shredders), the bathroom (Hello Kitty toe-jam brushes!), the beach, and the boudoir, Sanrio has made its way to the outer shoals of character merchandising: Hello Kitty condos, cars, and large appliances.
“And what is the new line?” I ask.
“Um … Hello Kitty um …”
Hello Kitty Homme, Sanrio’s new line of menswear, features Kitty’s decapitated noggin shrunk to the size of a polka dot.
Doug Parkes interrupts. “He’s saying homme. As in French for man.” Hello Kitty Homme is Sanrio’s new line of menswear and accessories in navy blue, burgundy, gray, and black, with Kitty’s decapitated noggin shrunk to the size of a polka dot. Kawaii! I will bring home boxer shorts for my homme.
You do not have to look carefully to find the cute in Shintaro Tsuji’s life. The Sanrio CEO’s office windows are papered with giant, peeking-in Hello Kitty heads that block the view of Mount Fuji and make it appear as if the poor feline had been thrown outside and had clawed her way up 20 floors of concrete in an attempt to get back in.
The back half of Tsuji’s desk is blanketed with Sanrio paraphernalia, a thick, pastel moss of cute. In among the rabbits and pandas and frogs is the planet’s one and only Hello Kitty ashtray - a handmade gift; cigarettes and hard liquor are no-fly zones at Sanrio. Each month, under the pen name Strawberry King, 71-year-old Tsuji writes the opening message to subscribers of the Sanrio fanzine The Strawberry News.
Along with Tsuji’s office, the 20th floor contains - I don’t know why - a suite of rooms laid out like a house. Doug Parkes and I wait in the “living room” for Tsuji to arrive. Visible through an open doorway is the “bathroom,” wherein a Victorian claw-foot tub, a sink, and a toilet have been set down on the carpet, but not installed. “Don’t use it, please,” says Parkes in a tone that suggests that someone, at some point, did.
Like the characters he has shepherded to market, Shintaro Tsuji is small and charming and difficult to dislike. He wears a dark blue business suit with a Hello Kitty pin in the lapel. This afternoon, he wants to talk about “social communication,” invariably the topic of his Strawberry King essays. This preoccupation is the reason “Hello” was tacked onto “Kitty.” (Hi Kitty, Tsuji’s first choice, “didn’t quite click.”) Sanrio products were originally intended to be given as presents that say, “I like you. You’re my friend.”
A smart move on Tsuji’s part, given the Japanese penchant for social gift-giving. Some journalists in Japan, I recently learned, by custom present their interviewees with a little token that says, “I like you. You’re my material.” I had picked up a Felix the Cat T-shirt for Tsuji, thinking he would enjoy seeing an American kitty-cat character. When I learned that Sanrio used to license the rights to produce Felix the Cat merchandise in Japan, I gave the shirt to the woman at my hotel desk, who said “Pussy!” and bowed deeply.
Tsuji explains why cute is always appropriate in gifts. “A formal gift makes you stiffen up,” he says. “It may make the receiver feel a need to return the favor. Something humorous is like you’re making fun of the person. It’s hard to maintain friendships if you’re giving them skeleton heads and silly things. Something cute,” he pounds his sternum with his fist, “gets you right here.”
Tsuji is quiet for a moment, and then he raises the topic of Kosovo. Parkes begins to look uncomfortable. “Mr. Tsuji says, ‘If only I could come up with a Hello Kitty smart bomb.’” Then Parkes adds, “To put good feeling in the hearts of the soldiers.” I can’t tell whether it’s Tsuji’s addendum or his own.
Sanrio will grant licensing rights to just about anyone who applies, drawing the line only at guns, hard liquor, and “sharp or pointed objects.” (A recent application to make a Hello Kitty paper cutter was turned down.) At the other extreme you have character-licensing houseDick Bruna Japan, trying desperately to sequester children’s book hero Miffy the rabbit within the realm of children’s goods and turning down a dozen licensee applications a month.
In between are companies like San-X, which picks and chooses according to some ineffable internal logic. Its Tarepanda graces the wrapper of a common Tokyo toilet-paper brand, but San-X rejected a condom company’s application.
Still, with some 15,000 products bearing Sanrio characters, market saturation threatens. When you have characters on eggs and digital pianos and bikini bottoms, it’s safe to say you’re nearing the last chapter. And so Sanrio is shifting its focus from things to places.
Japan now has Hello Kitty batting cages, restaurants, condo-design packages, at least one karaoke bar, and, most of all, Puroland.
Sanrio built its first theme park in 1990 in the urban-suburban sprawl that surrounds Tokyo. It remains one of Japan’s most popular attractions. My host is Eiji Ogiyama, Puroland’s giddy, portly assistant manager of sales. He has Hello Kitty on his wallet, and I am about to see that this is not just an accessory, but a metaphor. Though the theme park lost money its first three years, owing to operational foul-ups and a temporary lull in Hello Kitty’s popularity, it’s making up quickly for its losses. An estimated 20,000 people visit the park each weekend, at $40 a head. Then there are concessions, souvenirs, and miscellaneous purchases, this last attended to with a thoroughness most impressive.
Our tour begins at the Wisdom Tree Stage, where boys and girls, wearing smocks patterned with their favorite Sanrio character, parade around a magic tree. The park loans out the smocks and paper crowns, takes a picture, and charges 300 to 400 yen for each child. That’s $3 to $4 apiece. “Could be 500,” says Ogiyama, “I forget.”
From here, we move upstairs to marvel at the Hello Kitty Bell of Happiness. The bell’s frame and the surrounding walls are papered with handwritten wishes. A nearby vending machine sells plastic capsules containing official Bell of Happiness wish-writing paper for 500 yen. Ogiyama is grinning, his hair flopping forward onto his forehead. “Five hundred million yen just from this!”
Back downstairs, we tour Hello Kitty’s House, which the feline shares with her beau Dear Daniel (”separate bedrooms,” Ogiyama assures me). The exit deposits visitors in one of four gift shops. “After you love Kitty, you come out here and buy so much stuff! You know how the young Japanese adults love the cutesy stuff!”
The Pokémon jet is flying low on its approach to San Francisco. Below us is the drab mosaic of warehouses that is South San Francisco’s Cabot, Cabot & Forbes Industrial Park. One of them rivals a soccer stadium in square footage. This is Sanrio’s distribution point for the Western Hemisphere. I’m told that it’s one of the largest buildings on the West Coast.
“Something cute gets you here,” says Sanrio’s Tsuji, pounding his sternum. “If only I could make a Hello Kitty smart bomb.”
Thus far, cute is kid stuff in the US, and even then it’s not the candy-to-a-baby affair it is in Japan. American kids demand to be entertained; cute is a secondary selling point. Sanrio takes this into consideration in designing goods for the American market.
“American girls like moving action-type characters,” says Mari Yakushiji, Sanrio’s Tokyo-based head of design for US products. Pochacco, Sanrio’s “sports-minded pup,” is a flat-liner in Japan but a top seller in America. If Pikachu had been introduced in the US simply as something adorable to gaze at on a notebook cover, rather than as a computer-game character, he wouldn’t be the hit he is. And he wouldn’t appeal to boys.
