“Kawaii,” the closest Japanese equivalent to the contemporary English “cute,” goes further. Here the cute isn’t so much unthreatening as threatened. According to the Japanese cultural ...

From an early age, Japanese kids ... lunches are not as cute as their neighbors.' " These school lunches are locally grown and usually made from scratch. They're so yummy that, as The Washington ...

Little kids, especially infants and toddlers, often get constipated, so an adorable character ... If there is a product, then a Japanese company probably has a cute character for it.

We were of course in Japan, but still, what on earth was going on? As the economy progressed through the 1970s and 1980s, so did consumer subcultures – and cute as a style began to be expressed ...

Cute—"Kawaii" in local parlance—wears many guises in Japan. There's old-school kawaii, embodied by the helpless, mouthless gaze of Hello Kitty. There's the newer guy-cute, manifest by masses ...