OceanofPDF.com

Irresistible

How Cuteness Wired our Brains

and Conquered the World

Joshua Paul Dale

OceanofPDF.com

To my mother for constantly reading to me as a child,

and to my grandmother for writing

many of the books she read

OceanofPDF.com

CONTENTS

1. Title Page

2. Dedication

3. List of figures

4. Introduction: Hello Kitty Guards the Road

5. 1. Ancient Japanese Cuteness

6. 2. The Border between Wild and Tame

7. 3. Cuteness in the West

8. 4. Kawaii in the Hermit Kingdom

9. 5. Growth in Reverse: Neoteny and the Neural Crest

10. 6. Cute Attains its Modern Meaning

11. 7. The Evolutionary Substrate of Cuteness

12. 8. Kawaii in Contemporary Japan

13. 9. Are We a Self-Domesticated Species?

14. 10. The Future of Cuteness

15. Bibliography

16. Acknowledgements

17. Index

18. Copyright

OceanofPDF.com

LIST OF FIGURES

Introduction

0.1 Neon-lit Pokémon Eevees march through the evening at the Pikachu Outbreak. Photo by author.

0.2 Child schema from Studies in Human and Animal Behavior: Volume II, by Konrad Lorenz, trans. Robert Martin, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1971 by Konrad Lorenz. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

1. Ancient Japanese Cuteness

1.1 Beckoning cat figures at Gotokuji Temple, Tokyo. Photo by author.

1.2 Origami pigeon fortunes and cat votive tablets at a Tokyo shrine. Photo by author.

2. The Border between Wild and Tame

2.1 Antique kimono showing a fox wedding. Photo by author.

2.2 Close encounter with a domesticated Siberian fox. Photo by author.

3. Cuteness in the West

3.1 Raphael’s cherubs from the Sistine Madonna (1513–14): ‘The Angels from the Sistine Madonna’, copper engraving, Charles Gottfried Schultz, c.1890. Photo: CC0 A. Wagner / Wikimedia Commons.

4. Kawaii in the Hermit Kingdom

4.1 Puppy on a fan by Nagasawa Rosetsu. Courtesy of the Homma Museum of Art.

4.2 Puppies by Maruyama Ōkyo. Courtesy of the Fuchu City Museum.

4.3 Close-up of Ōkyo’s puppies. Courtesy of Fuchu City Museum.

4.4 The cover of Bunkio Matsuki’s Catalogue of Japanese Artists’ Materials, 1904.

4.5 The white-rabbit logo of Bunkio Matsuki’s Boston shop, from Bunkio Matsuki’s Catalogue of Japanese Artists’ Materials, 1904.

4.6 In Junichi Nakahara’s 1941 cover illustration for the magazine The Shōjo’s Friend, a young girl with a dreamy expression wears a traditional yukata along with a Western hairstyle and bow. ©Junichi Nakahara/Himawariya

4.7 Rune Naito’s 1971 character ‘Rune Panda’. © R.S.H/RUNE

5. Growth in Reverse: Neoteny and the Neural Crest

5.1 ‘Teddy Girl’. Courtesy of the Izu Teddy Bear Museum.

6. Cute Attains its Modern Meaning

6.1 A postcard from 1914 shows a Kewpie agitating for women’s suffrage. Courtesy of Alamy.

6.2 Kewpie Mayonnaise jar from 1925. Courtesy of Kewpie Corporation.

8. Kawaii in Contemporary Japan

8.1 Shibuya ward’s Hachiko bus. Photo by author.

8.2 Grave of the beloved dog Hachiko. Photo by author.

8.3 A small girl meets a yuru kyara mascot character at the 2018 Yuru Kyara Grand Prix in Osaka. Photo by author.

10. The Future of Cuteness

10.1 The author wearing a fursuit at Anthrocon. Photo by author.

OceanofPDF.com

INTRODUCTION

HELLO KITTY GUARDS THE ROAD

Tokyo, my home for several decades, is continually evolving, the new replacing the old at a frantic pace. My neighbourhood used to have a fishmonger, a greengrocer and a rice miller. There was a liquor shop run by two elderly women so nearsighted that one of them would read out the price of a can of beer while the other entered it into the cash till, her eyes only inches away from the keys. All of these are now long gone.

The demise of small shops is not unusual, of course, but in Japan the same is true of architecture. Many old buildings that would be preserved elsewhere don’t stand a chance here. Harajuku, a nearby neighbourhood, has long been the centre of youth culture. Built a year after the Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1924, its train station looked like a European chalet, half-timbered with a triangular roof, an ornate clock, stained glass and a weathercock-topped cupola. By some miracle it survived the fire-bombing of the Second World War, only to be torn down and replaced with a soulless glass box in 2020.

The charmingly rundown Aoyama Apartments stood a bit further down from Harajuku Station along the pleasant, tree-lined boulevard known as Japan’s Champs-Élysées. Built in 1926 as public housing, they provided pioneering architecture for modern living in the Japanese style, a good example of how Japan absorbed Western design and repackaged it to suit its own tastes. But the flats were too small for couples or families in booming post-war Japan. By the 1990s few owners still lived there. Instead they had taken advantage of the prime location and rented out their flats to shops and galleries, which plied their wares as the old building gracefully decayed around them. I remember entering this 1920s apartment building to find all the front doors propped open, with each flat displaying a carefully curated selection of fashionable clothes, art or curios. But this, too, didn’t last. The apartments were torn down in 2003 to make room for Omotesando Hills, a splashy development full of shops selling expensive watches and high-end fashion. At one end of this monstrosity lies a small, reconstructed façade of the original building, a homage to the vanished past that only makes it worse.

The atmosphere of Harajuku is created by people as much as buildings, and this has also changed. Long before the term ‘safe space’ had entered the public consciousness, Harajuku was a place where young people who didn’t fit into the mainstream could express themselves. Its location next to Meiji Shrine, an austere edifice in the middle of a forest, invites a certain decorum, and the merchants’ association of Harajuku has long banned any sort of adult entertainment, from nightclubs and bars to pachinko parlours. The area shuts down around eight o’clock.

Youth culture has moved online these days, but before the Internet, Japanese youth brought their obsessions onto the Harajuku streets. Throughout the 1990s dozens of aspiring rock bands set up on the street every Sunday to perform, carefully adjusting their sound so as not to overwhelm the band next to them. When I strolled by the small groups of devoted fans surrounding each band, I heard Elvis Presley songs coming from cranked-up boomboxes surrounded by crews of young men dancing rockabilly-style, all dressed in white shirts, leather jackets and jeans, with 1950s greased-back hairstyles. Harajuku was both new and different, old and familiar.

As well as aspiring rock bands, Harajuku became the epicentre of Japan’s ‘fashion tribes’, groups of like-minded young people who dressed not to conform but to express themselves. They met on weekends by the train station to hang out with their friends. The most noticeable were young women who wore dresses with long skirts that puffed out with ruffles and lace. Frilly corsets narrowed their waists and they wore elaborately styled wigs in different colours – blonde, red, even blue – festooned with ribbons. I often saw them gathered on a bridge over the train tracks and taking photos of each other near the chalet-like station building while dressed as a crazy mix of French rococo and British Victorian. They looked like living dolls. They called themselves ‘Lolitas’.

I found this name baffling. It obviously came from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, but why would they choose to call themselves this? To find out, I turned to Yukiko Toda, a fashion designer for a Lolita brand. ‘Nobody knows why they started using that term,’ she admitted, ‘but Lolita fashion has nothing to do with attracting the attention of men. It’s for the girls themselves. They dress up for each other because it’s cute.’

The word she used was ‘kawaii’, and while ‘cute’ is the best English translation, its meaning is more wide-ranging.[1] Lolita fashion was a subcultural movement, but kawaii in general was part of girls’ and women’s culture in Japan. It also appeared in the manga comic books popular with everyone, even adults, and was a feature of Japanese animation. I knew a bit about kawaii, but it didn’t really hold my interest at first. There was so much else going on. But then something changed.

As a long-term resident of Japan, I’ve learned that a surprise often awaits around every corner. Ten years ago that meant a sudden change in road-construction barriers, a common sight in every city. I’d never thought much about them until the day I walked out of my apartment to find the road blocked not by a row of prosaic red-and-white stripes signalling danger, but by a long line of large, plastic Hello Kitty characters, each holding a rainbow. This iconic cat, drawn simply with a large head, a red hair ribbon and no visible mouth, made her debut adorning a coin purse in 1975. Her parent company, Sanrio, was soon producing a dizzying array of Hello Kitty products that became globally popular.

Hello Kitty is now one of the most profitable licensed characters in the world, and she shows up in many unlikely places. A Taiwanese airline painted an enormous Hello Kitty on its planes, and Lady Gaga wore a dress made entirely out of Hello Kitty toys in a 2009 photoshoot. For this reason, seeing the celebrated cat appear on road-construction barriers wasn’t a complete surprise. However, I soon realised that this was more than just an advertising campaign; ‘cutified’ construction barriers were popping up everywhere in Tokyo, sporting unbranded frogs, monkeys, ducks, rabbits and dolphins. It was a bizarre transformation of mundane city streets and, at first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

This sudden culture shock, years after I’d landed in Tokyo, made me newly aware of the world around me. It was like a switch flipped in my brain; suddenly I noticed that kawaii is everywhere in Japan. The manhole covers right outside my front door are adorned with colourful portraits of manga characters. Railway safety posters telling passengers to stand clear of the platform are illustrated by a small figure with a huge head and big eyes. Animal cafés, where customers can receive a shot of cuteness along with their morning espresso, offer cuddles with cats, rabbits, miniature pigs and even hedgehogs. And it’s impossible to walk for more than a minute through a shopping street in Japan without overhearing the word kawaii, often exclaimed in a chorus among groups of young women. In fact, kawaii might be the most popular word in the Japanese language.[2]

Once I started noticing the extent to which cuteness had permeated Japanese culture, I wanted to understand it. When did its relentless spread begin, and why did it happen here? The main problem, though, was where to start. As an academic, my first impulse was to hit the books, but I was surprised to find how little scholarship existed on the phenomenon. There were studies of kawaii in specific areas of cultural life, like manga comics, fashion and pop music, but very few scholars had sought to trace the spread of kawaii in the culture at large.

The theories that did exist were, for lack of a better term, weird. The artist Takashi Murakami, who has been called the Japanese Andy Warhol, said that Japan became cute after the Second World War as a way of appearing harmless and inoffensive to its conqueror, the United States. In the process, he claimed, Japan had become like a forever-emasculated little boy.[3] On the other hand, in the late 1980s and early 1990s Eiji Ōtuska and a few other influential male critics wrote that excessive consumerism and rampant consumption had made Japanese people so enamoured with cute that everyone had turned into a little girl. Ōtuska and others characterised the country’s population as narcissistic, passive, irresponsible, weak and childish – traits that sexist cultural norms represent as inherently feminine and girlish.[4]

I soon found that there was even less scholarship on cuteness in other countries than there was about kawaii in Japan. This also seemed strange, because cuteness is on the rise outside Japan as well. These days it seems as if everyone is sharing online cute animal memes and responding with strings of emoji. And the boom didn’t begin with the Internet. Just like in the land of kawaii, cuteness has become a major presence in popular culture without anyone taking much notice. Take Star Wars, for instance, an outsized presence in popular culture since 1977. Its tales of battles in outer space are not generally regarded as cute, yet the franchise includes furry Wookiees, diminutive droids, Ewoks, Porgs and the massively popular Baby Yoda. There had been some backlash; I remember a friend in junior high school proudly sporting an ‘I kill Ewoks’ pin badge. But, in general, cuteness spread through popular culture exactly as it did in Japan – quietly, without many people noticing how much of their lives had been taken over. So are Murakami and Ōtuska right? Have we all become little boys and girls?