It’s boys I see a few weeks later at the Bay Area stop of the 1999 Pokémon League Summer Training Tour, held in San Rafael, California’s Northgate Mall. Just past the Piercing Pagoda and down the hall from the Pokémon Cable Club, where novices pick up game tips, are three folding tables set up end to end: the staging area for the Poké Cup Tournament. Eight pairs of competitors face off across the tables; only one player is a girl. A black cable links each pair’s Game Boys. A woman behind me with a microphone headset is shouting, “You learned a new move! You learned Tail Whip!”
At the signal to begin, the boys (and token girl) drop their heads and fall silent, motionless but for their twitching thumbs. Watching a Pokémon tournament is like watching grace at Thanksgiving dinner.
Nonetheless, it’s clearly a battle. No one talks about how cute their Bulbasaurs are or how they love the pink curly horn (hair? trunk?) on Jiggly Puff’s forehead. It’s all Tackles and Cuts and Poison Stings and Tail Whips, the sorts of things that would send Miffy running for the rabbit hole.
The further you get from elementary school, I suspect, the heavier the American resistance will be to cute in its purest incarnation. It’s hard to imagine US teenagers deeming it cool to own a Thunder Bunny cell phone case or a boogie board graced by Badtz-Maru’s visage, and harder still to picture middle managers in Hello Kitty dress socks. (Sanrio is trying to hit that market all the same - the company opened its first US adult-merchandise store, Vivitix, in October in Berkeley, California.) For that you must go to Japan. And when you go, you must bring me back a Hello Kitty toe-jam brush.
Kawaii style dominated Japanese popular culture in the 1980’s.
Kawaii or ‘cute’ essentially means childlike; it celebrates sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple, genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak, and inexperienced social behaviour and physical appearances. It has been well described as a style which is ‘infantile and delicate at the same time as being pretty.’ (Yamane, 1990, my translation) Cute style saturated the multi-media and consumer goods and services whilst they were expanding rapidly between 1970 and 1990 and reached a peak of saccharine intensity in the early 1980s.
Cute people and cute accessories were extremely popular. So much so that original cute fashion became a basic style or aesthetic in to which many other more specific and transient fashions such as preppy, punk, skater, folk, black and French were mixed. Cute fashion gradually evolved from the serious, infantile, pink, romanticism of the early 1980s to a more humorous, kitsch, androgynous style which lingered on into the early 1990s. The results of a survey I conducted as late as 1992 showed that 71 percent of young people between 18 and 30 years of age either liked or loved kawaii looking people, and 55.8 percent either liked or loved kawaii attitudes and behaviour.
Although many respondents encountered difficulties deciding what social class they were in and what politics they supported, few had any problems explaining their relative fondness for the cute.
The word kawaii itself was by 1992 estimated to be ‘the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese.’
Iwashita, president of the Kikan Fanshii (Fancy Goods Periodical) trade journal, recalls that, ‘Rather than being another post-war value, the present meaning of kawaii has not been in existence for any longer than fifteen years.’ (Shimamura, 1991a:225, my translation) The term kawaii appears in dictionaries printed in the Taisho to 1945 period as kawayushi. In dictionaries printed after the war until around 1970 kawayushi changed into kawayui but the meaning of the word remained the same. Kawaii is a derivation of a term whose principle meaning was ’shy’ or ‘embarrassed’ and secondary meanings were ‘pathetic’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘darling’, ‘loveable’ and ’small’. In fact the modern sense of the word kawaii still has some nuances of pitiful whilst the term kawaisô derived directly from kawaii means pathetic, poor, and pitiable in a generally negative if not pleasing sense.
The emergence of the modern term kawaii in the early 1970s coincides with the beginning of the cute handwriting craze and childish fashion. In 1974 large numbers of teenagers especially women began to write using a new style of childish characters. By 1978 the phenomenon had become nation-wide and in 1985 it was estimated that upwards of about 5 million young people were using the new script.
Previously Japanese writing had been written vertically using strokes that vary in thickness along their length. The new style was written laterally, preferably using a mechanical pencil to produce very fine even lines.Using extremely stylised, rounded characters with English, katakana and little cartoon pictures such as hearts, stars and faces inserted randomly into the text, the new style of handwriting was distinct and the characters difficult to read. In middle and high schools across the country the craze for writing in the new style caused discipline problems. In some schools the writing was banned entirely or tests which were completed using the new cute style would not be marked. The new style of handwriting was described by a variety of names such as marui ji (round writing), koneko ji (kitten writing), manga ji (comic writing) and burikko ji (fake-child writing). Through the 1980s magazines, comics, advertising, packaging and, word processor soft ware design (Macintosh) adapted the new style. Yamane Kazuma carried out two years of research into cute handwriting between 1984 and 1986 which he officially labelled, ‘Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting’. Arguing against the common view that cute handwriting was something young people had mimicked from the lettering in comics, Yamane furnishes evidence that in fact the craze for rounded lettering pre- dates its use in comics which relied on the later invention of photo composition methods in order to be able to use the round characters. Instead, he concludes that teenagers ’spontaneously’ invented the new style. Results of Yamane’s survey carried out in 1984-85 amongst middle and high school students showed that the older students were, the more likely it was that they would use the childish hand writing. 22.5 percent of 11 to 12 year old female pupils, 55.3 percent of 12 to 15 year old female middle school pupils, and 55.7 percent of 15 to 18 year old female high school pupils, used the cute writing style. Amongst young men 10 percent of 12 to 15 year old middle school, and 17.5 percent of 15 to 18 year old high school pupils used the cute style. The increasing incidence of cute handwriting amongst older students illustrates that cute handwriting was a style acquired with maturity and exposure to youth culture rather than the result of any adolescent writing disability. Yamane asked some of these young people why they used the round hand writing style and was unequivocally informed:
‘It’s got a kind of cute feel.’ ‘I think it’s cute and it’s my style.’ ‘I think these letters are the cutest.’ ‘Cute! They are hard to read but they are so cute I use them.’
It is interesting that cute style did not start in the multi media which are frequently criticised for originating all the trends of youth culture if not exercising a virtual mind control over young people.
Cute style began as an underground literary trend amongst young people who developed the habit of writing stylised childish letters to each other and to themselves.
Cute handwriting was arrived at partly through the romanization of Japanese text. The horizontal left to right format of cute handwriting and the liberal use of exclamation marks as well as English words such as ‘love’ and ‘friend’, suggest that these young people were rebelling against traditional Japanese culture and identifying with European culture which they obviously imagined to be more fun. By writing in the new cute style it was almost as though young people had invented a new language in which they were suddenly able to speak freely on their own terms for the first time. They were thus able to have an intimate relation with the text and express their feelings to their friends more easily. Through cute handwriting young people made the written Japanese language - considered to be the lynch pin of Japanese culture - their own.
The spread of cute style handwriting was one element of a broader shift in Japanese culture that took place between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s in which vital popular culture sponsored and processed by the new fashion, retail, mass-media and advertising industries began to push traditional arts and crafts and strictly regulated literary and artistic culture to the margins of society.
