The Aesthetics of ‘Cute’ (Kawaii)
November 28, 2005
The Aesthetics of ‘Cute’ (Kawaii)
Inuhiko Yomota (Professor of Film and Media Studies, Meiji Gakuin University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
11/23 We regret to announce that this talk has been cancelled for reasons of the speaker’s health. Professor Yomota has assured us that he looks forward to delivering the lecture on a future visit to New York, perhaps as early as next year. We are sorry for any inconvience that this rescheduling may have caused.
The dominant aesthetic of eleventh-century Japanese aristocrats was that of ‘mono no aware’, which emphasized the transient beauty of a world in which all things are constantly changing and disappearing. For sixteenth-century tea masters, the dominant principle of beauty was ‘wabi’, which shunned ostentation and ornament in favour of modest yet witty understatement. Twentieth-century philosophers turned back to the aesthetic concept of ‘iki’, which they saw as a perfect synthesis of willpower, coquetry, and detachment.
Today, the dominant aesthetic is that of ‘kawaii’. ‘Kawaii’ is an adjective that generally denotes the small, the reassuring, and the lovable. It is somewhat different than the English word ‘cute’, for it includes not just babies, young girls, and stuffed toys, but also full-grown men and the elderly, depending on the context. Animated characters from Pokemon to Hello Kitty have turned ‘kawaii’ into a massive industry which extends far beyond racial and national boundaries into the realm of global consumer society. Through an analysis of the concept of ‘kawaii’, this lecture illuminates not only the evolutionary history of Japanese aesthetics, but how ‘kawaii’ functions as an ideology and a mythology underpinning contemporary Japan.