I think Murakami and Ōtuska’s theories are too focused on masculinity. They both seem freaked out that men as well as women are interested in cuteness, but what’s the harm in that? Then I came across another theory about Japanese cuteness that really surprised me. The cultural critic Inuhiko Yomota has claimed that far from being a post-war phenomenon, kawaii has had a long history in Japanese culture. He traced it back to works of art that are up to a thousand years old and asserted that medieval Europe had nothing like it.[5] Was kawaii somehow built into Japanese DNA? The idea sounded ridiculous, but I hadn’t expected such questions to arise from a topic that most people think is so easy to explain.

Did people who lived a millennium ago feel cuteness in the same way we do today, even though so much else has changed? Ideas of what is beautiful, for example, differ widely across time and space. A thousand years ago, when Yomota claimed that kawaii began, Japanese women shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth to look beautiful. They’re not doing that today, yet I still think he’s right in saying that the things they found cute back then give us the same feeling now. But why is that?

Pikachu Outbreak!

The port city of Yokohama was where the United States first ‘invaded’ Japan, when a squadron of steamships commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1854 to force Japan to end its policy of national isolation and open its markets to foreign trade. Today it is a bustling city that hosts an annual celebration of cuteness called the Pikachu Outbreak. For a whole week every August, parades of up to 2,000 life-sized costumed Pikachus and other characters from the Pokémon video games march in front of tens of thousands of spectators from all over the world. I decided I had to go and see it for myself. Surely this would be the perfect place to find out why kawaii is so incredibly popular.

The Pokémon craze began in 1996. Like most adults at the time, I was only vaguely aware of it – in my case, through the passion of my young nieces and nephews. A video game that involves catching cute little monsters and making them fight, Pokémon was inspired by the tradition among Japanese children of going out into local parks to catch horned stag beetles. When the wildly popular video game Pokémon Go appeared in 2016, I was bemused at the sight of hordes of people silently wandering the streets in packs while staring at their smart-phones. But it wasn’t strange for them. Many of Pokémon’s nineties fan base never grew out of their favourite game. A succession of multimedia, cross-platform productions has kept them engaged for two decades, and Pokémon is often cited as the highest-grossing media franchise of all time.

As the Pokémon march began in Yokohama, I turned to others in the crowd and started asking questions. But no matter who I talked to or where they were from –whether Japan or another East Asian country, Europe, the US or Australia – every conversation followed the same path. I’d ask them what they liked about the parades, and they’d talk about how cute they thought Pikachu was. But when I’d ask what made Pikachu cute, the conversation would come to a stuttering halt. Everyone was firmly convinced that Pokémons were cute, yet no one seemed to be able to explain why.

There seems to be something about cuteness that resists interpretation. Everyone knows it when they feel it, but even the people who design the stuff can’t explain why a tiny change makes one iteration of a design cuter than another. Hello Kitty, the legendary character from the 1970s that has made billions of dollars for its parent company Sanrio, was designed by Yuko Shimizu. She made several initial drawings, but only knew she was onto something when her assistant pointed to one in particular and screamed, ‘Kawaii!’[6]

I needed help figuring out exactly what made Pokémon cute, and luckily I had brought an expert along. Yukiko Toda is an artist and fashion designer who has been expressing kawaii in her work for more than a decade. Together, we watched the parades and paid close attention every time the crowd rose up in a collective cry of ‘Kawaii!’ After a while, we started to notice some patterns. First, the Pokémons were surprisingly small. At six feet tall, I towered over them. Their eyes were placed low enough to make their foreheads bulge, and their cheeks were highlighted with red circles – characteristics that Yukiko immediately identified as kawaii. She also pointed out that their open mouths, which I had thought were simply smiling, had a more ambiguous expression. ‘They look like a baby bird opening its mouth to be fed,’ she said. ‘But it’s a blank look [muhyōjō] – you can’t tell what they’re feeling or thinking.’ Hello Kitty, with no mouth at all, has that same affectless expression that nonetheless is somehow appealing.

Fig. 0.1: Neon-lit Pokémon Pikachus march through the evening at the Pikachu Outbreak.

This apparently charming combination of features raised immediate cries of ‘Kawaii!’ as soon as the Pokémons appeared. Plus, their furry bodies were invitingly soft: whenever an individual Pokémon posed for photos, children and even some adults would run up and hug it unrestrainedly.

The adults’ behaviour surprised me, because hugging is not a common greeting among Japanese adults. But Yukiko explained that furry life-sized mascots of all sorts are a standard feature of public events in Japan, and running up to hug them is a behaviour that everyone has indulged in since childhood. Since it’s not common in Japan to hug friends or even family, it must be nice to give full rein to the impulse to hug a giant ball of fur once in a while.

As the parade began, we noticed that along with their huge heads, the Pokémons had small bodies with stubby arms, and legs so short they were barely able to shuffle along. This created a distinctive wobbly gait as they rocked from side to side. The parade would stop periodically so that the Pokémons could perform simple choreographed dances in which they waved their arms and wriggled their behinds at the onlookers. Their severely limited eyesight meant they were constantly bumping into each other, despite the best efforts of the whistle-blowing handlers who walked alongside them. These accidental collisions always caused a crescendo of ‘Kawaii!’ exclamations from the besotted crowd.

By paying attention to the behaviour of the Pokémon fans, we began to figure out what was triggering those spontaneous cries. The Pikachus all had big heads and eyes, small arms and legs, bulging cheeks and foreheads, wobbly movements and open-mouthed expressions that made people smile.

Kawaii seemed to be the realm of the cheerful amateur rather than the polished professional, and it fed upon itself – seeing the open-mouthed Pokémons waving at them, people smiled and waved back. Watching this, I was perplexed at first. It was clear that the people inside those furry suits couldn’t see well enough to distinguish individual watchers, so who exactly were they waving at? There was really only one way to find out, so in spite of feeling a little embarrassed, I started waving back, too – and soon found myself smiling at these folks in their fuzzy yellow suits.

Yukiko and I were not the first people to notice that cute things share a set of common characteristics. Back in 1943 the Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz observed that certain animals, especially baby ones, incite the same impulse to provide care and protection that people feel towards young children. He drew up a set of traits that he called the ‘child schema’ (Kindchenschema) which included: a large head relative to body size; predominance of the brain capsule; large and low-lying eyes; round, bulging cheeks; short and thick extremities; a soft body surface with a springy elastic consistency; and clumsy, wobbly movements.[7] Lorenz believed that his schema operated as an instinctual response that stimulated the nurturing and protective behaviour in adults that children need to survive.

Fig. 0.2: Konrad Lorenz’s child schema.

If our brains are hard-wired to feel a rush of cuteness upon encountering the child schema, then perhaps I was more of a puppet than the bright-yellow Pikachus that were dancing in front of me. Lorenz believed that our response to cute objects is compulsive to the point of being ‘virtually irrepressible’ and operates automatically, like a clockwork mechanism.[8] But I thought his theory sounded too extreme. After all, for every person who cries ‘kawaii!’ there’s likely to be another shrugging their shoulders. We may all have the same capacity to respond to cuteness, but not everyone is into it.

Plus, I’m sceptical about the idea that seeing something cute always gives rise to the impulse to nurture or protect it. Although the basic elements of Lorenz’s child schema were borne out by my observations at the Pikachu Outbreak, there still seemed to be something missing from his theory. A conga line of Pikachus didn’t make me feel like taking care of them or protecting them. Instead the sight simply made me want to join in with the fun. What did this response have to do with making sure humans evolved to take care of babies?

‘Cute Studies’ and cute science

Back when I was an undergraduate, I wanted to study children’s literature. It has since become a field that encompasses not only literary studies, but also child development, psychology and the history of childhood. At the time, however, most scholars thought it was too trivial to warrant serious research. It was hard to know what to do. When I visited one of my favourite professors to discuss the idea, he said, ‘It’s as if you’re facing two ponds: one is full of crystal-clear water to the very bottom, and the other is full of silt and pond scum with zero visibility. You seem to take a look at both, before diving straight into the muddy pond.’ At nineteen I took this as a compliment, though now I wonder if it was meant as one. At any rate, it seems he was right. Decades later, when faced with the realisation that little about cuteness was clear, I took a deep breath and decided to dive right in.

I was starting to wonder if cuteness deserved more than the odd article or book. Was there enough there to justify an entirely new field of study? After all, it had worked for children’s literature. If I got it right, I could be the founder of a whole new field. Well, either that or I could be ignored completely.

I considered Linda Williams, who created the field of Porn Studies when she realised that this multibillion-dollar industry was virtually unstudied. Just like pornography, cuteness makes billions in revenue without anyone paying much attention, and it’s also viewed as too inconsequential to warrant scholarly attention. And at least it’s not as controversial.

Williams announced the arrival of Porn Studies by editing a volume of scholarly essays with the same name. I decided to begin a bit more modestly; I reached out to other scholars interested in cuteness by editing a special issue of an academic journal that I would call Cute Studies. I planned to write an editorial declaring this new field open for business. But would anyone want to join it?

I put out an open call for papers on various academic websites, then waited to see what would show up. And while I wasn’t exactly flooded with submissions, I did receive some fascinating articles, on topics including young women who wear Lolita fashion, how Singaporean influencers use cuteness to gain an audience, and an analysis of the kawaii lunchboxes that Japanese mothers make for their children. But one of them was a real game-changer. It was from Hiroshi Nittono, now director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka University.

Like me, Hiroshi had noticed that kawaii in Japan extends beyond the traits listed in Lorenz’s child schema. However, virtually all the empirical research in his field focused on Lorenz’s infantile traits. Because of the outsized presence of kawaii in Japan, Hiroshi felt that analysing how people there feel about it could broaden Lorenz’s schema in ways that could be useful to anyone interested in the nature of cuteness.

Hiroshi distributed questionnaires to hundreds of university students and office workers willing to take part in a survey and analysed their responses. He found that things such as sweets, flowers and smiles, which are not part of the child schema, could also trigger the feeling of kawaii. In fact ‘smile’ received the highest kawaii rating from study participants, exceeding even that for ‘baby’. This was an indication that Lorenz’s child schema wasn’t telling the whole story.[9]

The university students and office workers who filled in Hiroshi’s questionnaire also referred to kawaii things as ‘yuru’. This is a hard word to translate. It can mean wobbly – an attribute that appears in the child schema – but it also means amateurish or imperfect. I had seen this for myself at the Pikachu Outbreak when people smiled and shouted ‘Kawaii!’ at Pikachus who mistimed their synchronised steps and fell on their fluffy backsides.

If cuteness is all about an irresistible instinct to nurture, then the watching crowd surely should have involuntarily leapt forward to help the fallen Pikachu. But that didn’t happen and, when you think about it, a child in need of real help – suffering and in pain – is not cute, either. Scientists like Hiroshi concluded that the feeling of kawaii encourages affiliation, which is social bonding in a broader sense than just nurturing. This is why feeling that something is cute makes us want to get closer to it, even if we have no particular desire to protect or nurture it.[10] The suggestion that cuteness is a releaser of social engagement would explain why I found myself wanting to wave at and hug the marching Pikachus.

Unlocking cuteness

Thanks to Hiroshi, I realised that science is key to understanding cuteness. It might not sound like much of a revelation, but academics like me who study the humanities – literature, art and culture – usually avoid hard science like the plague. Those social scientists who are comfortable with maths (anthropologists and sociologists, for instance) tend to stick to their own field. Academics are super-nerds – ‘otaku’, as they say in Japan – who generally find their comfort zone and stay there, talking mainly to each other. But I realised that this process of specialisation meant that we would never be able to account for the explosive global growth of cuteness that is occurring all around us. If Cute Studies was going to have an impact, it would need to accept all the various ways of studying cuteness and create a dialogue among them.

This wasn’t going to be easy; different ways of studying cuteness not only come to different conclusions, but they begin with different definitions. What even is cute in the first place? Scientists hypothesise that we’ve always had a deep genetic pull towards adorable children and animals. But which came first: the chicken or the egg? If cuter children received more care and attention tens of thousands of years ago, what made us appreciate those qualities in the first place?