At the same time that Japanese youth began to debase written Japanese infantile slang words began to spread across the nation typically coming into high-school vogue for only a few months before becoming obsolete again. In 1970 the Mainichi Shimbun carried an article describing how the common word kakkoii, meaning cool or good had sprouted a deformed infantile version of itself. The term kakkoii was deliberately mispronounced as katchoii, thus mimicking the speech of a toddler incapable of adult pronunciation. There are even a few examples of deliberately contrived childish speech such as Norippigo officially invented by pop-idol Sakai Noriko, alias Nori P, in 1985. Norippigo, now obsolete, consisted of changing the last syllable of common adjectives into a pi sound. Therefore kanashii (sad) could be changed into kanappi, and ureshii (happy) could be changed into ureppi. Meanwhile Nori P invented a few words of her own, such as mamosureppi (very happy). However infantile slang was not limited to the contrived over-use of puritanical kindergarten adjectives. ‘Sex’ became popularly referred to by the morbid term nyan nyan suru (to meow meow).
Cute handwriting is strongly associated with the fashion for using baby-talk, acting childish and wearing virginal childish clothes.
Young people dressing themselves up as innocent babes in the woods in cute styles were known as burikko (fake-children) a term coined by teen starlet Yamada Kuniko in 1980. The noun spawned a verb, burikko suru (to fake-child-it), or more simply buri buri suru (to fake-it). Another 80s term invented to describe cute pop-idols and their fans is kawaiikochan which can be roughly translated as ‘cutie-pie-kid’.
Cute culture started as youth culture amongst teenagers, especially young women. Cute culture was not founded by business. But in the disillusioned calm known as the shirake (’doldrums’) after the last of the student riots in 1971, the consumer boom was just beginning and it did not take companies and market research agencies very long to discover and capitalise on cute style which had manifested itself in manga and young peoples handwriting.
In 1971 Sanrio - the Japanese equivalent of Hallmark Cards - experimented by printing cute designs on previously plain writing paper and In In 1971 stationary. Sanrio began to produce cute decorated stationary and fancy diaries for the dreamy school students hooked onto the cute handwriting craze. The success of this early prototype of fanshi guzzu (fancy goods) inspired by cute style in manga animation and young peoples handwriting encouraged Sanrio to expand production and its range of fancy goods proliferated. Sanrio established a firm monopoly in the fancy goods market and during 1990 sold 200 billion yen worth of goods , whilst the fancy goods business as a whole reached an estimated turnover of 10 trillion yen in 1990. Typical fancy goods sold in cute, little shops were stationary, cuddly toys and gimmicks, toiletries, lunch boxes and cutlery, bags, towels and other personal paraphernalia.
The crucial ingredients of a fancy good are that it is small, pastel, round, soft, loveable, not traditional Japanese style but a foreign in particular European or American style, dreamy, frilly and fluffy.
Most fancy goods are also decorated with cartoon characters. The essential anatomy of a cute cartoon character is small, soft, infantile, mammalian, round, without bodily appendages (arms), without bodily orifices (mouths), non-sexual, mute, insecure, helpless or bewildered. Sanrio invented a large cast of cute proprietary characters to endorse and give life to its fancy goods: Button Nose, Tiny Poem, Duckydoo, Little Twin Stars, Cheery Chums, Vanilla Bean and, most famous of all, Hello Kitty and Tuxedo Sam. Not only do these cute characters inhabit cute- shops, but they have also worked hard selling under license the goods and services of over ninety Japanese companies. A large number of these are financial institutions such as twenty three banks, including Mitsui, Sumitomo, Sanwa, and Mitsubishi; fourteen stock companies, including Yamaichi, Daiwa and Nomura; and seven insurance companies, including Nihon Seimei, Sumitomo Seimei and Yasuda Kasai.
Cute design was not limited to banking cards and stationary, however. For the privileged, whose passion for cute was stronger than their sense of traditional good-taste, there was the option of purchasing a ’short cake’ house resembling a little cottage or fairyland abode in Hiroo or Seijô or a cute rounded apartment in Roppongi or Akasaka- Mitsuke. As the 1930s has been remembered for the brutal police implementation of thought-crime (shisôhan) laws, so the 1980s may be remembered as the decade which left behind police boxes designed as ‘gingerbread houses’ (okashi-no-ie).
Meanwhile Sanrio organised Sanrio festivals and athletics meetings,
Hello Kitty Santa tours, a Strawberry Mate travelling caravan, Halloween and Valentine extravaganzas, and printed Ichigo Shimbun (The Strawberry News). Sanrio built cute shopping arcades such as the Sanrio Ginza Gallery, and Sanrio Fantagen -a cluster of 18 cute goods shops in Funabashi, Ichigo Hall in Den-en Chofu, Sanrio Theatre in Matsudo and Harmony Land in Kyushu and Puroland in Tama City, Tokyo.
Cartoon characters printed on to goods literally add character to their lifelessness and slogans etched on to the actual good or printed on the packaging put across more forcibly the same notion of light fun. Cute slogans were more often written in fractured English or pseudo-French than Japanese. A toilet bowl called petit etoile. A pink toaster in the shape of a cottage called My Sweet Bread Toaster. A can opener which tells its user this can-opener is not just a kitchen tool, treat it kindly and it will be our loyal friend. School note paper inscribed with the message, OK! You’re in my team.
Let’s have fun together!. A set of plates saying Life is sweet like a poem when you are with kind friends.
The industrial, impure or masculine nature of some of the objects decorated in fancy style can produce incongruous images, such as the almost transvestite like character of baby pink road diggers or adult gambling machines called My Poochy and Fairies. But there has been no mischievous conspiracy of camp designers behind these articles. Despite appearances to the contrary there was no strong sense of kitsch attached to cute culture until the late 1990s. In some cases a mismatch between the goods function and its design had simply gone unnoticed, at other times it was a deliberate attempt to camouflage and mask the dirty image of the good or service in question. The typical household toilet, maybe unconnected to a sewage system and sometimes foul smelling often resembled a tiny grotto, festooned with puffy gingham curtains, quilted toilet brush covers and toilet roll dispensers, fluffy toilet seat covers, fancy cartoon slippers. Love hotels, which sell room space for sex are named after good, sweet girls like Anne of Green Gables and Laura of the Little House on the Prairie. Yakuza run pachinko gambling parlours are recognisable as the light buildings full of pink and blue neon with baskets of plastic flowers arranged on the pavement outside.
Cute style gives goods a warm and cheer- me-up atmosphere. After the production process had de-personalised the good cute design could re-personalise it. Consumption of lots of cute style goods with powerful emotion inducing properties could ironically disguise and compensate for the very alienation of individuals from other people in contemporary society. Cuteness loaned personality and a subjective presence to otherwise meaningless -and often literally useless- consumer goods and in this way made them much more attractive to potential buyers. The good could appear to have a character of its own because of its winsome UFO or mammalian shape, such as little round, weeping digitalized vacuum cleaners and rice cookers, or the 1980’s mini caasu (little cars) designed to feel playful and cuddly. Modern consumers might not be able to meet and develop relationships enough with people but the implication of cute goods design was that they could always attempt to develop them with cute objects.
