Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty and the lucrative appeal of “cute”
In the latter half of the 20th century, we developed an astonishing appetite for all things cute, says Neil Steinberg. Walt Disney built a megacorporation on it, but in few places does “cuteness” count for more than in Japan
On 14 April 2016, a 6.2magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southernmost island, Kyushu, toppling buildings and sending residents rushing into the streets. Hundreds of aftershocks continued for days, killing 49 people, injuring 1,500 and forcing tens of thousands from their homes. News spread around the globe on social media. “Earthquake just happened,” Margie Tam posted from Hong Kong. “R u ok Kumamon?” “Are Kumamon and his friends safe?” wondered Eric Tang, a college student. “Pray for Kumamoto and Kumamon,” wrote Ming Jang Lee from Thailand, a phrase that would be repeated thousands of times.
On 12 March 2016, one month before the earthquake, Kumamon had bounded onto an outdoor stage at the opening event of his birthday party in Kumamoto, a city of 700,000. About 150 guests – mostly women – cheered, clapped and whistled. Kumamon waved and bowed. He is just under 5ft tall, with black glossy fur, circular red cheeks and wide, staring eyes, and he was wearing, for the occasion, a white satin dinner jacket trimmed in silver, and a red bow tie.
One woman in the crowd held a Kumamon doll swaddled in a baby blanket. Another had dressed her doll in a grey outfit matching her own. It had taken her a month to make. A number of fans had pasted red paper circles on their cheeks to mimic his. Those in the first row had arrived at 3am to snag prime spots to greet the object of their affection. “Actually, I have no idea why I love him so much,” said Milkinikio Mew, who had flown from Hong Kong to attend the three-day-long festival – even though Hong Kong was holding its own party for Kumamon. She had overslept, and only arrived at 6am for the 10am kick-off, so she had to settle for a seat in the back row.
A birthday cake was rolled out, and the crowd sang Happy Birthday. Then presents. A representative from Honda, which has a motorbike factory nearby, gave him its Kumamon-themed scooter. An Italian bicycle-maker unveiled a custom Kumamon racing bike. There was also a new exercise DVD, on which Kumamon leads the workout. The Italian bicycle was not for sale, at that time. But the other two items were, joining more than 100,000 products that feature Kumamon’s image – from stickers and notebooks to cars and aeroplanes (one budget Japanese airline flies a Kumamon 737). When the toy manufacturer Steiff offered 1,500 special-edition Kumamon plush toys at $300 each, they claimed the bears sold out online in five seconds. Kumamon is a yuru-kyara, or “loose character”, one of the
cuddly creatures in Japan that represent everything from towns and cities to airports and prisons. The word is sometimes translated as “mascot”, but yuru-kyara are significantly different from mascots in the West, such as those associated with professional sports teams, which tend to be onedimensional court jesters that operate on the sidelines during game-time.
Kumamon has a far wider field of operation as the yuru-kyara for Kumamoto Prefecture. He has become more than a symbol for that region, more than merely a strategy to push its tourism and farm products. He is almost regarded as a living entity, a kind of fun, ursine household god. He hovers in a realm of fantasy like a character from children’s literature, a cross between the Cat in the Hat and a teddy bear.
After the April earthquake, Kumamon’s Twitter feed, which has half a million followers, stopped issuing communications. With a thousand buildings damaged, water to the city cut, a hospital jarred off its foundations, and 44,000 people out of their homes, the prefectural government, which handles Kumamon’s business dealings and appearances, had more important things to do than stage-manage its fictional bear. But Kumamon was missed. “People are asking why Kumamon’s Twitter account has gone silent when the prefecture needs its mascot bear more than ever,” The Japan Times posted on its Facebook page on 19 April.
Into the vacuum came hundreds, then thousands, of drawings, posted by children, adults and even professional manga artists, not only from Japan, but from Thailand, Hong Kong and China. They waged an impromptu campaign to drum up support for earthquake relief using the bear, which stood in for the city itself and its people. Kumamon was depicted leading the rescue efforts, his head bandaged, lifting stones to rebuild the tumbled walls of Kumamoto Castle, propping up tottering foundations, enfolding children in his arms. “Ganbatte Kumamon!” many wrote, using a term that means something between “don’t give up” and “do your best”.
Kumamon is kawaii – the word is translated as “cute”, but it has broad, multilayered meanings, encompassing a range of sweetly alluring images and behaviours. People spend a lot on cute avatars – Kumamon earned $1bn in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that. But what is cute? What is the basis of its appeal? Does appreciation for cuteness come naturally, or does it reveal something about our society? Is it broadly positive – or could
“People spend a lot on cute avatars – Kumamon earned $1bn in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that”
cuteness harbour darker facets as well? These are some of the questions being addressed by a nascent academic field, cute studies.
