Cuteness and Kawaii essentially means childlike; it celebrates sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple, genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak and inexperienced social behavior and physical appearance. (Kinsella, 1995) The word Kawaii was first appeared in the book – Konjaku Monogatari Shyu in the 12 century Heian period (Heian Jidai) Japan. Up until the early Edo period (Edo Jidai), the negative sense of Kawaii faded away, position emotional implications such as “Sympathetic” “likeable” became the mainstream, and the word Kawaii began to borrow Chinese Character (El)to express its meaning. Tadao, 1980)
During the same period, Kawaii have been gradually combined with the general public’s aesthetic consciousness at the time, in which created the symbolic basis of a unique Japanese aesthetic consciousness that usually used to describe the compact (small and delightful) objects. In modern time, as the Japanese society move towards Individualism, the inherit meaning of the term kawaii changes from an objective aesthesis sense towards developing a sense of subjective emotion judgment. And such emotional judgment and dependence, along with the rises of modern consumer society, began transforming into symbolization of the commodity.
In Contemporary Japanese society, minority of the general public and mass media have started to criticise and question that Cuteness is only about the experience if commodities as things created for commercial purposes and cuteness either completely infantilises young people or it’s a completely useless form of youth protest. However, majority of the criticisms towards cuteness (kawaii) were either subjective or devoid of facts, therefore it is vital to carefully evaluate the statements mentioned above with objective analysis and to identify why people would make with such statements.
Unfortunately, there are only few studies associated with the flourish culture of cuteness. Western Sociological researchers haven’t been paying a lot of attentions to the existence of cuteness culture, majority of the researchers only treated it as one of the offshoot of Japanese pop culture, a temporary social phenomena. Cuteness culture not only excluded from the general cultural studies, even popular culture scholars don’t pay attention to this topic. Up until the mid-1990s to early 2000s, “Hello Kitty” and “Pokemon” originated in Japan overwhelmed the global commodity markets in dominant fashion.
To the extend it can be said that, at the very least, the global success of Pokemon and other Japanese child products at the time signifies a shift in the entertainment market place until recently monopolized by United Stated. (Alison, 2004) The culture of cuteness have finally attracted the attention of sociologists after the overwhelmed force of Pokemon and hello kitty, Kinsella (1995) was the first scholar to use ethnography, through the analysis of character’s commodity, costumes, food, idols and general public thinking model in order to explore the kawaii phenomenon in Japan.
Perhaps due to the influence of University of Birmingham-Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Kinsella’s study mainly focused on youth subculture, and advocated that the kawaii culture was in fact an antisocial behavior by Japanese youth. However, Kinsella emphasized that such culture was fundamentally different compared to Western vouth “against the mainstream culture, resist consumer society” subculture, it was more like a comfort zone for Japanese youth to escape social reality and refused to grow up while Japan’s consumer culture at the time contributed to this trend.
After Kinsella’s study was published, Japan’s kawaii culture began to attract the attention of Eastern Asia researchers in America. In 2004, Harvard University has held the “Cute Culture in Japan” seminar for the first time in Harvard history, it aimed to not only explore the expression of cuteness culture in Japan, but also discussed its social impact. In addition, Belson and Bremner (2003) analyzing the process of commercialization and lobalization of the Hello Kitty merchandise in order to investigate the origin of contemporary Japanese popular culture – cuteness (kawaii) culture. European and American scholars has its own unique insights on Japanese cuteness culture (Kawaii Bunka) and they also refer it as symbolic icon of the formation of Japanese Consumer Society, an important indicator on observing and analyzing social changes in contemporary Japanese society.
Unfortunately, due to the excessive emphasis on the characteristic of the cuteness culture itself, general public as well as the scholars tended to ignore the process of origin, development and popularization of the cuteness culture, thus no different with any of the Western popular cultures since the 19th century, and that is exactly why general public today tend to criticize the cuteness culture. On the other hand, the cuteness culture itself has been shown that it has always been closely related the changes in general population’s psychology, taste, aesthetic consciousness and consumption culture.
Thus such topic already expand into and belongs to the field of Economic Sociology, ethnography method alone can no longer produce convincing research results since cuteness culture are highly associated with the nature of consumption. In today’s consumer society, how to meet the demand and criteria of consumer’s emotional experience has become one of the important indicator and goal for all companies worldwide.
Experiential marketing expert-Schmitt (1999) had emphasis that modern consumer behavior can be seen as a universal and sensory situation, the forms of consumer experience can be analyze as following: Sense, feel, think, act and relate. These type of experiential marketing strategy now seems to have become a common trait for companies like Apple, Starbucks and other successful modern business. Under this trend, emotional consumption has become the major force behind apid growth of modern consumption economy not only in Japan, but globally. And the “character economy” is now the best reflection of emotional experience in the consumer society. Generally, the “character economy” can be divided into two levels in terms of emotional consumption: the first level is by using character as the brand representative of products or enterprises, so that consumer will have positive cognition towards the product or the enterprise itself, it belong to the field of Marketing science.
For example, When Coca-Cola launched a new series of juice product in Japan, a character named “Qoo” has been created and it shaped an image of affinity to the product itself and it successfully captured the hearts of consumers at the time; The second level is to commercialize the character, direct appeal to meet the consumers emotional needs. Hello Kitty and Pokemon as examples, those characters derived more than 50,000 related merchandises. However, Scholars (Frankfurt School in most cases) criticized that those two levels of emotional consumption might result in overconsumption behaviors. The phenomenon of Fairy tale story characters are made into stuffed toys and sold in the toy shop was a disintegration process from cultural heritage to cultural merchandise. ” (Adorno, 1978)
In the reality, according to a survey conducted by CHARRAKEN (2000) the most successful character commodities in modern consumer society have a common trait, which allows consumer to generate emotional identification, these type of commodities all have a common denominator-kawaii. diagram 1) These cute merchandise often generate a form of healing effect- Iyashi (L) to the consumer , allowing them to temporarily escape from the stressful and alienate real world, thus provided an intimate space. In conclusion, to sum up the information mentioned above, consumption is no longer an economic activity or social activity, but it is also a mental activity, an emotional activity. Therefore, it not only consist the elements of economic value and social significance, but it also associated with individuals’ psychological experience and emotional practice.
Economic value and social significance of consumption highlighted the productivity and society, whereas emotional and mental activity manifested in its emotion and culture. Kawaii consumption encompasses majority of the nature of emotional consumption, including consumer preference, symbolic consumption and emotional experience consumption. And as a prominent feature of kawaii consumption, other than instant gratification, it always have a lag and delay effect, thus able consumer sentiment cast into capital accumulation while convert into other capital and spread to other industries, forming a “kawaii economics”.
The value of commodities under kawaii consumption or kawaii economics has gone beyond the original value of the material goods, and with the emotional investment by both the producer and consumer, it will enhance the value added. From the analysis above, it can be seen that although kawaii consumption cannot fully escape from the definition given by general population and from what Fromm (1955) stated ‘consumption is a tool for modern people to escape pressure, a comfort zone for pain and misfortune”.
But the foundation of its origin was not what ‘Frankfurt school” have alleged -False needs, but rather a reflection of true feeling of modern consumers, it is an active participation of consumer behavior by general public. Thus, consumption of kawaii merchandise is by no mean a compulsive consumption, but rather a freedom of choice by individual who are loyal to their self-emotion.