Adverts and articles printed in An-an and Non-no two of the leading women’s fashion magazines suggest that the desire for a more than just youthful, but distinctly child-like, cutie-pie look began in the mid 1970s. In May 1975 An-an ran a special article introducing its readers to the novel new concept of cuteness:
‘PLAY! Cuteness! Go for the young theme! On dates we only want feeling, but our clothes are like old ladies! It is the time you have to express who you really are. Whatever you say co-ordinating a very young theme is cute. Wear something like a French slip…..for accessories try a cute little bracelet. BUT! It will look much cuter if you don’t use high quality exclusive materials. Cute looking plastic and veneer looks younger. For your feet try wearing colourful socks with summer sandals, it will exude a sporty cuteness! Hair is cutest styled straight with children’s plastic hair pins fixed in the sides.’
Cute clothes are deliberately designed to make the wearer appear childlike and demure. Original cute clothes were simple white, pink and pastel shades for women and more sort of bright and rainbow coloured for men. The clothes were often fluffy and frilly with puffed sleeves and lots of ribbons, - a style known as ‘fancy’, or alternatively were cut slightly small or tight and came decorated with cartoon characters and slogans. In the first half of the 1980s the most fashionable design house in Tokyo was ‘Pink House Ltd.’ which produced adorable outfits for budding cuties. Pink House was so sought after that the Hakuhodo research institute began to refer to young people aspiring to the Pink House image as the ‘Pink House movement.’ (Hakuhodo, 1984:227) Women’s underwear was also cute, the dominant taste being for puritanical white pants and vests, in addition to the infamous white tights, frilly ankle socks or knee length ’school-girl’ socks. Then there was the understanding habit of manufacturers in placing great lengths of elastic in underwear so that women’s pants often looked like a little girl’s off but fortunately stretched to three or four times the size in service.
By the late eighties cute fashion had matured into a cheeky, androgynous, tomboy sweetness. Apart from the perennially popular tight, white, baby vest like T-shirts, nursery colours, cartoon characters and baby doll frills have mellowed out into woolly Noddy hats, dungarees and tight little sweaters. This change is well illustrated by the fashion magazine Cutie For Independent Girls, first published in spring 1986 and attracting a readership of 100,000 by October 1989. Obviously Cutie takes cuteness as its starting point but on top of the basic ingredient of childlikeness Cutie style is also chic, eccentric, androgynous and humorous. Cutie is published monthly by the odd ball media corporation Takarajimasha which was founded by a group of ex-revolutionary Waseda University students and is more well known for publishing the sub-culture oriented magazine Takarajima through the 1980s, and in Cutie the rebellious, individualistic, freedom seeking attitude embodied in acting childlike and pursuing cute fashion is very clear.
The magazine and prints pages of photographs of readers which it calls ‘kids’ posing in clubs and streets trying to look bad and cute at the same time.
Young people took to purging themselves on cakes and sweets. Eating confectionery is not only a habit with childlike connotations but also symbolically stresses personal sweetness which in Japanese (amai), as in the English, refers interchangeably to both edibles and charming people. The association between sugary foods, especially between cake and children’s culture is strong in Japan, as Edwards elaborates:
‘Alcohol in general is considered one of the spicy foods which as a class are the province of adults, and which children are taught to avoid in favour of sweet ones. Cakes, as sweet foods, have a close association with children in Japan. Special cakes were made in pre-war times at the naming ceremony of a new born child’.
The most popular and fashionable foods of the 1980s were soft, sweet and milky, including ice-cream, cakes, milk drinks and soft deserts. The yearly growth rate of the ice-cream market in the 1980’s was 5 percent and by 1989 the sale of the high-class ice-cream in Japan accounted for $100 million per annum. Most of this ice-cream was sold in the fancy ice-cream parlours which arrived on the streets of Tokyo and Osaka in the early eighties at the beginning of the ‘ice-cream boom’ caused by the sudden increase in adult consumers:
‘Until now ice-cream was always considered as ’something for the kids’, however it has recently become fashionable and achieved a certain adult respectability…’
Ice-cream, puddings and cakes purchased at ‘fancy patisseries’ and café and cleverly invented baby food like cheezu mushi pan (squashy, cheeze flavored cake) popular throughout the 1980s, whilst other sweet foods such as creme caramel, tiramisu, nata de coco, tapioca pudding and panacotta attained briefer fad followings.
The ideal ‘cute’ food carried with it a marketing image, frequently something petite, frilly and Victorianesque; rustic and oldie worlde; or derived from fairy- tale images scavenged from the nursery.
A good example is Rolly Doll, founded in 1985, which operates and franchises over sixty fresh-baked cookie shops across Japan and owes most of its 5 billion yen annual sales to nostalgia. Its founder explains:
‘Drifting through sweet memories of childhood I recalled the special aroma of fresh baked cookies, emanating from Aunt Stella’s farm kitchen in Pennsylvania’s rustic Amish country. The concept was complete in a flash; the image, the taste, the aroma, the wholesome goodness of an earlier America where “kinder and gentler were the norm.”
Matsuda Seiko was to cute what Sid Vicious was to punk. Between April 1980 and 1988 she became the reigning queen and prototype for a whole new industry of ‘idol singers’ that flourished in the 1980s. Matsuda was flat chested and bow-legged and on TV she wore children’s clothes, took faltering steps and blushed, cried, and giggled for the camera. Every one of her twenty three singles released between 1980 and 1988, became number one smash hits. Matsuda gained her popularity being childish. She published several books for her fans, filled with large wobbly hand writing, small words and ‘heart-warming’ poems like the one below:
‘Seiko always….. Wants to see a dream. What I’m thinking, I want to try and put in a poem. So my little heart, Can reach out to you a little.’
Following in Matsuda’s footsteps most of the 1980s idols were released in time to become famous between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. The debut age of packaged pop-stars have in fact been getting progressively younger since 1974. This includes male sweety bands like Tanokin Trio aged 14 to 19 (debut 1980), SMAP aged 14 to 15 (debut 1988) and Hikaru Genji aged 14 to 16 (debut 1988), and female idols such as Kyon Kyon aged 14 (debut 1982), Nakayama Miho aged 15 (debut 1984) and WINK aged 14 (debut 1988).
Cute stars dominated the television and magazines as well as pop-music. Known by the collective term ‘talents’ their appearance as hosts, contributors or ornamentation in a great many television programs was an innovation that partly originated with Fuji Television’s Yuyake Nyan Nyan (Sunset Kittens) program in 1985. Kato Koichi describes the original reasons for the program’s popularity:
‘They responded to the hosts questions, and played silly games, like a competition to see who could stay in an extremely hot bath the longest. Childish and frivolous as the show was, it nevertheless attracted far more viewers than programs featuring the performances of professionals and celebrities.’