Could cuteness somehow have come first? Maybe we’re the primate equivalent of dogs or cats, bred to be adorable; but no one was in charge of breeding humans, so how could that be so? Could we have unconsciously chosen to be cute, as if something baked into our DNA made us prefer slightly cuter attributes over countless generations? That would mean the egg came before the chicken. My head started to spin at the thought.

To make matters worse, if Inuhiko Yomota was right and cuteness was a quality that had appeared only in Japanese artworks a thousand years ago, the emergence of the cute aesthetic can be tied to a single time and place. How could I account for this specificity if cuteness has been with us all along as a species-wide emotion? I’d been asking myself why it appeared earlier in Japan than anywhere else, but now I found myself flipping that question round. Why did it take so long to appear, and why only in Japan?

Notes

1   Hiroshi Nittono et al., ‘English and Spanish Adjectives That Describe the Japanese Concept of Kawaii’, SAGE Open (January–March 2023), pp. 1–12, doi.10.1177/21582440231152415.

2   Toby Slade, ‘Cute men in contemporary Japan’, ed. Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly, Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend (London: Intellect Books, 2019), p. 79.

3   Takashi Murakami, Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

4   Sharalyn Orbaugh, ‘Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the Shōjo in 1990s Visual Culture’, in J. Mostow et al., eds, Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), pp. 213–14.

5   Inuhiko Yomota, Essay on ‘Kawaii’ (Kawaii Ron), (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2006).

6   Matt Alt, Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World (New York: Random House, 2020), p. 122.

7   Konrad Lorenz, ‘Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung (The innate forms of possible experience)’, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5 (1943), pp. 235–409. See also Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Vol. 2, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971), p. 154.

8   Ibid. (1971), pp. 146, 160.

9   Hiroshi Nittono, ‘The Two-Layer Model of “Kawaii”: A Behavioural Science Framework for Understanding Kawaii and Cuteness’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 2, 1 (2016), pp. 85–91.

10   Ibid., p. 87.

OceanofPDF.com

1

ANCIENT JAPANESE CUTENESS

All small things, no matter what they are, all small things are most adorable.

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

A classic work of Japanese literature, The Pillow Book was written more than a thousand years ago by a courtier named Sei Shōnagon (965–1017). It covers many topics – love, court gossip, poetry, the beauty of nature and the rhythm of the seasons – all filtered through the eye of an irrepressibly intelligent woman who is, above all, fun. The book has influenced Japanese women all the way up to modern times.[1]

The Pillow Book also contains one of the earliest articulations of an aesthetic that eventually became today’s kawaii culture. When I ask Japanese people to name the earliest example of kawaii they can think of, the answer is often the ‘list of adorable things’ (Utsukushiki mono) from The Pillow Book. Almost everyone knows this passage – it’s frequently included in the Japanese school curriculum.

The Pillow Book includes the first attempt in prose to catalogue the small, brief encounters with children, animals and objects that pierce the heart with cuteness. Although the emotion of cuteness may have been part of everyone’s experience because it is part of our biology, the list shows how cuteness was central to women’s culture. More importantly, it demonstrates that in the hands of a talented writer this simple feeling can be elevated into an expression of great art.

When Sei Shōnagon entered the court of Empress Teishi in the year 993, she was in her late twenties – older than usual for a new court attendant. The empress herself was about ten years younger, but she was an intelligent and accomplished woman who prized learning and wit among her attendants.[2] The pair became firm friends.

The cloistered lives of the women who served the empress hardly suggest feminist values. Forbidden to show their faces to men, they knelt behind screens or curtains to converse with gentlemen callers. Only when they were sure no men were present could they venture onto the palace’s veranda or walk in the gardens. On the rare occasions they left the palace grounds, court women rode in carriages, peering at the outside world through reed lattice windows.[3] Such was life for upper-class women in the Heian era, a period of Japanese history that ran from 794 to 1185.

Yet women were important in this world. They possessed the rights of inheritance, including of property and succession.[4] Thus, although they were barred from the overt exercise of power, women at the Heian court still dealt with men on equal terms in other areas, like love and art.[5] But the reason their literary works still have an impact today concerns the artistic values they expressed so beautifully in their poems, diaries and novels.[6] Women gained influence in the literary arts in part because men, in the process of setting the standards of civilisation and learning, left themselves adrift when it came to poetry and literature.

Like many other Asian countries, Japan had long looked to China as the source of all that was civilised, importing everything from government to law, art to architecture. Even the writing system was a Chinese import. Poetry, however, posed a problem. Chinese poetic conventions conformed to unfamiliar structures and sounds, and dictated that references be made to particularly Chinese things, from historical events to famous mountains. Early Japanese poets trying to compose poetry in Chinese didn’t fare particularly well. ‘As might easily be imagined,’ writes the literary scholar Donald Keene, ‘most of this poetry is exceedingly poor.’[7]

Women of the Heian era were not taught to write Chinese characters; although a few upper-class women like Sei did manage to learn some, they had to hide their knowledge from men. Sei could allude to her knowledge of classical Chinese literature, but she couldn’t recite it in public.[8] However, by her time there was a workaround – a phonetic Japanese alphabet called kana. Since men were expected to write poetry in Chinese, poetry and prose written in the native language became known as writing in a ‘woman’s hand’ (onna-de).

Men did sometimes write using kana. It was helpful, for instance, when they wanted a love-poem to be understood by a female recipient. In addition, men who wrote in literary genres considered to be the province of women, such as diaries, often pretended to be female.[9] Writing in their native language enabled both men and women the freedom to express their innermost feelings, and these intimate accounts became associated with women’s literary production.

Today, people might send a carefully chosen emoji to a lover after a romantic encounter; in Sei’s time, they would send a love-poem penned in elegant calligraphy on paper carefully chosen for its colour and quality, folded like origami and accompanied by a matching spray of flowers. In Japan’s Heian era, such matters of taste were vital. An inelegant poetic reference, slightly slipshod calligraphy, paper of the wrong texture, watered-down ink: any such misstep would kill a budding romance as surely as an insensitive string of emoji would today.[10] This ability to exercise judgement in matters of taste enabled Heian women to create new areas of aesthetic enjoyment; in Sei’s case, this included an exploration of the pleasures offered by the cuteness of small children, animals and objects.

The world’s first list of cute things

The Pillow Book probably began as a notebook in which Sei recorded poetic inspirations or trifles to entertain her empress. This would account for the various lists sprinkled throughout, such as ‘Things That Make the Heart Beat Faster’ and ‘Occasions When Time Drags By’. These lists had no literary antecedent in Japan.[11] And among them is the earliest expression in Japanese literature of items and occasions that prompt the feeling of cuteness.

When Sei was writing, the word kawaii didn’t exist, so she used the word utsukushi.[12] Today this word means beautiful, but in pre-modern Japan it signalled the feeling of affection that people in a higher social position felt towards those people for whom they were responsible. Today the word kawaii is sometimes used in the same way, but modern kawaii has a much broader meaning.[13]

As a talented poet, Sei was able to take the limited meaning of this word and expand it in delightful and unexpected directions. She did this by linking all the items on her list to cuteness, a common feeling that hadn’t yet received enough attention to warrant a single word describing all of its manifestations.

The world that Sei Shōnagon inhabited was privileged, but also boring. Women of the court were expected to stay inside, cloistered inside dark palace rooms. There was little to do except gossip about love affairs. Sei’s witty conversational skills gained her a position there, and her main task was to entertain the empress. I think her list of cute things was intended to be read aloud, one item at a time, as a way to demonstrate that the everyday, mundane life happening around them was full of delightful encounters with cuteness.

To accomplish this, Sei used an ordinary word and turned it around, like a gemstone, to reveal new facets. Each item on her list reveals another way to appreciate cuteness. Let’s take the first line, which is simply ‘A child’s face drawn on a melon’. Drawing faces on melons was a common pastime in Sei’s day, especially for women and children.[14] Yet the word Sei uses in this list, utsukushi, normally described a man’s affection for his wife and children.[15] From the first line, Sei upends the meaning of this word to show that this same feeling can be triggered in anyone by a simple outline drawing. The fact that this idea of a child’s face drawn on a melon still feels cute to us today is no coincidence. Such simplification is a hallmark of modern cute designs, from Charlie Brown to Hello Kitty. We’ll return to this aesthetic principle of reduction later.

The next item on the list concerns a common activity with which court women amused themselves. They would capture a baby sparrow and tie a thread around its leg, so they could keep it close and watch as its parents fed it. By calling a baby bird being fed utsukushi, Sei again upends the usual definition of the word and shows her audience a connection between baby birds and outline drawings of children’s faces that no one had thought of before. These two completely different things evoke the same feeling, which is only partially captured by the word available at the time. This is what poetic language is all about. It opens up new experiences and makes people see the world around them in a different light.

Here is another example of cute animals from Sei’s list: ‘Pretty, white chicks who are still not fully fledged and look as if their clothes are too short for them; cheeping loudly, they follow one on their long legs or walk close to the mother hen.’ Descriptions of animal families as utsukushi removes the patriarchal, hierarchical connotations of this word and bends it in a new direction that enables Sei’s audience to appreciate the connection between the natural and human worlds.

Many of the items on her list involve human children. Small children make the list when they walk by in long ceremonial robes, when they proudly show a tiny object they found on the ground to an adult, and when their sleeves are comically long. Older children are cute when they practise reading aloud in their childish voices, or tilt their heads to examine something closely. All these moments encompass the joy of watching children’s enthusiasm, their engaging solemnity or their struggle to match adult behaviours. They also reveal the privileged existence of these upper-class women, who didn’t need to perform any of the messy parts of child-rearing. ‘One picks up a pretty baby and holds him for a while in one’s arms,’ Sei writes. ‘While one is fondling him, he clings to one’s neck and then falls asleep.’ Presumably crying babies were handed over to the servants and swiftly taken out of sight.

The list also includes many small items, such as ‘The objects used during the Display of Dolls’. Playing with dolls and doll’s houses was popular among girls from noble families in the Heian period. The Doll Festival (hina matsuri), which traces its origins to the Heian era, is celebrated to this day by girls all over Japan, whose dolls wear the same ceremonial court dress as in Sei’s time. But the list doesn’t mention the dolls themselves; rather, it focuses on the miniature doll’s-house furnishings and tableware that accompany them. This leads into the most famous line of the list, which concerns small things: ‘One picks up a tiny lotus leaf that is floating on a pond and examines it. Not only the lotus leaves, but little hollyhock flowers, and indeed all small things, are most adorable.’

The Pillow Book’s list of adorable things does more than simply give examples of cuteness; it builds a new aesthetic by providing guidelines on what types of objects and interactions may trigger the feeling of cuteness. In this way Sei Shōnagon gives a cultural voice to a biological phenomenon. Her list has stood the test of time not only in its continued popularity, but in the consistency of her observations. Recent research on cuteness shows that it is still associated with small, round and smooth shapes, as well as things that people want to keep close by them, like baby animals.[16] Musicologist David Huron found that high-pitched sounds are considered cute, which might include the cheeping birds and the voice of a child reading aloud that Sei describes.[17] Furthermore, the list’s colour palette, which includes lavender robes, pink flowers, creamy-white duck eggs and sky-blue urns, comprise the same shades that research shows are considered kawaii today.[18]

Advice for women today

‘“Getting married and having children” – is this all that makes a woman happy?’ The manga character who speaks this line has a big head, large eyes and a small body, but she’s far from weak and passive, cheekily sticking out her tongue on the cover illustration. Having Fun Again Today! is a manga version of Sei Shōnagon’s life that seeks to help women weather the sexism that is still prevalent in Japanese society.[19] For Japanese women who are struggling to find their own path in life and depart from traditional gender roles, the life and work of Sei Shōnagon are an inspiration. Such adaptations are popular because her life and work encourage women to face adversity with self-confident aplomb and view life as a voyage of self-discovery. They indicate to modern readers that seeing the funny and cute in everyday life is a viable alternative to traditional gender roles that limit a woman’s role to marriage and children.[20]

Japan was largely peaceful in the Heian era, leaving the upper class little to do but cultivate beauty and taste in all aspects of life.[21] Although the nobility numbered only a few thousand, their aesthetic values spread across the land.[22] This happened in part because the tone set by female writers became the standard and was later adopted by men as well.[23] This is one way in which women’s experience, and their method of relating it in both verse and prose, became central to the development of Japanese artistic values that continue to hold sway today. This literary parity – the sense that men and women are on equal ground when they take up pen and paper to write – is one reason why the women writers of the Heian period still inspire modern Japanese women in their continuing struggle for full social equality.

