Kawaii. Harajuku fashionistas with pink tutus and purple bangs, Hello Kitty TV sets, fish cakes that look like pandas, girls in manga with sparkly eyes, construction signs that take the form of frogs?

Providing an in-depth overview of all things kawaii (cute), this book traces the cute aesthetic from its inception in the 1970s as a schoolgirl trend to its position as a leading cultural norm ...

Kawaii is inescapable in Japan, where I have lived since the 1990s, so the global rise of adorable content online has not surprised me. As of the time of writing, 676 million posts are tagged # ...

“Cute” is not a perfect translation of kawaii but it gives some idea of what it is about. The term emerged in the 1970s, at a time of economic prosperity in Japan when consumer goods and ...