Sunset Kittens on air daily at five o’clock became such a popular program that it has since achieved the status of a TV classic. The program was hosted entirely by school girls and consisted of games, songs, sketches ridiculing adults and an ongoing competition amongst school girls who wanted to join the team of amateur hosts, otherwise known as the Onyanko Club (Kitten Club). Eventually the number of kittens expanded to fifty two and some of the most popular girls such as Kawai Nanoko and Kokusho Sayuri began to branch out into separate careers releasing hit singles and diffusing into other television programs over the following years. The practice of using cute childish stars with no specific talent such as singing or acting to increase the interest value of programs began to fade out by the 1990s though.
Instead in 1991 there was a national craze for the 100 year old twin sisters, Kin and Gin, who made frequent appearances in talk shows on television, had their faces printed on all kinds of fancy merchandise such as Kin and Gin-san hard boiled orange sweets, and even recorded a song on CD together. They were described by young and older people alike as both kawaii (cute) and kawaiso (pitiful). Kin and Gin were sweet, frail old ladies with girlish old fashioned ways of expressing themselves and like many very old people they were slightly out of touch. The case of Kin San and Gin San illustrates that although cute was principally about childishness, a sense of weakness and disability -that is a part of childishness- was a very important constituent of the cute aesthetic. In fact cute and pitiful were often the same thing.
Toddlers, baby animals, and frail old ladies are the natural models for cute and cute characters produced by the fancy goods industry were deliberately designed to be physically frail emulating weak members of society. Cute characters like Hello Kitty and Totoro have stubbly arms, no fingers, no mouths, huge heads, massive eyes -which can hide no private thoughts from the viewer-, nothing between their legs, pot bellies, swollen legs and pigeon feet- if they have feet at all. Cute things can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t in fact do anything at all for themselves because they are physically handicapped. Harris discussing cuteness in America makes this point very clearly:
‘Although the gaze we turn on the cute thing seems maternal and solicitous, it is in actuality a transformative gaze that will stop at nothing to appease its hunger for expressing pity and big heartedness, even at the expense of mutilating the object of its affections.’
However cute fashion in Japan more than merely cuddling cute things, it was all about ‘becoming’ the cute object itself by acting infantile. Young Japanese, especially women, purchased cute accessories and filled their rooms, cars, desks at work, and hand bags with sweet paraphernalia as a way of surrounding themselves by cuteness to the point where they felt transformed and could enter this cute-only world themselves. Being cute meant behaving childlike which involved an acts of self-mutilation, posing with pigeon toes, pulling wide eyed innocent expressions, dieting, acting stupid, and essentially denying the existence of the wealth of insights, feelings, and humour that maturity brings with it. In cute culture young people became popular according to their apparent weakness, dependence and inability rather than their strengths and capabilities.
During a survey amongst 18 to 30 year old men and women carried out in Tokyo in 1992 I asked respondents to write down freely what cute meant to them. The question asked was ‘In what kinds of situations might you use the word kawaii ?’ and the replies were dominated by themes related to childhood. Respondents said they used kawaii when they felt people were childlike:
“Children and adults are innocently frolicking about.”
“When you have treated your companions a little contemptuously as though you thought they were little fools.”
“I use it as a complimentary word when people are childlike.”
“When peoples faces are perpetually childlike.”
“People who experience things in a childish way.”
“When my friends seem precocious and their clothes and gestures childish.”
“People that in places are as pure as children.”
These childlike people were often childlike because of their apparent innocence:
“Loveable idiots.”
“Cute is people so lacking in experience that they can’t communicate.”
“When I see a clear girlish innocence in someone.”
“Tiny innocent things.”
“Babies, children and people younger than me with an expression of innocent obedience.”
Beyond mere innocence some respondents felt that kawaii to referred to people in a state of naive unity with their world:
“When children and friends are happy and quite indifferent to their lack of common sense.”
“People who fit into their surroundings and lose sight of themselves.”
Cuteness was also a very unconscious thing as is reflected both in the degree of unawareness respondents displayed in their answers and in a few outright admissions that kawaii was about not thinking at all:
“The word just pops out unconsciously.”
“When people are acting without thinking at all.”
Kawaii was also considered to be a natural thing:
“When I feel natural.”
“When a friend is genuinely and naturally lovely.”
Secondly respondents used kawaii when they felt that warm emotional contact between individuals had been expressed:
“The effort people expend for other people is cute.”
“When I see something that is dear to me.”
“When people make contact with someone else.”
“When my feelings are softened and made culpable.”
“When I see an incredibly sympathetic face.”
“When without any connection to profit the mood of your heart is expressed.”
These sociable, sincere emotions tended to come from inside individuals where it was normally hidden:
“It is about the internal part of you seen when you make a chance gesture or move that is disarming.” “The greatness inside someone oozes out.”
“When things warm the spirit.” “When from the bottom of my heart I am able to think that something is sincerely cute.”
“When it is hard to say “I love you”.” “When people show their real selves without any affection.”
The fashionability of cute was apparent in the answers of respondents who associated cute predominantly with fashion items and attractive people or mentioned the peer pressure they felt to use the word cute:
“Attractive faces.”
“Things to my taste. When I see and touch things.”
“When I see the kind of little things and clothes I like.”
“When I realise my friends want me to say ‘cute’.”
Cute was also strongly associated with animals, or more precisely pets, which needless to say were very popular during the 1980’s.
“When animals and children play for my attention (amaeru).”
“When I see the gestures of the animals I look after.”
Some respondents directly described as cute an individuals weakness and inability to deal with everyday life:
“When I look and I feel that someone is trying as hard as they can and grappling with something.”
“When someone’s situation overwhelms them more than my situation overwhelms me.”
“When someone is happy and then suddenly their smile drops, or when someone is relieved.”
It is quite apparent from these statements that for its fans cute sentiments were all about the recovery of a childlike emotional and mental state. This childlike state was considered to be innocent, natural and unconscious. And this childlike state was one in which people expressed genuine warm feelings and love for one another.
But most of the time this expressive emotional state was hidden trapped inside each individual and something that was not often visible to other people. For its fans cute people and things seemed to be in a state of happy, naive, and natural unconscious unity with life and other people.
The idea underlying cute was that young people that had passed through childhood and entered adult life had been forced to cover up their real selves and hide their emotions under a layer of artifice.
But the original childlike, innocence of each individual rather than disappearing forever was still present in some naive individuals and could be glimpsed at occasionally in the gestures, expressions and attitudes of almost any kind of person. Cute childlike behaviour was considered genuine and pure which implies that the experiences and social relations acquired after maturation were considered to be a false, shallow, external layer.The logic of this assumption is quite coherent although ironically it is cute that is in fact extremely artificial and stylised. Cute is the particular style derived of adults (and children) pretending to be ‘childlike’. Furthermore the ‘childlikeness’ aspired to is not so much real childish behaviour which must include subservience, temper tantrums, bed-wetting and frustration, so much as the idolised childlikeness described in the neo-romantic tradition.
Respondents tended to think of cuteness manifested in the minutiae of friends gestures and behaviour as profoundly natural. At the same time as they imagined cute to be natural they did not tend to view it as a historically defined style. Young people fond of cute things and acting like burikko (fake children) did not consider themselves to be engaging in a current fashion at all. This apparently unconscious involvement was very distinctive of cute fashion. I say ‘apparently’ because one of the ideals of the cute fashion, as we know, is precisely to be uncontrived and genuine, so that any real cutie was obliged to cover up the traces of their conscious effort to look sweet.