Furthermore, the idea that artistic pursuits could lead to self-improvement became established in this era.[24] The modern attitude towards kawaii reflects this idea: in Japan, people believe that cultivating the appreciation of cute things has a positive effect on one’s own life. In the Heian court, contemplating cuteness was a cure for boredom. Today, Japanese people cite cuteness as a force that can help to combat unhappiness stemming from depression, anxiety or dissatisfaction at work.

The literature produced by women in the Heian court has been read and taught through the ages. Modern Japanese women admire Sei Shōnagon because she forged a career in which her wit and wisdom were valued and applauded. At the same time, her sensibility resonates because it seems fresh and modern, even though her list of cute things expresses an emotion that humans have probably felt since the beginning of time.

Three artistic values: small, temporary and delightful

The authorial voice that pervades The Pillow Book clearly conveys a woman who is witty, clever and, most of all, fun. Japan’s traditional culture of wabi-sabi, or rustic simplicity and sparse elegance, appears fundamentally separate from its ebullient kawaii culture, but the two are closer than they first appear. Sei’s list is organised around three guiding principles that reflect deep-rooted aesthetics of Japanese art and artistry and were key to the later development of everything kawaii, from colourful, energetic Pokémon to the expressionless and enigmatic Hello Kitty. Let’s look at them one by one.

‘All small things are most adorable,’ writes Sei Shōnagon (italics mine). In Japan, however, the attraction to the diminutive is not limited to cute objects. The Korean scholar O-Young Lee wrote an entire book about how Japanese culture values small items. He points to the folding fan – an ancient Japanese invention – as an early example of ‘an imaginative power’ that he believes to be deeply rooted in Japanese culture, one that ‘seeks to make things smaller, that idealizes the dwarf over the giant’.[25] When fans went from large and flat to small and folding, they attained a new value as something that could be held in the hand and stored inside the sleeve of a kimono.[26] Lee believes that the Japanese enjoy small things because they reflect the desire for a more intimate relation to objects.[27] The penchant for miniaturisation appears everywhere in Japan, from traditional bonsai and haiku to the modern Walkman and Pokémon – the last of which, after all, is short for ‘pocket monsters’. All the items on Sei’s list – from children to baby animals, eggs to glass pots – are small and vulnerable.

The cute appearance and antics of young children as well as animals have a special poignancy because we know they have a temporary nature – they will vanish with maturity. Part of our enjoyment of the things that appear on Sei’s list is due to this awareness that they are temporary and must be enjoyed to the full before they fade away. This preference for transience is among the earliest Japanese artistic values.[28] The literary historian Donald Keene called it ‘the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal’.[29] Cherry blossoms, for example, bloom for only a few glorious days, yet ornamental cherry trees are planted everywhere in Japan; the custom of holding parties amid the falling blossoms, which began in the Heian era, continues today.

Sei Shōnagon insisted that she wrote for fun, and indeed the adjective that appears most frequently in The Pillow Book – 445 times, to be exact – is okashi.[30] This word is still used, but these days it refers to something funny or absurd. In the Heian era it referred broadly to the delightful, that which ‘entertains, intrigues, delights, pleases and beguiles’.[31] It is a central motif of The Pillow Book because sharing amusing things was an important aspect of Sei’s role at court. She had honed her sense of the frisson of pleasure that an object or moment could produce to the extent that she could delight her audience simply by describing a small child crawling along the ground, or the comically long legs of baby chicks.

The Pillow Book’s list of adorable things describes situations that trigger the feeling of cuteness. Some of these stem from the desire to take care of or nurture something, but others are oriented around fun and playful moments. Some scientists believe that these represent two distinct categories of cuteness, and they term the latter ‘whimsical cuteness’.[32] This makes sense to me – we’re just as likely to want to play with something cute as we are to take care of it. It follows that the way a society treats the idea of play may influence the appearance of cuteness in its art and literature.

Playful animals in Japanese art: the Scroll of Frolicking Animals

We are all born to play,

Born to have fun.

Hearing the voices of children at play,

Loosens even my old limbs.

Popular song in the Ryōjin-hishō anthology, late twelfth century

If the scientists are right in thinking that an appreciation for cuteness is wired into our brains, then we have always been predisposed to enjoy the antics of young children – or at least the antics of our young children. A group of neighbourhood kids screaming outside your office window when you’re trying to work may not provoke the same response as the delighted laugh of one of your own. But like the singer in the traditional Japanese folk song quoted above, we all envy the carefree abandon of children at play at times, and may even yearn to join them.

Wild animals – from lions and tigers to bears – will sometimes join their cubs in play. Human adults, on the other hand, take play to another level. We fill our lives with amusing distractions. But adult play contains a fundamental tension. On the one hand, we often tell ourselves not to take life too seriously. On the other, we say that life is not all fun and games. How a society deals with this tension may explain whether cuteness appears in its art and literature.

Take medieval Europe as an example. Life there was anything but dull. On the contrary, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga writes: ‘Life was brimful of play: the joyous and unbuttoned play of the people, full of pagan elements that had lost their sacred significance and been transformed into jesting and buffoonery.’[33] Huizinga singles out ‘pagan elements’ because religion had transformed the social perception of play, if not people’s tendency to engage in it. However, play remained pagan because Christians saw it as a frivolous distraction from God. Art was meant to express serious, religious themes, which might explain why cuteness appears far less in the art of medieval Europe than it did in Japan.

And yet Western artists did occasionally play around. Monks who spent many hours copying manuscripts sometimes doodled in the margins of the books they were working on. These marginalia include images of monsters and animals acting like humans, but they tend to look grotesque and strange.[34] However, a few of them might be considered cute. In one such illustration, a rabbit jousts with a dog. The rabbit looks surprised, as if he’s about to fall off the snail with a bearded human face that he’s riding into combat. Marginalia like this mix the funny, the odd and the cute all together, but the last is peripheral to the others. European artists simply didn’t do much with cuteness.

Sei Shōnagon took the amusing minutiae of everyday life in the Heian court and turned it into high art. But the importance of play in Japanese culture may run much deeper than its expression in The Pillow Book. The historian Michal Daliot-Bul notes that the female literary tradition that Sei helped to form idealises laughter and everything amusing, but she also says that this trend was informed by a religious tradition that ‘sees laughter as spiritually empowering’.[35] It’s quite a leap to say that a cloistered group of bored nobles desperate to amuse each other thought they could elevate their souls with laughter, but let’s suppose that Daliot-Bul is right. After all, for cuteness to emerge in the arts in any culture, it has to be taken seriously on some level. Could the appearance of kawaii in Japanese culture be connected to the association of the playful and amusing with the power of the gods?

The literary scholar Donald Keene observes that by the tenth century Heian court society had elevated aestheticism to something close to a religion.[36] Poetry, fashion and love affairs were of vital importance in their world. Long before The Pillow Book was written, however, Japanese religion had integrated playful elements into its core.[37] Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion, is full of stories of vengeful gods being appeased through singing, dancing and musical entertainment. ‘Playing with the gods’ (kami asobi), as this was known, comprised a deliberate strategy to curry favour with powerful deities.[38] From ancient times, Japanese believed that entertaining a deity would bring it closer to them, forging an intimate relationship that would work to their advantage. Put simply, laughter both attracted the gods and curried their favour. In this way religious worship was regarded as simultaneously amusing and spiritually empowering.[39]

This historical connection between religion and fun exists to this day; shrines and temples still host raucous festivals all over Japan in which miniature shrines called mikoshi are paraded through the streets. The ‘Pigeon Forest’ shrine near my home in Tokyo mounts several of these each year, when the rhythmic chants of volunteer shrine-bearers echo through my neighbourhood. This custom recalls our relationship with cute things, which – as Hiroshi Nittono’s research suggests – beckon us closer in order that we play with them. In Japan it’s fairly common for shrines and temples to use cuteness as a way of attracting worshippers. Some sell protective amulets that depict Hello Kitty, or other cute characters of their own invention.[40] Gotokuji Temple in Tokyo is adorned with thousands of beckoning cat figures that have been donated by grateful supplicants, while the Pigeon Forest shrine distributes fortunes folded into an origami pigeon each New Year.[41]

Cats and pigeons might seem strange creatures to be associated with shrines and temples, but in Japanese folk belief animals are frequently ridden by gods, appear as their messengers or just signal their presence.[42] We should keep this in mind as we turn to one of the oldest-surviving Japanese works of visual art that strikes the modern eye as cute: the twelfth-century official ‘national treasure’ known as the Scroll of Frolicking Animals.

Fig. 1.1: Beckoning cat figures at Gotokuji Temple, Tokyo.

Fig. 1.2: Origami pigeon fortunes at a Tokyo shrine.

The world’s oldest anime?

The most famous scene in the scroll begins with a running monkey, a broad-brimmed hat blown off his head by the wind and held around his neck by a string. The monkey looks over his shoulder with a delighted grin at several outraged frogs and rabbits waving sticks at him as he makes his escape. Unrolling the scroll further reveals the scene of the crime: a frog is lying on the ground unconscious, his arms and legs splayed. Solicitous rabbits bend over to tend him; further along, a cat in a hat and a family of foxes in aristocratic dress have turned to gawk, amused by the frog’s plight and the monkey’s flight. Finally, at the far left where the action began, two dancing frogs appear. One wears an upside-down lotus pad as a hat as they wave fans and scarves, performing a comic song and dance called the ‘monkey musical’ (sarugaku) to a crowd of delighted animals.

One of the most beloved works of art in Japan, the Scroll of Frolicking Animals (Chōjū giga) is another Heian-era masterpiece. Officially registered as an ancient national treasure in 1899, the scroll is an early example of the technique of outlining characters using brief brushstrokes (ryakugashiki) that would eventually lead to modern manga.[43] Nearly thirteen yards long, it contains various lively scenes of anthropomorphised animals: mainly monkeys, rabbits and frogs, but also mice, deer and foxes. The scenes take place in a landscape of fields, hillsides and streams, with the animals dressed as men and women of various classes, from court nobles and Buddhist monks to labourers.

Festivals at shrines and temples in the Heian era, as in later times, offered multiple forms of entertainment, from magic to juggling. Pantomimes, which were often obscene, were performed by masked actors with enthusiastic participation from the audience. The monkey musical depicted in the scroll was a particular favourite. A commentator at the time wrote that such comic routines caused audiences to laugh hard enough ‘to burst the stomach’. An antecedent of mainstay traditional arts like the stately noh and comic kyōgen dances, both still performed to this day, monkey musicals included risqué pantomime performed by singers and dancers wearing frog masks or hats. The scroll offers a droll take on the monkey musical by depicting frogs as its performers.[44]

There is no text to accompany the images in the Scroll of Frolicking Animals, but unrolling the scroll from right to left gradually reveals the action, as various charming scenes play out like the storyboard for an animated film. In addition to the monkey musical scene, there is a sumo match between a frog and a rabbit, while a watching crowd laughs uproariously; an archery contest between frogs and rabbits, with a fox keeping score; and a ‘horse race’ in which monkeys ride deer like jockeys.

The scroll has long been cited as influential to the origin of both manga and anime, and one reason is the dynamic energy of its depictions. The animals’ emotions are clearly conveyed through vivid facial expressions, gestures and eye contact.[45] In addition to cluing us in on the action, these reciprocal gazes personalise the scene by showing us the individual character of each animal. As we peer at the frolicking animals on the scroll, their delighted grins and laughter bring a smile to our faces as well.

