Japanese schools once banned cute handwriting that teenage girls had invented
In the 1970s Japanese teenage girls began writing sideways in fine mechanical pencil, with fat rounded characters decorated with hearts, stars and little faces. Teachers found it so hard to read that many schools banned it. Within a decade the style was selling toys and magazines, one strand of the cute culture called kawaii.
The word has travelled a long way. It grew from an old phrase meaning a face aglow, used for blushing, and drifted in meaning and sound, through kawayui, to today's kawaii, cute or adorable. Its common written form uses characters that literally suggest lovable. A close relative, kawaiso, means pitiable, and in some dialects forms of the word can mean embarrassing or, conversely, splendid.
People trace the sensibility back to Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, written between 900 and 1000, whose list of pretty things includes a child's face drawn on a melon. The Cool Japan author Tomoyuki Sugiyama points to the netsuke craze of the Edo period. The modern version grew out of girls' culture after girls' secondary schools spread from 1899, and the illustrator Rune Naito, drawing big-headed, doe-eyed girls for magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s, is credited as a pioneer. Sanrio's Hello Kitty arrived in 1974 and was an instant hit.
The researcher Kazuma Yamane studied the rounded handwriting from 1984 to 1986, cataloguing nicknames like kitten writing and fake-child writing. Many assumed teenagers had copied it from comics, but he concluded they had invented it themselves, since it appeared before comics had the technical means to print rounded lettering. In the 1980s the idol singer Seiko Matsuda helped popularise a cute persona that many young women copied.
Kawaii now reaches well beyond girlhood. Commentators such as Soichi Masubuchi argue cute and neat have displaced older ideals of beauty and refinement, and one Tokyo sociologist has called cute a magic term for everything acceptable in Japan. Men can be cute too; some once shaved their legs for the look. Fashion subcultures carry it furthest, from Lolita style, drawing on Victorian and Rococo dress for a porcelain-doll effect, to Decora, piled with colourful accessories, and pastel Fairy Kei, inspired by 1980s Western toys. Sanrio has meanwhile aimed newer characters like Aggretsuko at older fans.
Source: Kawaii
