Kawaii. You hear it in anime, you hear it on TV shows, and you hear it on the streets of Japan, where the word is spoken by young and old alike. With people around the world growing up on Japanese ...

Cute—"Kawaii" in local parlance—wears many guises in Japan. There's old-school kawaii, embodied by the helpless, mouthless gaze of Hello Kitty. There's the newer guy-cute, manifest by masses of young ...

A fluffy, doe-eyed kitten adorned with a rainbow and a unicorn horn may, at first glance, stir up images of childishness or innocence. However, this cute creature is more powerful than it may first ...

What is cute, or kawaii, to use the almost synonymous Japanese term? In 1943, an Austrian zoologist named Konrad Lorenz proposed that our perception of cuteness is based on certain physical ...

Hui-Ying Kerr received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2010 - 2013 as part of her PhD research on Japan in the 1980s. This is a true story. One Saturday night, I ...

It’s no secret that Japan is seriously into cuteness. Accordingly, in most situations, deeming something kawaii, or cute, is seen as high praise. This is especially true when it comes to women.

Alongside "photobomb", one of the new words added to the Collins English dictionary this week was "kawaii". Yet unlike photobomb, selfie or onesie, you're unlikely to know what kawaii means unless you ...

You can trace the word “kawaii” all the way back to the start of the 11th century, when an early form of it, “kawayushi,” which at the time translated more to “having pitiable qualities,” appeared in ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Alongside "photobomb", one of the new words added to the Collins English dictionary this week was "kawaii". Yet unlike photobomb, selfie or onesie, you're unlikely to know what kawaii means unless you ...