Cute in Japanese Culture

The rise of cuteness in Japanese culture emerged in the seventies as part of a new direction of writing. Many young girls began to write laterally victimization mechanical pencils. These pencils produced very fine linages, as opposed to traditional Japanese writing that varied in onerousness and was vertical. Also, the girls would write in big, round characters and they added little pictures to their writing, such as hearts, stars, smiley faces, and letter of the Latin alphabet. These pictures would be inserted randomly and made the writing very onerous to read.As a result, this writing style caused a lot of controversy and was taboo in many schools. During the mid-eighties, however, this new cute writing was adopted by magazines and comics and was put onto packaging and advertising. From 19841986, Yamane Kazuma studied the development of cute handwriting, which he called inconclusive Female Teenage Handwriting, in depth. Although it was commonly thought that the writing styl e was something that teenagers had picked up from comics, he found that teenagers had come up with the style themselves, as part of an underground movement.Later, cute handwriting became associated with acting childishly and using infantile slang words. Because of this growing trend, companies such as Sanrio came out with intersection like Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty was an immediate success and the irresistible impulse with cute continued to progress in other areas as well. The 1980s also saw the rise of cute idols, such as Seiko Matsuda, who is for the most part credited with popularizing the trend. Women began to emulate Seiko Matsuda and her cute fashion style and mannerisms, which emphasized the weakness and innocence of young girls. 4 No longer limited to teenagers, however, the spread of devising things as cute as possible, even common household items, was embraced by people of all ages. Now there are airplanes painted with Pikachu on the side, and each of Japans 47 prefectur es, the Tokyo police, and even the everyday broadcaster NHK all have their own cute mascots. Currently, Sanrios line of more than 50 characters takes in more than $1 billion a year and it remains the most successful company to capitalize on the cute trend