We have established that cute style was all about acting childish in an effort to partake of some of the childhood’s legendary simplicity, happiness, and emotional warmth. Underpinning cute style are the neo-romantic notions of childhood as an entirely separate and because of this unmaligned pure sphere of human life. In fact the general belief that childhood is ‘another world’, in some ways an ideal world has the dominant perception of childhood throughout the developed world for most of the twentieth century. Early European criticism of the spiritual poverty of modern society which developed in response to industrialisation and urbanisation lead to a romantic re-evaluation of pre-industrial society. For the first time past and more primitive lives in rural communities and in childhood were described as a period of innocence, simplicity and spiritual unity which had been ruptured and destroyed by the corrupting and alienating forces of modern social relations and cities.
Urban nostalgia for this wholesome country life did not result in a cute aesthetic until this sentiment was captured by Disney animation and delivered to a mass audience. Disney made his first animations in the interwar years, producing Steam Boat Willy in 1928 and The Opry House in 1929. As with Charlie Chaplin, Disney animations were adored in Japan as much as if not more than in America until they were banned for the period of the war. After the war in 1950 Disney comics and animation, this time full length productions such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, flooded into the country. Going to visit the cinema to see Disney films on specially designated days became a part of primary school education. Disney had a big influence both on Japanese animation and comics and in introducing the modern cute aesthetic into Japan.
However whereas Disney cute was based more on a sentimental journey back into an idealised rural society populated with happy little animals and rural characters taken from folk stories Japanese cute fashion became more concerned with a sentimental journey back into an idealised childhood. As Disney romanticised nature in relation to industrial society, so Japanese cuteness romanticised childhood in relation to adulthood. By idolising their childhood’s and remnant childishness young Japanese people implicitly damned their individual futures as adults in society. Condemning adulthood was an individualised and limited way of condemning society generally.
In the survey I conducted in 1992 I also asked respondents to describe the way they felt about adulthood and childhood. In relation to adulthood the question I asked was: ‘When you think of adulthood what images come to mind?’ Although some respondents, gave positive appraisals of adulthood, describing it as a period of ‘freedom’ and ‘potential’, the great majority of respondents, who we must remember are not teenagers but young people already well embarked in their adult lives, described adulthood as a bleak period of life:
“The harshness of having to make do everyday and make a living, the harshness of supporting a family.”
“Controlled society, hard work to help society, responsibility and effort.”
“It is a hard society where you take responsibility for all your actions, working hours are long and free time is lacking, fun, gentleness and naturalness are hard to give and let out.”
“A dirty world of power.”
“The degree of freedom on the spiritual side is lower than that of a child, responsibility to big organisations become very large, dreams disappear as the necessity to conform comes nearer.”
“Strictness day in and day out, you can’t stop working.”
“Life is lonely.”
The negativity of the answers given is startling. Their assessments of Japanese society were very dark and their impressions of an adult life in that society were equally depressing. Adulthood was directly understood to mean society and visa versa. Adulthood was not viewed as a source of freedom and independence, it was viewed as quite the opposite, as a period of restrictions and hard work. The most common impression of adulthood was that it involved responsibility (sekinin), typically a huge responsibility. This responsibility was not an abstract individual responsibility but a specific responsibility to society, to their families, and to large organisations to work hard and conform to expectations. After social responsibility respondents cited a general lack of free time and tight social regulations as the unhappy characteristics of adulthood. Mid 1970s to mid 1980s was period notable for its lack of political and social imagination in japan and in relation to this widespread understanding that adulthood is a period of restriction and overwhelming obligations, childhood -one of the oldest and most immediate sites of imagined freedom- become extremely popular.
Cute fashion idolises childhood because it is seen as a place of individual freedom unattainable in society.
There is no strong pattern of thought which links adulthood with individual emancipation in Japan. Maturity which in the West has been linked to the authority and rights of the individual, still tends to be thought of according to the Confucian model in modern Japan.
That is maturity is commonly thought of as the ability to cooperate well in a group, accept compromises, fulfil obligations to parents, employers etc., and carry out social responsibilities. This underlying ideology is another reason why rebellion from society in Japanese youth culture has developed into a rebellion from adulthood as well. For the same reason intellectuals, ascetics and artistic outsiders from Japanese society have long carried the stigma of infantilism and some possibly even played up to the image of being childlike eccentrics.
Cute fashion was, therefore, a kind of rebellion or refusal to cooperate with established social values and realities. It was a demure, indolent little rebellion rather than a conscious, aggressive and sexually provocative rebellion of the sort that has been typical of Western youth cultures. Rather than acting sexually provocative to emphasise their maturity and independence Japanese youth acted pre-sexual and vulnerable in order emphasise their immaturity and inability to carry out social responsibilities. Either way the result was the same, teachers in the West were as infuriated by cocky pupils acting tough, as Japanese teachers were infuriated with uncooperative pupils writing cute and acting infantile.
Young women were the main generators of and actors in cute culture. From the consumption of cute goods and services and the wearing of cute clothes, to the faking of childish behaviour and innocent looks, young women were far more actively involved in cute culture than men. This is not to say that cuteness was not popular amongst young men, on the contrary it was very popular, but young men were largely relegated to the passive, wistful, audiences of the performance of cute culture put on by women. Towards the late 1980s more and more young men did in fact join the ranks of cute young women themselves and cute style became more androgynous and more asexually infantile. The gender related nature of youth culture is not new. Nearly all originally Western youth cultures in the post-war period such as mods, rockers, new romantics, techno, punk and hip hop, have been dominated by young men with young women playing a more passive side-kick role. The much greater original involvement of men than women in other youth cultures to date has attracted little specific notice, perhaps for the simple and valid reason that the greater active involvement of young men had seemed to be normal or natural, given the general structure of modern societies. Consequently the creation of cute youth culture around young women has attracted a lot of notice. While old fashioned mums in England grumble that they can no longer distinguish between girls and lads because the girls all dress like boys these days, Japanese social commentators have bemoaned the domination of modern culture by young women and the increasingly cute, little girlish appearances of young men.
The position of the young unmarried woman in contemporary Japanese society represents freedom more than that of the young man. Young women, by virtue of the strength of their oppression and exclusion from most of the labour market and active roles in society, have come to represent in the media the freest, most un-hampered elements of society. Young women pushed outside mainstream Japanese society are associated with an exotic and longed for world of individual fulfilment, decadence, consumption and play. Young men do not represent freedom in the same way, and in their role as subservient company employees neither do they embody any of the characteristics of the powerful, antagonistic, macho individualism of the male in Western societies and their youth cultures. For many young men cute fashion represents freedom and an escape from the pressure of social expectations and regulations. Typically these young men both wear cute fashions and emulate cute behaviour themselves and, fetishize young women- either real girl friends or syrupy sweet little girl heroines depicted in lolita complex comic books for adolescent boys. Adolescent women (shôjo) provide the elusive model for cute culture. Shôjo, the leaders of cute, have been transformed into an abstract concept and a ’sign’ for consumption in the Japanese mass-media and modern intellectual discourse.
