East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

Originating in Japan, Lolita is a consumer lifestyle fashion unrelated to the Vladimir Nabokov novel. The concepts that inform Japanese words like kawaii (cuteness), shōjo (young girl) and otome (maidenhood) are complex and varied. These keywords are explored through interviews with Japanese women from their teens to mid-40s who wear or have worn Lolita fashion. Participants in this study were asked to define and discuss these concepts and their responses provide an example of how women outside the age range of young girlhood build an identity and a space removed from social and familial obligations through a fashion movement that cultivates a specific vision of cuteness. By surrounding and adorning themselves with the things they adore, Lolitas assert their individuality and personality through a kawaii revolution. Otome and shōjo are the backbone concepts that drive this personal sense of kawaii, while its incarnation as Lolita provides a site for a lived practice and performance in which happiness is built through feelings, affects and states of becoming.

There has yet to be a definitive study of cute culture that is organically Singaporean. Drawing on existing work on East Asian cute culture and the regional popularity of commercial social media microcelebrities or ‘Influencers’ in Singapore, this article annotates three modes of agentic cute used to obscure the soft power that Influencers hold. Through the qualitative textual and visual analysis of content from three popular Singaporean Influencers, and their associated blogs and social media, this article examines how three tropes that I term ‘the Doll’, ‘the Darling’ and ‘the Dear’ are enacted as cute femininities among adult woman. It argues that the subversive power of this performative cuteness is obscured by the corresponding sensual delight, romantic docility and homosocial desire that the Influencers develop in tandem with their cute self-presentations. By continually emphasizing stereotypical gendered relationships with their male partners, and relations with their followers, these Influencers are able to position themselves as non-threatening and submissive, when they are in fact quietly subverting these hierarchies for personal gain.

Approaching the cute object as a metaphor for the lovable, this article provides a survey of the different approaches to the study of cuteness and uses their intersections to map out a three-domain approach that incorporates the dimensions of affect, language and design. When considered in isolation, these domains highlight specific facets of cuteness, but their intersection underscores an important etymological tension that continuously transforms the metaphors of cuteness. These changes do not compromise the primary meaning of cuteness, but lead to a reinvention of the lovable, whereby the cute object continues to represent an abstraction of a particularly affectionate connection to the other. Therefore, the arguments presented will demonstrate that the notion of cuteness emerges through a particular etymological tension embedded in the idea of ‘cuteness’ that reifies aesthetic concepts through the relationship between the individual’s affective experience and the operation of language through culture.

The recent boom in cute characters (kyara) has permeated Japanese popular aesthetics to the extent that character-shaped foods have displaced the former emphasis on recreating natural objects in bento (packed lunches) created for preschoolers. Prior to this development, Anne Allison described bento as an ‘ideological state apparatus’. Under this rubric, learning to make a proper bento was a part of training women to be proper mothers of preschoolers, just as eating it quickly and completely helped train the children as model citizens. Contemporary mothers of small children, having been reared on Hello Kitty and her ilk, are now no longer simply the targets of character merchandizing, but the promulgators. Performing the domestic and educational rituals of kyaraben encourages women’s and children’s production and consumption of ‘character culture’.

‘Kawaii’ is one of the most popular words in contemporary Japan and is recognized as representative of Japanese pop culture. It is often translated into English as ‘cute’, but a subtle difference of nuance seems to exist between the two words. In this article, a framework for research on kawaii from a behavioural science perspective is put forward. After introducing the dictionary definition, history and current usage of kawaii, this article reports survey results of Japanese students and office workers about their attitudes towards kawaii. These findings and past psychological and behavioural science research lead to a two-layer model that consists of kawaii as an emotion and kawaii as a social value. This model postulates that the basis of kawaii is a positive emotion related to the social motivation of watching for and staying with preferable persons and objects, which is typically observed in affection towards babies and infants, but not limited to them. This culturally non-specific, biological trait has been appreciated and fostered in Japan by certain characteristics of Japanese culture. Because previous research on cuteness has been almost exclusively associated with infant physical attractiveness and baby schema, using the relatively fresh, exotic word ‘kawaii’ may be helpful to describe this broader psychological concept.

This article addresses a conspicuous phenomenon within the burgeoning cute cultures of contemporary Japan – namely, pre-adult women adopting a fashion style that is simultaneously cute and hyper-sexy. While both cuteness and hypersexuality stand in contradiction to the norms of Japan’s patriarchal gender system, public amalgamations of these two elements constitute a trend initiated by and for some contemporary young Japanese women. Through a series of ethnographic observations and theoretical reflections, the authors aim to uncover how the initially subcultural cute fashion phenomenon was brought to public attention by incorporating hyper-sexy elements into a ‘sexy’ facade that publicly signalled these young women taking control of their own sexuality. Such a transformation not only works to reclaim these practitioners’ sexual identities as women, but may also destabilize prevailing perceptions of acceptable (or desirable) feminine behaviour through the very instruments of sexuality that are readily produced and made available in the heterosexual consumer market.

Kawaii is different from the western cute because it may also include ‘cool’. The paradoxical coexistence of weakness and strength, of cute and cool, is interesting in philosophical terms. Kawaii is not simply weak but equipped with its own kind of strength. In this article, I explore kawaii by using philosophical ideas linked to the paradigm of ‘strength out of weakness’ that appears in the so-called ‘weak thought’ philosophy of Gianni Vattimo. The Heideggerian term Verwindung (twisting) as it is used by Vattimo, is at the centre of this analysis. Vattimo’s philosophy is also based on the Christian idea of kenosis, a classic theological term that can be translated as ‘weakening’. Feminist theologians use the concept of kenosis in order to ‘feminize’ theology. It is in this context that kawaii can be shown as bringing together such antagonistic qualities as submission and subversion. Vattimo’s Verwindung describes the effect of distortion to which gender distinctions are submitted through the impact of kawaii. As a result, kawaii should be seen as femininity without metanarratives because kawaii strips feminist gestures of their metaphysical features.

Oshii Mamoru’s 2008 film The Sky Crawlers imagines a world in which cloned adolescents (Kildren) are made to fight staged aerial battles for the entertainment of the TV-viewing public. This article uses the narrative and visual aesthetic of The Sky Crawlers to examine what it means to be an adolescent, a killer, and a human being in a world where reality and spectacle have become indistinguishable, and where both the bodies of young people and the very idea of adolescence (as a liminal state defined by a lack of experience in and wisdom about the world) have been commodified by corporations. The existence of the Kildren and the world they live in is made all the more vivid through the visual framework of anime, which has a long history of using contrasting drawing styles (hyper-real for machines, handdrawn for humans). This framework allows The Sky Crawlers to re-imagine the idea of ‘deathlessness’ in anime and manga, with the hand-drawn bodies of Kildren characters emphasizing the impermanent, recyclable nature of their existence. The film points to a world in which spectacle reigns supreme, and everything – bodies, emotions, the very concept of adolescence – has the potential to be optimized to enhance that spectacle.

Television and The Modernization Ideal in 1980S China: Dazzling the Eyes, Huike Wen (2014) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 155 pp., ISBN: 9780739178867, h/bk, $75.00

Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture, Hui Faye Xiao (2014) Seattle, WA: The University of Washington Press, 247 pp., ISBN: 9780295993492, h/bk, $75.00

Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics, Ruoyun Bai (2015) Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 276 pp., ISBN: 9789622091832, h/bk, $99.00

Chinese Television in The Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation, Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song (Eds) (2015), New York: Routledge, 200 pp., ISBN: 9780415745123, h/bk, $145.00