Pink globalisation, the spread of cute goods from Japan to other parts of the industrial world, has been a stronghold of consumption in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly with Hello ...

On social media feeds all over the world, puppies experience hiccups for the first time, hamsters eat tiny tacos and cats befriend monkeys. And they do it a lot. Kawaii is inescapable in Japan, where ...

Kawaii. You hear it in anime, you hear it on TV shows, and you hear it on the streets of Japan, where the word is spoken by young and old alike. With people around the world growing up on Japanese ...

Hui-Ying Kerr received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2010 - 2013 as part of her PhD research on Japan in the 1980s. This is a true story. One Saturday night, I ...

Editor’s Note: Joshua Paul Dale is a professor at Tokyo Gakugei University. He is co-editor of “The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness”, and the editor of “Cute Studies,” a special issue of the East ...

"Gross" characters are proliferating in a country known for kawaii, and now even local governments' mascots are trying to out-weird one another. Long considered the global capital of cute, Japan is ...