For their part young women had, even more than young men, reasons to desire to remain free, unmarried and young. Whilst a woman was still a shÙjo (adolescent girl) outside the labour market, outside of the family she could enjoy the vacuous freedom of an outsider of society with no distinct obligations or role to play. But when she grew up and got married the social role of a young woman is possibly more oppressive than that of young company men. In the role of an unmarried woman she was pushed to the margins of society but still able to work as an OL (office lady) on a temporary contract in company offices, spend her money on herself and her friends and socialise in urban centres. Maturity and marriage threatened to separate her from these privileges and very likely shunt her off to a small apartment in remote and unattractive suburbs with only her devotion to her children and their school books to occupy her. Whilst the ‘moratorium mentality’ and lack of desire to grow up and take on adult social roles and responsibilities was a feeling spread right through Japanese society in the 1980s, for women, the urge to prolong youth and its appearances took on the form of a profound struggle. These young women both savoured their brief years of freedom as unattached urban socialites through decadent consumption and expressed their fears of losing their freedom and youth through the cute aesthetic. Shimamura notes that as young women get older and particularly in the period immediately prior to marriage their fascination with and immersion in cute culture becomes still more acute.
Young people entered cute culture through consumption of cute goods with cute appearances and emotional qualities. The increasingly large disposable incomes of youth and young women in particular throughout the 1980s and the inventiveness of Japanese businesses in providing goods to make them part with their money had the greatest determining influence on the highly commercial nature of cute culture. Cute did however seem to be accessible exclusively through consumption. This was both because it encouraged hedonism and sensual pleasure necessitating consumption, and because even during their youth and bachelor days it was very difficult for Japanese to be cute full time. Cute culture along with other youth cultures could only be enjoyed during brief moments of private time such as at home between working and sleeping, or in the car, and in tiny private places such as inside handbags, presents and pencil cases. There was not only no space for cute to ever become part of a ‘lifestyle’, but the fantastical nature of cute culture itself contained so few references to real life and society that there was in any case little way of understanding it in terms of everyday life. Cute culture had to be entered and left in a matter of minutes or moments which lent it to construction by ephemeral products and places of consumption of goods and leisure services.
And childlikeness was an expensive youth culture. There is no upper limit to the cost of childish clothes and accessories because perfect childlikeness is a particularly unattainable ideal that becomes less and less attainable with time. The demanding ideal of cute fashion generated an built in orientation towards the consumption of goods which could transform a young person look and feel something like a child.
Unlike even those ironically well marketed Western origin youth cultures such as punk, and grunge cute culture did not condemn materialism and the display of wealth. Many contemporary Western youth cultures have been distinctly opposed to, amongst other things, modern consumer culture, encouraging a tendency for hip youth to condemn materialism, appear to or actually buy little, dress down, and find cheap, second hand goods with which to adorn themselves. To the contrary personal consumption is portrayed as something rather anti-social and immoral in mainstream Japanese society and cute youth culture went against the grain of older social values by sanctioning consumption.
Their were anti-cute elements. Anti-cute people can be divided into two social categories; young people who considered cute to be too weak and stupid, and conservative intellectuals in the academia and civil service who were appalled by the spread of a new female- lead youth culture which did not accord to traditional cannons of good taste let alone good morals.
Punks, rockers and young people attracted to the ‘indies’ scene felt their own fashion was more politically progressive, intelligent and sophisticated. These types of independent young people would have been likely to read magazines like Takarajima Japan’s main sub-culture magazine which frequently criticised the commercial pop- idol industry, whilst promoting YMO, Japanese indie bands, ‘New Age Fashion’, and encouraged the import of UK punk music and fashion and challenging pop- stars like David Bowie, The Jam, and Siouxie and the Banshees. Many of these young people who in the 1990s are in there late twenties and early thirties entered katakana and multi media professions as producers, editors, free writers, and designers etc. and took their disdain for cute and other common cultures with them.
Amongst intellectuals criticism of cute style blended with the general moral attack on youth and especially young women’s behaviour and social values which has been sustained through the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically this is also the period when Japanese youth have been most politically passive and untroublesome for the establishment in post-war history. But in fact it is this extremely passive behaviour with which intellectuals began to take offence. Rather than reflecting on 1968 and being grateful for the enormous inactivity of Japanese youth moral academics complained that this passivity was part of an attempt on the part of youth to shrink away from their active duties and obligations in society, at work, in the public space, in the home. More than just being not actively critical of society intellectuals demanded that youth show their commitment to the social order by an eager, positively motivated, moral engagement with their traditional social roles as company man and housewife. Cute fashion was perceived correctly as one more example of social disaffection and malaise amongst youth. Rather than attempting to grow up and take on social obligations that adulthood brings with it youth were quite obviously attempting to avoid all these oppressive demands made on them by aspiring not to grow up at all and immersing themselves in cute culture.
Cute ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ were portrayed spending horrendous amounts of money on music, clothes and cute ‘things’ in Harajuku and Aoyama, on meeting their friends at trendy restaurants and bars, and going on frequent holidays skiing or abroad. And this they surely did where possible -but it wasn’t cute youth in particular that consumed but the goods under consumption that were particularly cute. Retailers, advertisers and manufacturers scrambling over each other to invent new goods, services and gimmicks to sell on the expanding domestic consumer market appropriated the cute style.
Conservative critics felt that allowing this consumption to continue out of control could only encourage the idea that life was about the pleasure of the individual and not about gaining moral satisfaction through fulfilling social obligations and responsibilities.
Individualistic consumption and the cute values of sensual abandon and play which provided an apology for consumption, were accused of undermining Japanese tradition:
‘Play can only be truly satisfying when a sense of balance reveals the substance of tradition. True play by drastically diminishing one’s own stature in relation to tradition, expands one’s world. Puerile play by exaggerating ones position in relation to tradition, constricts one’s world. I bear no ill will towards commercial civilisation. Like it or not, I am very much it’s beneficiary. This does not mean, however, that I feel the least inclination to glorify it in anyway. The maturity of culture requires a certain degree of serenity and moderation, but commercial civilisation spreads noise and excess in the name of vigorous differentiation. As little as I know about foreign lands I am well aware that the “Japan problem” brought on by our commercial civilisation has grown to serious proportions. As Ishikawa Yoshimi has pointed out, the basic Japan problem is not the trade surplus but implicit and explicit disdain for the Japanese way of life itself’.
Nishibe directly equates play with consumption and makes it quite clear that the concept of play (asobi) in the contemporary Japanese context was no more than a cute way of saying ‘doing what you want’.
But the play motif ran right through the core of advertising, retailing, and the multi media in the 1980s. For these industries which had to appeal to the private, often solo consumer to purchase their goods the idea of play became a useful aphorism for individual fulfilment through consumption. Incidentally, the patronising implication of the equation of individual free time and consumption with play, made both amongst the Japanese intelligentsia and in the mass media, was that Japanese youth were insignificant people even to themselves who’s private activities amounted to little more than child’s play.
