ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the culture and ideology of kawaii, typically understood as the ‘cute’ style associated with the Japanese girl, mediated the lives of women in the Heisei era. Kawaii's overseas reputation often emphasizes its sweet quirkiness, but in Japan, kawaii essentially remains the most normative, mainstream, and prescriptive aesthetic and affect that majority society demands of women and rewards them for. This is due to kawaii's ‘minor’ and ‘paraesthetic’ nature: being subordinate and/or supplementary in relation to something held as the main or the dominant. The ubiquity of kawaii has thus stood in ambiguous and conflicting relation to female empowerment in Japan. The chapter examines the genealogy of kawaii by tracing its appearance as a critical concept in the male-dominated discourse in the 1990s, its hyped return in women's fashion and lifestyle in the early 2000s participating in post-feminism as well as anti-feminism, and the appropriation of kawaii's ‘disarming’ quality in the affective marketing and branding of various products and institutions.
