ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the beginnings of the modern manifestation of the aesthetic of kawaii to the early 1970s, a period following significant political and social unrest. In Japanese, kawaii derived from the phrase, "kawahayushi," meaning a flushed face and implying embarrassment, and came to mean able to be loved, adorable, or cute. The difficulty in determining exactly what cute is, however, lies in the overlap of an adaptive evolutionary strategy and a constructed social strategy. One thing that kawaii fashion does, however, is destabilize the distinctions of high and low by holding up a mirror to social and cultural structures that claim the space of maturity and seriousness by being deliberately neither. Just as the aesthetic of cool ignores mainstream tastes, so, too, kawaii does not directly enter into or challenge mainstream cultural and aesthetic values but establishes its own values and aesthetics by ignoring them.