Cuties were also denigrated for being infantile. For a style which labels its self as infantile it is hardly a critique to say that it is infantile. However Fujioka, PR director for Dentsu. Inc., certainly came up with an original reason why cute might be literally ’stupid’ when he described cuteness as the epitome of thought without reason:
‘Cuteness can not be developed by reason and cannot be evaluated without being seenä Thus it is really not in the least surprising that for grasshoppers (Ed- modern youth, spend thrifts), making what one would want oneself means responding not to any practical demand but to the subjective, intuitive demand for cuteness.’
Fujioka was using post-modernist theory to make his point but most critics were not so relativistic and generous. The general opinion of cute was that it was ‘juvenile, effeminate and tasteless’. In this equation the feminine, the tasteless, the infantile and the popular were used as virtually interchangeable concepts giving a good idea of the kind of narrow prejudices of the critics. Yamane, in particular, took it for granted that infantile means feminine:
‘What can we conclude about this complete infantilisation of Japan?- The answer is straightforward. The girl has jumped up. The girl is boisterous.’
Nakano Osamu, a leading intellectual and expert on youth echoes Yamane’s sentiments:
‘With the action of one selfish nod of their head in response to a question, a response originally typical of children, young people display their infantilism. At times female university students babble to themselves and from their attitude and demeanour to their facial expression they act just exactly as though they were children.’
Nakano gives the strong impression that he feels the problem of ingratiating ’selfish’ cute fashion could be solved if only women were banned from universities altogether. Women are blamed for feminizing society. But the so called feminine behaviour described by critics is not actually traditional feminine behaviour at all but a new kind of petulant refusal to be traditional subservient females observed in modern young women following cute fashion. Cute behaviour was perceived as ’selfish’ not just because of its seeming refusal to co-operate with social expectations, - in this case respectful and polite behaviour in the presence of superiors like Nakano, - but because it was strongly related with indulgence and individualistic consumption.
Young women in particular have born the brunt of criticism of consumer culture throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Cuties have been scapegoated. Their recent and highly conspicuous participation in decadent consumption activities and the older association of personal consumption involving interest in fashion and emotional abandon with femininity has helped critics of modern culture to point the finger at women. Over worked salary men have been encouraged to see the source of their misery as the new generation of stroppy decadent young women who selfishly do what ever they wish and make unreasonable demands on men. There is a general consensus that, today, men are hard done by and humiliated by manipulative, choosy, cute young women. In fact in the first half of the 1980s young women worked more than at any time previously in the post war period. However the greater involvement of young unmarried women in the labour force has also been interpreted as another act of wilful selfishness on the part of women, who were accused as deliberately vying with men for good jobs and simultaneously denying them marriage partners.
There is an interesting though incidental similarity between both the particular forms of black culture and the ways in which black Americans have been discussed in academic and media discourse in the USA and the particular form of feminine cute culture and the ways in which women have been discussed in academic and media discourse in Japan. In the 1980s a strand of black American culture responded to the mainstream stereotyping of blacks as vain, emotionally unstable, immature, violent, criminal, etc., by adopting the stereotype of the ‘nigger’ and raising it into a positive stereotype. They proudly described themselves as ‘niggers’ (Ice T, NWA etc.), and flaunted their potential for criminality, violence, and sexual prowess in their fashion, in hip hop and in rap music. In Japan a barrage of sexist stereotyping and insults, frequently propagated under the guise of media or academic social analysis about the new position of women in Japanese society, began flowing in the mid 1970s and continued throughout the 1980s, producing, by now, a mountain of books on ‘women’. Aspects of cute culture engaged in by young women appear to respond to this criticism by defensively strengthening a ‘girls only’ culture and identity.
Women debased as infantile and irresponsible began to fetishize and flaunt their shôjo personality still more, almost as a means of taunting and ridiculing male condemnation and making clear there stubborn refusal to stop playing, go home and, accept less from life.
Popular examples, true or false, of young women’s triumphal manipulation of men using their cute appearances as a bait abounded in late 1980s Japan. Apparently the cutest and most innocent looking of young women were keeping several dates on the boil at once in order to service their materialistic needs. Between the girls each date would have a separate function and name ashi- kun (Mr Legs) awarded to the man who could provide a free late night taxi service, and meshi-kun (Mr Food) for the man who provided free meals out on the town.
Cute fashion as we have seen idolises childhood. The aims of playfulness, individual emotional expression, and naivetÈ incorporated in childlikeness are not consistent with traditional social values. The people who persisted in play and ‘refuse to grow up’ are what Okonogi Keigo would call moratorium people:
‘Present day society embraces an increasing number of people who have no sense of belonging to any party or organisation but instead are oriented towards non affiliation, escape from controlled society, and youth culture. I have called them the moratorium people.’
The concept of ‘moratorium people invented by Okonogi in 1979 became very widespread and influential, to the point that students and individuals on the periphery of Japanese society happily identified themselves as moratoriamu. But in fact the contemporary association of social disaffection or social rebellion with childishness began during the students movement at the end of the 1960s. One of the reasons for this was the adoption of children’s culture as an alternative to mainstream ‘adults’ culture by students who refused to accept the values taught by the universities any longer. Rather than reading the classics and doing as they were told students started to read children’s and adolescent comics instead and fairly well took the comic (manga) medium for their own. The common motto of the day was ‘never trust anyone over thirty’ and students showed their loathing by spending hours with their noses in comics which became considered somewhat risqué and underground. ‘Adult’ came to have the additional meaning of conservative whilst ‘childlike’ and play came to have the additional meanings of progressive and open minded. This explains the logic behind Doi Takeo’s thinking when in 1971 he neatly described internationalism and social equality as infantilism:
‘In practise, the present tendency to shelve all distinctions- of adult and child, male and female, cultured and uncultured, East and West- in favour of a universal form of childish amae can only be called a regression for mankind.’
responsibilities and social duties and adulthood is an extension of Doi Takeo’s theory of childishness. Nakano goes on to bitterly recall that cute behaviour is a direct expression of the moratorium mentality:
‘They deliberately affect a pitiful cuteness. Growth, maturity and becoming an adult are not positive values: they want to remain children forever. This subjective childishness is related to the prolongation of the moratorium period, which is made evident by the striking infantilism of young people after they have entered university.’
Cute style is anti-social; it idolises the pre-social. By the pre-social world otherwise known as childhood cute fashion blithely ignores or outright contradicts values central to the organisation of Japanese society and the maintenance of the work ethic. By acting childish Japanese youth tried to avoid the conservative’s moral demand that they exercise self-discipline (enryo) and responsibility (sekinin) and tolerate (gaman) severe conditions (kuro, kudo) whilst working hard (doryoku) in order to repay their obligation (giri, on) to society.
Rather than working hard cuties seem to just wanted to play and ignore the rest of society completely. The overwhelming desire of young Japanese wrapped up in nostalgic cute culture were to escape from the restrictions governing their lives. Ultimately, for Cuties, as for Sid Vicious, there was NO FUTURE; in fact, there was not even a present.