The simple outline drawings of the Scroll of Frolicking Animals also employ reduction – another traditional Japanese aesthetic with deep roots that is a key factor in modern kawaii. The simplicity of the scroll’s execution is striking, considering the amount of frenetic activity it depicts; the landscape is barely shown, and the characters are drawn with economical strokes. Employing restraint to achieve a desired effect is a hallmark of Zen philosophy that appears in everything from the minimalist rock garden at Ryōanji Temple to the sparse beauty of the tea ceremony.[46]

The artists who painted the scroll created a visual shorthand that intensifies the features to which they wished to draw attention. Describing this principle of reduction, O-Young Lee writes: ‘On one hand there is abbreviation, on the other, emphasis.’[47] While The Pillow Book accomplishes this emphasis through an incredible economy of language, the Scroll of Frolicking Animals does so with carefully attenuated visual detail. Reduction is a keystone of modern kawaii design – the minimalism of Hello Kitty is a case in point – but its roots go back 900 years to these monochrome scenes of playful animals that look as if they were painted yesterday.

Because so much of Japanese culture originated in China, it is important to note that these early examples of proto-kawaii don’t seem to have had any Chinese antecedents. For example, neither China nor Korea has anything like the Japanese Doll Festival mentioned in The Pillow Book.[48] And the anthropomorphic animals of the Scroll of Frolicking Animals weren’t inspired by the Chinese artistic tradition.[49]

More importantly, The Pillow Book and the Scroll of Frolicking Animals demonstrate that Japanese kawaii is not a completely modern phenomenon. It is, in fact, connected to various traditional aesthetics – a preference for smallness, the treasuring of the transient and perishable and an enthusiasm for simplicity – that appear across a broad swathe of Japanese culture. The author of The Pillow Book wrote within the cloistered world of the empress and her ladies-in-waiting. Beyond the walls of the Heian imperial palace, however, men and woman of all social classes shared Sei Shōnagon’s penchant for the amusing and the playful.

Scholars have long sought to identify the artists responsible for painting the Scroll of Frolicking Animals, or at least their illustrious patron. But there is another possibility. Twelfth-century Japan saw a flourishing of songs, dances, sports and festivals popular with people of all social classes. Perhaps the scroll was painted by anonymous artisans who came from the community it depicts.

The workshops of famous artists tended to be staffed by artisans from the lower classes; a few talented apprentices may have dashed off the scroll to delight their friends. Since animals are associated with the gods, their presence could be seen as an appeal for divine favour. Or, considering their devilish antics, the scroll could be read as a slapstick send-up of religious rites that tended to cement the position of the upper class. If the famous scroll was a comic send-up of the secular authorities, then having cute animals stand in for people created an ambiguity that might have proved useful in keeping the artists out of trouble.[50]

There was an abrupt explosion in the number of picture scrolls at around the same time that the Scroll of Frolicking Animals was painted.[51] If they were meant for an audience of commoners – and perhaps even produced by them – it follows that their content would reflect universal tastes. The elegant aristocrat Sei Shōnagon wrote The Pillow Book for a noble audience. Modern kawaii, however, is more of a bottom-up aesthetic.[52] Unlike fine art, which is judged by critics and appreciated by connoisseurs, the Scroll of Frolicking Animals may be an early example of how the tastes of ordinary people can inspire art that lasts the ages.

The influence of the scroll has certainly lasted, for images from it remain a perennially popular design motif in Japan. While working on a computer in a university library, I was delighted to see the mischievous monkey from the scroll grinning up at me from the mouse mat. In a Harajuku antique shop a few years ago, I bought a scrap of kimono fabric that was embroidered with scenes from the scroll. Even more than The Pillow Book, the Scroll of Frolicking Animals has cemented its place in the hearts of Japanese people.

In Sei Shōnagon’s day, women shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth to look more beautiful. No one does that today, just as men in the West have given up on powdered wigs. If standards of beauty change, depending on the time and place, then why do we still find cuteness in Japanese art from a thousand years ago? One reason could be that the biological basis of cuteness is hard-wired in a way that makes it more stable than other aesthetics. Yet this can’t be the whole answer, because whether something is seen as cute clearly has some connection with the eye of the beholder. Foxes, for example, gambol alongside rabbits, frogs and monkeys in the scroll, but elsewhere in the world many people consider them to be mere pests.

An animal like the fox, which has a more ambivalent image than a domesticated puppy or kitten, may be exactly the place to start an investigation into the roots of cuteness in nature, as opposed to culture. What would it take to make foxes cute to everyone?

Notes

1   Gergana Ivanova, Unbinding the Pillow Book: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 14–62.

2   Donald Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981), p. 38.

3   Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, trans. Meredith McKinney (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), pp. xiv–xv.

4   Haruko Wakita, Women in Medieval Japan: Motherhood, Household Management and Sexuality, trans. Alison Tokita (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2006), pp. 78–9.

5   Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture, p. 38.

6   Ibid., p. 12.

7   Ibid., pp. 28–9.

8   Ibid., p. 29.

9   Ibid., p. 31.

10   Ibid., p. 12.

11   The Chinese T-ang poet Li Shang-yin included lists in his collection I-shan’s Miscellany (I-shan tsa-tsuan), but this work was not known in Japan in Sei Shōnagon’s time. Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993), p. 418.

12   The earliest use of utsukushi appears in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (late ninth/early tenth century), which is also the earliest work of fiction in the Japanese language. The story refers to the diminutive heroine – a tiny woman three inches tall found in a stalk of bamboo by the titular character – as utsukushi. After many adventures she turns out to be a magical princess from the Moon. This charming story continues to be popular: Studio Ghibli released an animated version called The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in 2013.

13   For example, a sempai – usually translated as ‘senior’, though ‘mentor’ fits better – may use kawaii to describe a kōhai, or mentee. The phrase ‘kawaii kōhai’ appears in the Studio Ghibli movie From Up on Poppy Hill (2011).

14   Ivan Morris, ed., The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 125 n.711.

15   Dictionary of the Japanese Language, 2nd edition, Vol. 2 (日本国語大辞典 第二版 第二巻) (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1972), pp. 405–7.

16   Nittono, ‘The Two-Layer Model of “Kawaii”’, p. 85.

17   David Huron, ‘The Plural Pleasures of Music’, Proceedings of the 2004 Music and Music Science Conference, Johan Sundberg and William Brunson, eds (Stockholm: Kungliga Musikhögskolan & KTH, 2005), p. 6.

18   Shiri Lieber-Milo, ‘Pink purchasing: Interrogating the soft power of Japan’s kawaii consumption’, Journal of Consumer Culture 22, 3 (2022), p. 7, doi:10.1177/14695405211013849. See also Yuko Hasegawa, ‘Post-identity Kawaii: Commerce, Gender and Contemporary Japanese Art’, in Fran Lloyd, ed., Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), p. 127.

19   Japan has a perennially low ranking in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.

20   Gergana E. Ivanova, ‘The many lives of The Pillow Book’, lecture delivered for The Japan Foundation (Toronto: 17 January 2020).

21   Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture, p. 34.

22   Ibid., p. 12.

23   Ibid., p. 28.

24   Michal Daliot-Bul, License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), p. 24.

25   O-Young Lee, Smaller is Better: Japan’s Mastery of the Miniature, trans. by Robert N. Huey (New York: Kodansha International, 1984), pp. 24, 32.

26   Ibid., p. 34. Folding fans may have been the first Japanese product to dominate the world market, since they were exported to China, starting in the twelfth century, and China subsequently exported them to Europe. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

27   Ibid., p. 36.

28   Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007), p. 18.

29   Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture, p. 23. Western manifestations of the aesthetic of perishability tended to be unpleasant. For example, in the Dutch still-life genre of vanitas each item depicted spelled its doom: expensive fruit destined to rot, wilting flowers, etc.

30   Keene, Seeds in the Heart, p. 421.

31   Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, trans. McKinney, p. xvii. Originally okashi derived from a verb that meant ‘to welcome somebody, to invite, to lure somebody’, which recalls O-Young Lee’s book about why small things are valued in Japan. Tzvetana Kristeva, ‘The Pillow Hook: The Pillow Book as an “open book”’, Nichibunken Japan Review: Bulletin of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies 5 (1994), p. 21.

32   G. Y. Nenkov and M. L. Scott, ‘“So cute I could eat it up”: Priming effects of cute products on indulgent consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research 41, 2, pp. 326–41, doi.org10.1086/676581.

33   Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 179.

34   Hunter Oatman-Stanford, ‘Naughty Nuns, Flatulent Monks, and Other Surprises of Sacred Medieval Manuscripts’, Collector’s Weekly (24 July 2014), www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/naughty-nuns-flatulent-monks-and-other-surprises-of-sacred-medieval-manuscripts/.

35   Daliot-Bul, License to Play, p. 23.

36   Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture, p. 12.

37   Debra J. Occhi, ‘Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message Comparing Japanese Kyara with their Anthropomorphic Forebears’, Asian Ethnology 71, 1 (2012), p. 114.

38   Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 83. The early-eighth-century Kojiki, the oldest chronicle of legends in Japan, relates that when the sun goddess Amaterasu hid in a cave and refused to come out, the goddess Amenozume teamed up with a few human shamans to perform a bawdy striptease dance just outside. Hearing raucous laughter from the other gods, the sun goddess emerged from her cave to satisfy her curiosity, bringing sunlight back to the world. Ibid., pp. 82–3.

39   Ibid., p. 83.

40   Occhi, ‘Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message Comparing Japanese Kyara with their Anthropomorphic Forebears’, p. 114.

41   Communing with the gods through play was not limited to the animist Shinto religion. Japanese Buddhism also places amusement and entertainment in harmony with religion: at times even considering play as one path to salvation. Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society, pp. 83–4.

42   Mimi Yiengpruksawan, ‘Monkey Magic: How the “Animals” Scroll Makes Mischief with Art Historians’, Orientations 31, 3 (March 2000), p. 82.

43   Nobuyoshi Hamada, Manga: The Prehistory of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: PIE International, 2013), p. 84.

44   Yiengpruksawan, ‘Monkey Magic’, p. 81.

45   As the art historian Mimi Yiengpruksawan writes: ‘Each vignette shows a network of glances and looks that in effect binds together the elements of the scene for the beholder.’ Ibid., p. 78.

46   Keene, Appreciations of Japanese Culture, p. 20.

47   Lee, Smaller is Better, p. 46.

48   Ibid., p. 42.

49   G. B. Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1931), p. 253.

50   Yiengpruksawan, ‘Monkey Magic’, pp. 82–3.

51   Ibid., p. 83. Many picture scrolls were based on literary works such as The Tale of Genji. The earliest known picture scroll of The Pillow Book dates to the fourteenth century.

52   Nittono, ‘The Two-Layer Model of “Kawaii’”, p. 82.

OceanofPDF.com

2

THE BORDER BETWEEN WILD AND TAME

‘You become forever responsible for what you have tamed,’ said the fox.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Pillow Book and the Scroll of Frolicking Animals make animals seem cute by giving them human traits. As we have seen, it has been argued that the idea of cuteness evolved as a biological trigger to help ensure that children receive care and attention; if this was the case, anthropomorphising might be a way to make us feel this warmth for other creatures as well. However, this is not the only way in which animals become cute. Cats and dogs, for instance, probably became cuter over time as we chose – whether consciously or unconsciously – the most adorable of each litter to breed the next generation. Either way, cuteness seems to be something we have imposed on animals for our own satisfaction.

At least this was what I thought when I started researching this topic. But as I dug deeper, I realised there are many layers to animal cuteness. One animal in particular led me towards this new understanding: the fox. There’s been a special link between people and foxes throughout the ages; studying our relationship with them caused me to completely reassess my assumptions about animal cuteness.