Babies are our model for cuteness. Konrad Lorenz recognised that in his 1943 paper Kindchenschema – the blueprint of cute studies; in it, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist discussed the “innate releasing mechanisms” that prompt affection and nurture in human beings: fat cheeks, large eyes set low on the face, a high forehead, a small nose and jaw, and stubby arms and legs that move in a clumsy fashion. Not just humans: puppies, baby ducks and other young animals are included in Lorenz’s theory. However, his paper did not produce a positive reaction among the scientific community. He was a Nazi psychologist writing during wartime, exploring the party’s theories on selective breeding (he later apologised and disowned Nazi ideology).
For decades, scientists focused on what babies perceive, and how they think. But in the 21st century, attention turned to how babies themselves are perceived, as cuteness started to become a cohesive realm of research. Experiments have apparently demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills, which are useful modifications for handling an infant. Experiments hooking up volunteers to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners have shown how seeing cute creatures stimulates the brain to release dopamine. Society’s embrace of cuteness has led academics in gender studies to wonder whether cute culture trains women to be childlike, or whether it could be a means by which young women take control of their sexuality.
More recent experiments have been carried out with the aim of identifying general aesthetic standards that can make an inanimate object cute. In a study at the University of Michigan in 2012, visual information expert Sookyung Cho asked subjects “to design a cute rectangle by adjusting the size, proportion, roundness, rotation and colour of the figure”. What she found supported the idea that “smallness, roundness, tiltedness and lightness of colour can serve as determinants of perceived cuteness in artefact design”. It mattered, she found, whether the person designing the rectangle was in the US or South Korea. Cuteness is culturally specific.
Nobody is cute in Shakespeare. The word did not exist until the early 1700s, when the “a” in “acute” was replaced by an apostrophe – ’cute – and then dropped altogether. Acute came from acus, Latin for needle, later denoting pointed things, so cute at first meant “acute, clever, keen-witted, sharp, shrewd”, according to the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which doesn’t suggest the term could describe visual appearance. The newer usage was still being resisted in Britain in the mid1930s, when a correspondent at The Daily Telegraph included cute on his list of “bastard American expressions”, along with radio. The portrayal of cute, chubby babies is largely absent from visual art before the 20th century. Babies in medieval paintings are depicted as wizened miniature adults. Cute images of the kind we have become accustomed to began showing up around 1900, when popular culture was discovering the bottomless marketability of cute things. In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from Cupid) – preening baby-like creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around on Jell-o ads. Cuteness and modern commercialisation became intricately linked. Still, kewpies followed the lines of actual human anatomy more or less, the way that Mickey Mouse resembled a real mouse when he first appeared on film in 1928. A half-century of fine-tuning made him much more infantile, a process the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously described in his “biological homage” to Mickey, in which he traced the mischievous and sometimes violent mouse of the late 1920s as he morphed into the benign, bland overseer of a vast corporate empire. “He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty character of [the 1928 short] Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom,” Gould wrote.
In Japan, the fascination with cuteness expresses itself in girls’ handwriting. Around 1970, schoolgirls began to imitate the caption text in manga comics – known as koneko-ji, or “kitten writing”. By 1985, half of the girls in Japan had adopted the style, and companies marketing pencils, notebooks and other inexpensive gift items learned that these items sold better when festooned with a variety of characters, the queen of whom is Hello Kitty. Her full name is Kitty White, and she has a family and lives in London (owing to a fad for all things British in the mid-1970s). The first Hello Kitty product, a purse, went on sale in 1974. Today, about $5bn-worth of merchandise is sold annually. In Asia, there are Hello Kitty amusement parks, restaurants and hotel suites. EVA Air, the Taiwanese airline, flies seven Hello Kitty-themed jets, which carry images of Hello Kitty and her friends not only on their hulls, but in their cabins, on the pillows and on the antimacassars.
Humanity has always embraced household gods: not the worldcreating deity, but more personal allies to soften what can be a harsh and lonely life. Not everyone has the friends they deserve, or the baby they’d cherish. Often people are alone. Teddy bears exist because the night is dark and long and, at some point, your parents have to leave you. There is real comfort in cuteness. “Filling in an emotional need is exactly where kawaii plays a significant role,” said Christine R. Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the author of Pink Globalisation: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific. “Even in America, journalist Nicholas Kristof has written of an ‘empathy gap’ in today’s society. He points to the place of objects that may be considered promoters of ‘happiness’, ‘solace’, ‘comfort’. When a society needs to heal, it seeks comfort in the familiar. And often the familiar may reside in ‘cute’. Witness the use of teddy bears as sources of comfort for firefighters in the wake of New York City’s 9/11. So I see kawaii things as potential empathy generators.”
Kumamon evokes a ton of empathy. In the weeks after the earthquake, Kumamon was so necessary that in his absence, his fans conjured him up themselves, independently, as an object of sympathy, a tireless saviour, an obvious hero. When he visited the town of Mashiki, where residents were still sleeping in their cars for safety, his arrival was reported on TV and in the papers, as if a long-sought survivor had stumbled out of the wreckage alive. The children, many of whom had lost their homes in the earthquake, flocked around him, squealing, hugging, taking pictures. Their friend had returned.
“When a society needs to heal, it seeks comfort in the familiar. And often the familiar may reside in ‘cute’”