FRom hEllo KITTY To CoD RoE KEWPIE A Postwar Cultural History of Cuteness in Japan

The cute characters and commercial goods emerging from contemporary Japanese popular culture have quickly spread around the globe, capturing
the attention of teenagers and adults, most of
whom were not even considered as target con-
sumers of these products. Their popularity is
much more than a passing phenomenon of
fashion-conscious people looking for the lat-
est thing. In fact, the steady development of
cute culture in Japan since the 1970s signals
more than even the most avid consumer of
“cute” may realize. Cute culture reflects the
changing modes of social, economic, and politi-
cal conditions, especially young women’s ideas about
work and marriage and young male perceptions about
their future.

from consumption of things to consumption of images -1970 j

he Hello Kitty revival hap- pened in the mid-nineties when the value of
the Japanese yen fell drastically and major
Japanese banks went bankrupt.

many banks, began using cute mascots for their advertise- ments in order to soften their public images. In this period of financial struggle, the range of “youth” targeted by this cross-media entertain- ment and “soft-image” bureaucracy extended especially toward men and women in their thirties and beyond, including mothers who had purchased “fancy goods” in the seventies and eighties and seniors who needed easily accessible icons to handle computerized systems. 

The cute craze that has spread to the world since the late nineties seems to stem from this revival of “cute” that emerged against the strug- gling economy and aging popu- lation in Japan.