Soon after arriving in Japan I came across a scrap of old kimono fabric at an antiques store in Kyoto. The design features a wedding procession of people with the heads of foxes. The blend of human and fox bodies is not unusual, because foxes are associated with transformation in Japanese culture. They are thought to possess people who proceed to get into all kinds of mischief, such as playing tricks on haughty samurai and greedy merchants.[1] But there is also a positive side to the fox. Many Shinto shrines are dedicated to Inari, the god of rice, sake, tea – and foxes. Inari shrines feature statues of foxes on their grounds, many with cute little red bibs tied to their necks by worshippers as a sign of respect.

Foxes in Western culture are likewise associated with sly, cunning behaviour. In Aesop’s first-century BCE fable ‘The Fox and the Crow’, for example, a fox tricks the bird out of a piece of cheese. This story reminds me that the English word ‘cute’ – a shortened form of ‘acute’ – still contains the meaning of cunning.

The relationship between foxes and people stretches way back in time. The oldest known burial in which a dog lies together in the grave with its owner was 12,000 years ago in present-day northern Israel, where a Natufian woman was buried with a puppy. Yet near this site, in a graveyard from several thousand years earlier, lies the earliest fox–human burial.[2] The significance of foxes to these ancient peoples may never be known, but their behaviour towards humans – curiosity mixed with shyness – may have been similar to the behaviour of dogs before they were domesticated.

Fig. 2.1: Antique kimono showing a fox wedding.

At times the connection between humans and foxes may have gone beyond the symbolic. At the early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe site in present-day Turkey, carvings of foxes are a common motif on pillars.[3] One of them shows a fox in the crook of a man’s arm. It might have been hand-raised from birth and was used to being around people, or there may have been an attempt to domesticate these animals, which ultimately failed.[4]

Even today, foxes often lurk around the edges of human settlements, only to dart away when approached. This combination of curiosity and shyness may have inspired the many folktales about foxes around the world. ‘What are they doing?’ people may have wondered. ‘What do they know?’ But there is another factor at work: the apparent cuteness of the fox’s facial ‘expression’, which makes it seem as if they are smiling. The fox’s face appeals to us, while its behaviour may not. The ambivalence that foxes engender may have caused people to see them as a potential friend rather than a wild animal. To further explore the human bond with these creatures, I decided to visit Zaō Fox Village, a tourist attraction on the side of a mountain in northern Japan that has been dubbed ‘the cutest place on Earth’.

The Fox Village

Holding a baby fox in my arms should have been the highlight of my visit to Zaō Fox Village, but I was disappointed. I expected the cub to play with me as a kitten would, or even gaze into my eyes, lick my hand and wriggle in excitement like a puppy. Instead it just sat there and waited to be put down, so that it could run back to its siblings. But even though its behaviour was a letdown, its appearance was anything but. So small and fluffy! Such big ears! The other people sitting around me were clearly as excited as I was. We were gathered in a circle of chairs and all wore bright-green plastic ponchos, to keep the animals’ gamey smell off our clothes. Cries of ‘Kawaii!’ and ‘Cute!’, along with an abundance of cooing, indicated that the group was overwhelmed by cuteness, and I couldn’t help smiling.

However, this happy communal experience was not shared by the fox itself. As the staff from the centre took photos with my mobile phone, the fox cub sniffed my poncho before staring into the distance. It was clear that I was being tolerated rather than loved – perhaps not surprising, considering that the foxes at the village are wild animals rather than pets.

Zaō Fox Village opened in 1990 with a population of foxes brought from Hokkaido in the far north of Japan; it now has more than a hundred foxes that roam freely in an open-air reserve covering nearly 2,000 square yards. Outside the fenced enclosure that contains the cubs, the adults roam about, running, digging, sleeping and making a surprising amount of noise. But Zaō Fox Village is more tourist attraction than animal sanctuary.

The village is open every day of the year, so the foxes are used to the presence of human beings – but this does not mean they are tame. I went to the centre to investigate the connection between humans and animals that are habituated to people, but still wild. Although some people think of foxes as pests, others see them as cute; their tails are appealingly bushy, thick fur makes their faces appear wider (seeming to hide chubby cheeks) and they often seem to be smiling. But I wondered how this perception would affect my relationship with them. I could walk among the foxes without disturbing them, but how close to them would I feel?

At one end of the wooden deck where we were holding the fox cubs was a high gate of chicken wire festooned with warning signs: the entrance to the fox sanctuary. Most of the signs are illustrated with cute figures of boys and girls with fox heads engaging in prohibited behaviour with the animals. In this way the signs suggest that entering the enclosure will somehow make you a fox – part of their world, yet unaccustomed to their manners and mores.

The gate opens onto a spacious hillside where the foxes are free to roam wherever they please. Many of them are sleeping – they are nocturnal, after all – but others run, dig and screech loudly as they interact with one another.

The foxes basically ignore human visitors who obey the rules. Since they may bite, one of the most important rules is not to hold out your hand to them. I had to constantly fight the impulse to do so; having just cuddled a cute little fox cub in a group of fox-loving fellow visitors, I instinctively wanted to make friends with these creatures. I stuck both hands in my pockets, where my fingers encountered the plastic packets of food pellets I’d bought. ‘Don’t squeeze the food packs’ is another rule; the foxes are smart enough to know what the crinkling sound signifies and will leap up to bite the food. It was hard to obey this regulation as well. Surrounded by so much cuteness, I found myself wanting to squeeze something.

Wandering through the village, I noticed that foxes bite and snap at each other all the time. At the fenced-off feeding platform I could crinkle the packets of food to my heart’s content, before throwing the contents and watching the animals squeal as they fought over the bounty. It was becoming even clearer to me that the foxes may look cute, but they don’t act that way.

Human visitors to the centre tend to approach the foxes as if they’re pets. Everyone I saw was walking slowly with smiling, open faces, keen for as much contact with the animals as possible. I kept hoping a fox would approach me as a dog or cat might, but this didn’t happen. Like the fox cub on my lap, the adult foxes ignored us.

The many YouTubers who come to film Zaō Fox Village are frustrated by the foxes’ indifference, but they have found a solution that makes for more interesting videos: they break all the rules posted on the gate. After all, the foxes will approach people if they think they will be fed, sensing the opportunity to run off with something or can approach unseen and bite an unwitting visitor. YouTube is full of videos of people breaking the rules to make the foxes approach, so that they can conclude that the foxes of Zaō Fox Village act as well as look cute. ‘They’re like a cross between a dog and a cat,’ is a common You-Tuber refrain, but I don’t agree.[5]

According to the caretakers at the Fox Village, the foxes are extremely fearful as well as very curious. A few of the calmest adults are kept inside the enclosure to sit on visitors’ laps when no cubs are available, and these hand-raised creatures are fully habituated to human presence. However, the caretaker, Fumiko Satō, explained that although the foxes love to steal visitors’ possessions, the slightest twitch of a toe will make even the calmest of them shy away immediately. This makes it extremely difficult for the staff to capture an injured fox when it requires treatment.[6]

The foxes’ indifference reveals a crucial difference between wild and domesticated animals. Dogs and cats seek out humans, but foxes fundamentally don’t care about people. If a human hand doesn’t contain food, then perhaps it is food. Likewise, a dangling phone strap is a possible snack, not an invitation to play with a new friend.

In order to leave the Fox Village, one passes through the gift shop that sells fox clocks, wind chimes, biscuits, toys and stickers. All of these souvenirs render the foxes as we would prefer to see them – waving hello, posing jauntily and smiling as if they really mean it – in other words, engaging with us in all the ways that the real foxes do not.

The domestication syndrome

Although the foxes of Zaō Fox Village have been living close to humans for decades, they are still wild. They are different from domesticated animals, which are not merely curious about, but friendly towards, humans. At Zaō Fox Village visitors try to convince themselves that the foxes are cute, without any meaningful input from the animals themselves. But domesticated animals like dogs and cats actually want to be around us, and along with their friendly behaviour, they have an altered appearance. Domesticated animals are cuter than their wild counterparts because, even as adults, they retain the juvenile, baby-like features that we find appealing. Why did this happen? Does cuteness trigger such deep emotional responses in us that we caused our companion animals to conform to our desire?

This begs another question: how have some animals become tame while others remain wild? For a long time the answer seemed obvious. It was thought that early humans would only tolerate the presence of animals that had useful traits. For example, if a few wolves crept close enough to humans to eat from their rubbish heaps, they could provide a warning if larger predators showed up. Aggressive specimens would have been chased away, while calmer individuals were allowed to remain. Darwin called this process ‘unconscious selection’. Given enough time, such winnowing would produce a population of wolves that were calm enough to begin artificial selection – that is, choosing particular animals to breed together. Eventually we ended up with dogs.

However, there is one aspect to this process that Darwin was unable to explain: becoming tame seems to change both the behaviour and the appearance of different species of animals in the same way. Collectively these changes are known as ‘the domestication syndrome’.

All types of animals, from dogs and sheep to pigs and rabbits, exhibit a similar process as they become domesticated. Their fur changes colour; their teeth shrink; their muzzles get shorter; their heads grow smaller and wider; their ears become smaller and floppier; and their tails become curly. Their fertility and breeding cycles change; they become docile, due to the attenuation of stress hormones produced by the pituitary gland; their brains shrink, and juvenile behaviour persists much later in life. Darwin puzzled over this diverse suite of changes that somehow held true across so many different species, including birds and some fish, as did many scientists who followed him. In fact the mysterious origin of the domestication syndrome is widely considered to be one of the oldest problems in genetics.[7]

Lacking another explanation, scientists believed these traits were selected individually because they were useful. However, it’s striking how many traits associated with the domestication syndrome are simply cute. Floppy ears on dogs may be adorable, but they would surely be better at hunting if they had pointed ears, like their wolf ancestors. Likewise curly tails, shorter muzzles, smaller teeth, wider heads and the desire to play aren’t particularly useful – but they are cute.

At first I thought this was yet more evidence for the seductive power of cuteness – it seemed that all of these qualities must have arrived in different species through artificial selection, chosen because they were adorable. Then I discovered an astonishing experiment that offers a very different explanation. Far from the Zaō Fox Village, in the Siberian wilderness, scientists breeding a unique population of foxes may have taken a significant step towards solving the mystery of the domestication syndrome.

The Siberian silver fox experiment

In folklore around the world, foxes are close to humans, yet also distant. They seem capable of being friendly, but never take that first step. This seemingly untapped potential prompted a unique experiment that brings us significantly closer to unravelling the mystery of how companion animals became our friends. The story begins in 1952 when Dmitri Belyaev, a scientist who ran the Central Research Laboratory on Fur-Breeding Animals in Siberia, conceived of a radical and politically dangerous genetic experiment.[8]

Belyaev was an outlaw scientist in Stalin’s USSR: a geneticist at a time when the entire field was considered fake science. Its practitioners were stripped of their positions, exiled and even imprisoned, yet Belyaev was determined to contribute more to science than lustrous fox-fur coats.

Anyone who has raised a dog or cat knows they have distinct personality traits; in running the fox farms, Belyaev noticed that the behaviours that foxes demonstrated as cubs – from curiosity to fear, aggression or even docility – continued into adulthood.[9] His great insight was that one of these traits, friendliness towards humans, must have been far more important to domestication than the others.[10] If he started deliberately selecting foxes that showed less fear of humans and then breeding them together, Belyaev mused, the eventual result might be foxes that demonstrated calmness as an inherited trait from birth.

Belyaev’s hypothesis was that breeding foxes based on their willingness to be approached, which we may call ‘tameability’, would eventually dampen down the ‘fight or flight’ response by altering the physiological systems governing hormones and neurotransmitters that influence behaviour. In other words, if Belyaev was correct, his foxes might eventually become genetically tame.[11] And if different species responded in similar ways to the same selective pressure, the experiment might go some way towards explaining the domestication syndrome.[12]

The experiment was based on an unproved hypothesis. Belyaev primarily sought to shed light on the mysterious origins of the domestication syndrome. The creation of a new domesticated species would constitute a landmark in genetic science, but whether or not it would happen was an open question.

