Kawaii is inescapable in Japan, where I have lived since the 1990s, so the global rise of adorable content online has not surprised me. As of the time of writing, ...

In only its fourth year the Tokyo Girls Collection, a fashion show turned cultural extravaganza, has quickly become a premier event for Japan's trend-conscious and economically influential girls and ...

In Japan, ‘cute’ is a big deal. Their own word for it, kawaii (“ka-why-ee”), is more of an ethos than an adjective. Shops and billboards are filled with big-eyed fluffy figures.

And kawaii style can be traced further back, the London-based Japanese animator Miki Kato argues in her 2002 essay, “Cute Culture,” to centuries-old Japanese aesthetic principles that prize ...

The rise of Hello Kitty. At the end of World War II, Japan faced a reckoning. The country’s surrender in 1945 forced its political leaders to confront the consequences of the nation’s ...

Sanrio recruited Shimizu and other illustrators to create “kawaii” characters at a time when cute, girlish styles were popular in Japan. But the word is used often in Japanese society, and not ...

How Japan's "most famous" artist, and others, are subverting the country's cute "kawaii" aesthetic to question the world we live in. More than a millennium ago, the Japanese empress Fujiwara no ...

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

He dubs his genre as Kawaii Metal (or ‘Cute Metal’), which mixes some elements from heavy metal and J-Pop. One of the pioneers of this genre is a Japanese idol trio Babymetal, who just wrapped ...

Hello Kitty turns 50 on Friday. Befitting a pop icon at midlife, the bubble-headed, bow-wearing character's fictional birthday has brought museum exhibits, a theme park spectacle and a national tour.