He was well aware that his experiment would take decades, at the very least. Plus, research in genetics was banned in Stalin’s Russia, which required Belyaev to lie about the intent of his project. The official paperwork listed it as an attempt to improve fur production of the silver fox.[13] Had the truth been revealed, his experiment would have ended immediately.

The silver fox is a naturally occurring colour variation of the red fox, which inhabits forests and tundra, farmland and prairie, and even cities all over North America, Eurasia and northern Asia.[14] Silver foxes have been bred for their fur in Russia since the late nineteenth century.[15] I saw a few at the Zaō Fox Village and was struck by their beautiful silver-tipped black fur. Many generations of silver foxes had been raised in captivity by the time Belyaev began his experiment, resulting in foxes that were habituated to living in cages. However, these foxes were not tolerant of people – the breeders were focused on improving the quality and colour of their fur rather than on their tameness.[16]

The arrival of the elite

In 1959 Belyaev moved to Novosibirsk in Siberia to direct the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and his experiment began.[17] Strict protocols were put in place to choose the calmest fox cubs for breeding. To prevent researchers from unconsciously choosing a cute fox over a calm one, he kept the foxes in enclosures with only brief and controlled contact with humans.[18] The selection criteria were rigorous, especially in the beginning, when fewer than 10 per cent of the tamest pups were chosen to be parents.[19]

When Belyaev began his experiment, the farm foxes demonstrated a range of behaviours towards people. Around 30 per cent were extremely aggressive; only 10 per cent were quiet and curious. However, even the foxes that seemed benign were prone to biting the staff, who wore thick protective gloves whenever they went near them.[20] In fact Belyaev referred to his initial sample population as ‘virtually wild animals’.[21] Lyudmila Trut, who joined the experiment as a graduate student and later became the lead scientist on the project, called the first generation ‘fire-breathing dragons’.[22] They were significantly more aggressive and fearful than the foxes of Zaō Fox Village – being kept in a small cage does not make for a placid temperament.

Like many wild animals, foxes breed once a year. Changes in their behaviour were expected only after many years, but to the researchers’ surprise, aggressive and fearful behaviours were eliminated in just a few generations. To make the selection more objective, Belyaev had divided the fox cubs into three categories according to tameness. Those in Class III, the least-tame category, soon became tamer than foxes bred on farms and allowed their keepers to feed them by hand.[23]

Class II foxes were like the calm adult fox at Zaō Fox Village that sat on my lap. They tolerated human contact and let themselves be petted, but showed no emotional reaction or friendliness towards people. The real surprise came in 1963, with the fourth generation of controlled breeding. A single fox cub began to wag its tail at the approach of humans – a behaviour never before seen in foxes.[24] Such foxes, which were happy to see people, were designated Class I and their numbers increased in every subsequent generation.

As it progressed, the Siberian experiment continued to yield even more incredible results. In 1965 the sixth generation was born, and some of these cubs displayed a range of dog-like behaviours, including trying to nuzzle their caretakers and licking their hands, rolling on their backs hoping for belly rubs, and whining when they were left alone.[25] Only a tiny minority of the cubs in this generation demonstrated these behaviours, but the difference was so striking that Belyaev decided these super-friendly foxes deserved a category of their own. They became the first in the Class IE ‘elite’ category.

In the next generation around 10 per cent were judged elite. In the eighth generation there was another key change: some of the cubs were born with curly tails, a trait seen not only in dogs, but in other domesticated animals such as pigs. They also retained pup-like behaviour – being extremely playful and boldly curious about everything – for twice as long as wild cubs. The scientists were careful to observe the cubs rather than trying to play with them, but just a few years later the cubs would run up to them with tails wagging whenever a caretaker approached.[26]

By 1967 the elite foxes were tolerating – and even seemed to desire – the human gaze, even though wild foxes see direct stares as a threat that often triggers aggressive behaviour.[27] At around this time adult foxes started playing with the balls that had originally been brought for the cubs.[28] Mutual gazing and adult playfulness are behaviours that encourage social affiliation and bonding. We may think an animal looks cute, but if it gazes into our eyes and wants to play, we feel a closeness that intensifies our emotional response to it. Belyaev’s silver foxes were heading in this direction.

When the tenth generation of cubs was born in 1969, 18 per cent of them were judged Class IE, and two more surprising changes appeared. The first concerned their ears. All fox cubs are born with floppy ears, but they straighten out after the first couple of weeks of life, an important survival trait for a species that hunts by listening for the small noises made by its prey. But one cub retained her floppy ears as she grew up and passed this trait on to the next generation. The other new trait concerned fur colour. One male cub had a white star in the middle of his forehead, and thereafter this trait became increasingly common as well.[29]

White coloration, called piebald, is common to many domesticated animals, including dogs, cows, horses and cats. My own cat Toby has a white patch on his forehead that makes him easy to spot from far away, even in the dark, which is precisely why most wild animals don’t have such colouring. Floppy ears and piebald coats are two traits of the domestication syndrome, but it was always presumed that humans had intentionally selected them. White patches of fur make companion animals and livestock easier for their caretakers to see, while floppy ears were assumed to have been selected because they look cute. But the fox experiment was throwing doubt on this theory; somehow these changes were showing up without human intervention, suggesting that selection for tameness alone was producing these other effects, too.

By the early 1970s the level of stress hormones in Belyaev’s foxes was about half that of wild foxes. Their adrenal glands were smaller and their serotonin levels higher, making for ‘happier’ animals.[30] Although the staff had always been careful not to train the foxes, definitive proof was needed that the changes were happening at a genetic level; Belyaev initiated a parallel experiment designed to test if the foxes were really inheriting all these traits of the domestication syndrome.[31] To test his theory, he needed to breed a new population with exactly the opposite traits.

Now, instead of choosing tame animals, he selected the most aggressive individuals to breed for the new group. With unselected foxes acting as a control group, the experiment had three groups of animals to compare in the search for the source of animal domestication.[32] As the aggressive group bred, these foxes began to pose a challenge to their caregivers. Unlike the relatively muted reaction of the control group and the love shown by the tame group, the aggressive foxes absolutely hated humans. I’ve seen videos of them, and it’s alarming to watch as they lunge and bite the bars of their cage whenever anyone approaches. Far from gazing lovingly into the eyes of their caretakers, the aggressive foxes follow human movements, looking precisely as if they are stalking prey.[33]

Later in the 1970s, with the aggressive fox line firmly established, cross-fostering experiments were performed in which embryos were painstakingly transplanted from aggressive mothers to tame mothers, and vice versa. Thus an aggressive mother would have both aggressive and tame offspring in the same litter. As soon as they could walk, the tame cubs rushed to the door of their cage when a human approached, wagging their tails to beg for attention. The aggressive mother would grab them by the scruff of their necks and throw them to the back of the cage, in an effort to encourage the attitude towards humans that she considered proper. The aggressive cubs born to tame mothers, on the other hand, growled at approaching humans before running for cover. This provided evidence that both tameness and aggression were, in part, governed at the genetic level.[34]

Just as evidence mounted that genetic inheritance was at work in the experiment, even more amazing results appeared. By the mid-1980s striking physical changes began to manifest in the elite group. These foxes’ snouts and upper jaws shortened and their skulls widened. Along with curling, their tails became shorter and even bushier, and their heads significantly smaller. More and more traits of the domestication syndrome were showing up in the elite group, while they were becoming as tame as dogs.[35]

By the turn of the twenty-first century 70–80 per cent of the foxes in the experiment were in the elite category.[36] By 2005–6 almost 100 per cent of the foxes were classed in this way. The success of Belyaev’s experiment has seemingly resulted in a newly domesticated species: foxes that eagerly approach humans, remain tame throughout their lives and pass that quality on to the next generation.

While the foxes at Zaō Fox Village tolerate humans, they don’t actively appeal to us, which limits their cuteness in our eyes. The Siberian foxes, on the other hand, showed both genetic and behavioural changes that made them more friendly – and their appearance became cuter, too. However, their journey towards domestication is not over. So far the foxes have been bred only for tameness, with all other changes coming as a by-product. If they were intentionally bred for the other traits, their evolution as a domesticated species could proceed even more quickly. Even without such selective breeding, however, they are still quite tame. Since 2010 Belyaev’s institute has been selling elite foxes as pets; a few lucky owners are happily settling into domestic life with a tame fox.

To meet these tame Russian foxes, I had to find ones that had been adopted as pets. They are scattered all over the world, but assiduous searching led me to the JAB Canid Education and Conservation Center near sunny San Diego, which had three of the Russian foxes and was willing to let me meet them.

Meeting the elite

The road from San Diego to the Siberian foxes’ new home took me from the sun-drenched desert into the cool mountains. When I arrived at the conservation centre, I was jittery with anxiety from the California traffic and pumped with adrenaline from anticipation at meeting the world’s newest domesticated animal. But when Amy Bassett came to meet my car, the leaping animals straining at the leashes she held were not foxes. They looked like dogs, but their constant howling was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Amy introduced them as Nicky and Stumpy Doo, members of a very rare breed: New Guinea singing dogs.

Like the Australian dingo, these dogs are a formerly domesticated breed that returned to the wild thousands of years ago when they became isolated from both humans and other dogs in the mountains of New Guinea. They provide a unique window into the origins of our canine best friends, because they evolved in their own way.[37]

Amy, who has a passion for animal conservation, explained that singing dogs howl to communicate with their pack in the dense mountain vegetation. They are not wild, but not quite tame, either. In addition to being very noisy, they are extremely difficult to house-train – this was not a priority when they were domesticated thousands of years ago. Yet Nicky and Stumpy Doo were unquestionably dogs. They came up to me and shoved their faces in my lap, wagging their tails wildly: they wanted to be friends and they knew how to go about it.

The book How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, who was lead researcher on the silver fox experiment, tells this remarkable story. According to Amy, some people are disappointed that the second part of the book’s title has not yet been successfully realised, but building a dog was never the Russian scientists’ goal. Amy’s partner Dave, a quiet guy whose deep connection to animals was apparent in his steady movements and close attention, notes that the Siberian-fox experiment involved a laboratory model designed to illuminate the basic elements of domestication. The result was indeed a new domesticated animal, but one that remains true to its origins – just what I was looking for.

I met three Siberian domesticated foxes that day: silver Maksa, red Viktor and Mikhail, a Georgian white. The foxes live in an outdoor fenced area with room to run and a shed for shade. When Dave let them out, they rushed over to sniff me. After that, they were off like a flash to investigate every corner of the enclosure. They didn’t linger, like the New Guinea singing dogs. They were curious about me – and about everything else. However, there was a huge difference from the foxes of Zaō Fox Village. I felt an immediate connection to Maksa, Viktor and Mikhail. They wanted to be friends.

Just as I was bonding with the Russian foxes, Amy and Dave brought another fox into the enclosure. This was Ishy, a US fox that had been rescued from a fur farm as a pup and hand-raised by people. Ishy is habituated to humans, but not genetically tame. When she came into the enclosure, she did a circuit of the outer edge, then retreated under a bench. She was friendly with Amy and Dave, but quite wary of me.

Ishy is tamer than the Zaō Fox Village animals, but her socialisation is skin-deep. Dave said that although she is younger and smaller than the Siberian foxes, she wins most dominance interactions because she bites harder. According to Dave, when this happens, the Siberian foxes seem to feel betrayed – you can see in their eyes that they’re thinking, ‘That’s not the game we play.’

Dave likened Ishy’s tameness to a software patch. It works most of the time, but if it fails, her behaviour can change in a heartbeat. The Siberian foxes, on the other hand, have different software altogether. Domestication has rewired their brains. ‘It’s like they have a soul,’ says Amy. ‘They have a being and I look into their eyes and they look into mine and we see each other. There’s that connection that I don’t, or can’t, get from the US foxes.’

Amy explained that they don’t usually allow people to hold the Siberian foxes, but since they approached me without any signs of stress, she decided to make an exception. Dave picked up Mikhail, the Georgian white, and placed him in my arms. Mikhail looked up at me, opened his jaws and moved his head towards my nose. Alarmed at the sight of an approaching mouthful of fox teeth, I leaned back in a panic, only for Mikhail to reach out and gently take the tip of my nose in his mouth. At that moment, joy washed over me. An animal I had just met was saying an affectionate hello – not like a dog, but like a fox.

The Siberian foxes have not become dogs; rather, they are foxes that are attuned to humans in a new way. The Bassetts are trying to train their foxes in the ways of relating to humans, which means getting to know them on their terms and adjusting to their temperament. For example, the Bassetts have discovered that although the foxes learn tricks as well as dogs, at times they are too smart. You can fool a dog into doing a trick by pretending you have a treat in your hand. But the foxes figure out the subterfuge immediately and simply walk away. This shows that the human–pet relationship is not one-way. Humans must be socialised to interact with animals, too.

Fig. 2.2: Close encounter with a domesticated Siberian fox.

However, the cleverness of the domesticated foxes is not what impressed me most about them. Dave told me that when Maksa loses her ball under the couch, she doesn’t simply scratch at it from different angles, like a wild fox would. ‘She’ll look up at me just like a dog would,’ Dave said. ‘Can you help me?’ To me, this speaks to the essence of the relationship that we can forge with domesticated animals. We’re not merely objects in their environment; we’re fellow beings who can communicate and help each other.

I had always thought that cuteness was primarily a visual phenomenon, but my experience with foxes made me realise that our perception of cuteness is also related to how something acts. This is in line with the findings of psychologists like Hiroshi Nittono, who maintain that cuteness elicits affiliative behaviour, or actions that reinforce social bonds.

When Amy introduced me to Ishy, their undomesticated rescue fox, she said Ishy’s coloration, with her white face and black-rimmed eyes and ears, made her the cutest-looking of all their foxes. But when Ishy looked at me and promptly retreated under a bench, I was left unmoved. My cuteness response was triggered by the friendly behaviour of Maksa, Viktor and Mikhail, the Siberian foxes. Thanks to them, I began to think that cuteness was more than simply skin deep.

This in turn gave me new insight into the rise of cuteness in human culture. Thinking about cuteness in terms of affiliative social behaviour, like that shown by the Siberian foxes, led me to realise that there was a long-standing motif in European art that represents the force that brings people together: Cupid, the god of love.

Notes

1   Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

2   L. A. Maher et al., ‘A Unique Human–Fox Burial from a Pre-Natufian Cemetery in the Levant (Jordan)’, PLoS ONE 6, 1 (2011), e15815, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015815. The fox skeleton shows no trace of burn or butchery marks, implying that it was not a commodity valued for its meat or pelt. Unmarked fox bones have also been found in burial sites later in the Neolithic period.

3   J. Peters and K. Schmidt, ‘Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey: A preliminary assessment’, Anthropozoologica 39, 1 (2004), pp. 179–218.

4   John Bradshaw, Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet (New York: Basic Books, 2011), pp. 8–9. The images look like foxes, but a few scientists believe they are more likely to be golden jackals, since these animals hunt in packs while foxes are solitary. Yet cats are also solitary hunters; and, as the following section demonstrates, some foxes may have been naturally calm enough to approach humans.

5   Rachel and Jun, Fox Village in Zaō Japan!, 1 July 2015, YouTube (accessed 21 May 2018).

6   Vice Japan, 100 Foxes – Fox Village (キツネ100匹！ – Fox Village), 5 October 2013, YouTube (accessed 20 May 2018).

7   A. S. Wilkins et al., ‘The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: A Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics’, Genetics 197, 3 (July 2014), p. 795, doi:10.1534/genetics.114.165423.

8   Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 7, 15.

9   Dmitri Belyaev, ‘Destabilizing Selection as a Factor in Domestication’, Journal of Heredity 70, 5 (1979), p. 301.

10   Claudio J. Bidau, ‘Domestication through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes’, Gayana 73 (Supplimento), (2009), p. 64.

11   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 15.

12   Lyudmila N. Trut, ‘Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment’, American Scientist 87 (1999), pp. 160–61.

13   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 12.

14   Bidau, ‘Domestication through the Centuries’, p. 64.

15   Dmitri Belyaev, ‘Domestication of Animals’, Science Journal 5, 1 (1969), pp. 47–52.

16   Lyudmila N. Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication: The Domesticated Fox as a Model’, Bioessays 31, 3 (2009), p. 3.

17   Trut, ‘Early Canid Domestication’, p. 162.

18   The fox cubs were tested several times, beginning when they were one month old. A researcher would offer a tiny cub food from a gloved hand and try to stroke and handle it. This was done once in a cage and once in an enclosure where the baby foxes could run around with other cubs. The process was repeated several times. The cubs that ate the food and tolerated the stroking in the cage, and that chose to approach a researcher rather than run around playing with the other cubs, were then selected to breed the next generation.

19   Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication’, p. 3.

20   Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs are Smarter Than You Think (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 74.

21   Belyaev, ‘Destabilizing Selection as a Factor in Domestication’, p. 301.

22   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 42.

23   Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication’, p. 3.

24   Ibid.

25   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 56. See also Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication’, p. 3.

26   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, pp. 57–8, 73.

27   Ibid., pp. 63–4.

28   Ibid., p. 72.

29   Ibid., p. 75.

30   Lee Alan Dugatkin, ‘The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment’, Evolution: Education and Outreach 11, 16 (2018), p. 2.

31   Another parallel experiment following the same protocols as the fox experiment, but using rats, resulted in a population of increasingly tame rats after just five generations. The rat experiment continued and has shown very similar results to the fox project. Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 56. See also Nandini Singh et al., ‘Facial shape differences between rats selected for tame and aggressive behaviors’, PLoS ONE 12, 4 (3 April 2017), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0175043; and Frank W. Albert et al., ‘Genetic Architecture of Tameness in a Rat Model of Animal Domestication’, Genetics 182 (June 2009), pp. 541–54.

32   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 77.

33   Ibid., pp. 77–8.

34   Ibid., pp. 107–8. Work is ongoing to pinpoint the exact genes responsible. A recent study found that fox chromosome 15 is a ‘hotspot’ for synaptic plasticity, which affects changes in learning and memory associated with domestication. See Dugatkin, ‘The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment’, p. 2.

35   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, pp. 133, 154–5. See also Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication’, p. 4.

36   Trut, ‘Early Canid Domestication’, p. 163.

37   Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 91.

OceanofPDF.com

3

CUTENESS IN THE WEST

Cuteness is part of human biology. At least that’s the hypothesis that seems to best fit the facts. Human children need years of care and socialisation, and being cute helps to get the job done. However, it’s difficult to locate material evidence for this theory. Apart from the baby-like features that Lorenz identified in his child schema, whether an object is cute or not depends on our perception. Take baby rattles, one of the earliest known toys. The ancient world produced plenty of these from terracotta pottery, and many of them are purely practical, but a few seem whimsical and playful to modern eyes. Did parents at that time enjoy the sight of their babies clutching rattles shaped like animals or were they meant to ward off evil spirits? It’s impossible to know for sure.

That’s the challenge of locating cuteness in culture. Japan was different – the building blocks of cuteness were in place a thousand years ago – but when I turned to the fine arts of medieval Europe, I found almost nothing. It didn’t seem to occur to monks that they might add a playful personality to the animals they portrayed in bestiaries, or to draw them in a realistic manner. Once in a while I can sense a cat-lover among them. A thirteenth-century bestiary from northern France includes an image of a cat watching a mouse, which is kind of cute.[1] But such cases are rare – the symbolic meaning of the animal seems to have been more important than its appearance.

Children who appear in portraits before the eighteenth century are rarely cute because they hardly ever look like children, as artists focused as much on the adult that the child would become as on the physical aspects of the child. Children were posed stiffly with serious expressions, to show that a family lineage would continue, and they tend to show little personality.[2]

Cupid, the baby god of love

However, cute children could be found everywhere between the Renaissance and the rococo period (c. the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) – they just weren’t real. Instead they took the form of little cupids, gambolling around the edges of paintings and frescoes. The enduring popularity of these tiny winged babies made cupids the major expression of cuteness in Western art for three centuries.

Cupid began as the Greek god Eros, who was depicted not as an infant but as an adolescent youth. But in the fourth century BCE the teenage Eros became younger and began to take on the rounded form of a child, a baby god of love who acted under the control of his mother, Aphrodite.[3] The Romans adopted this later version and named him Cupid. Since Roman artists were skilled at depicting the human form, their cupids often followed the child schema. However, as the Christian era dawned, pagan baby love-gods fell out of fashion. When Cupid showed up in the medieval period, his form was often distorted or represented as an emblem of evil from the pre-Christian world.[4]

In the Renaissance, artists turned to the classical period for inspiration. They rediscovered the cute Roman cupids and started adding them to their paintings, sculptures and frescoes. The new cupid trend began in Italy, where nude winged infants in the classical style were called putti or cherubs.[5] Artists like Donatello elevated the cupid to the sphere of the angels and made him part of Christian iconography.[6] In the sixteenth century cupids proliferated as an ornamental motif, and the trend accelerated in the seventeenth century.[7]

The popularity of these baby gods of love grew, and in the eighteenth century they appeared on everything from commodes to candlesticks. Chubby babies capered in the clouds, gambolled in the waves and frolicked among ribbons and flowers. But cupids and cherubs were more than simply a popular motif; they also had a serious religious meaning that often affected their cuteness.

The cherubs who adorn Raphael’s Sistine Madonna may look cute, but they were still divine angels – being from the heavenly realm, they didn’t represent real children and were fully aware of the trials and tribulations that awaited the infant Jesus.[8] These adult qualities detracted from their childlike cuteness.

As the rococo era waned in the mid-eighteenth century, cupids fell out of fashion – just as a revolution was taking place in child portraiture. Stiff poses vanished and the personality of children started to shine through. Looking at the paintings now, it’s as if people suddenly realised that they were surrounded by living, breathing versions of the cute cupids that adorned their walls. Why had it taken them so long to recognise cuteness in real children?

Fig. 3.1: Raphael’s cherubs from the Sistine Madonna (1513–14).

When I looked into the history of childhood, I was surprised to find the smoking remnants of a raging academic debate. It had begun in 1960, when the historian Philippe Ariès suggested that for most of its history Western culture didn’t have any concept of childhood at all. In his landmark study Centuries of Childhood, Ariès proposed that the concept of childhood was a product of Enlightenment thinking. In premodern times, he claimed, childhood was not considered to be a distinct stage of life. Back then, adults cared for children, but didn’t really engage with them. Children, he said, were treated as deficient adults.

According to Ariès, pre-modern children joined adult society at around the age of seven, which is why medieval paintings include figures who look like very short adults. For this reason, Ariès maintained that people didn’t value childhood as a special stage of life and were more likely to impose harsh discipline on these incompetent little adults than cherish their innocence and indulge their mischief.[9]

Many later historians made the even more radical claim that parents in the past had not loved their children. ‘One would not expect to find any more love in a premodern family than one would in a bird’s nest,’ wrote one of Ariès’s English aco-lytes.[10] These historians argued that in a world with sky-high rates of infant mortality, benign neglect was the best children could hope for. They claimed that parents chose to limit their emotional investment in offspring who, after all, were likely to live for only a short time.

To me, the idea that parents didn’t love their children until modern times seemed preposterous. I was relieved to find that there was strong resistance to this idea. Historians presented evidence from letters and diaries – sources that Ariès and his followers had ignored – to show that medieval parents had loved their children and delighted in their cute antics. For example, it was common for fathers to send celebratory letters to friends and family upon the birth of a child. Legal codes in medieval England stipulated the need to protect children. Japanese scholars weighing in on the matter noted that children under seven in their country had long been treated with indulgence. The emotional cost of high child mortality was great, but it didn’t preclude either emotional attachment to children or grief at their deaths.[11] In 1603 the poet Ben Jonson wrote an elegy for his first son, who died of the plague at the age of seven. In the last line he bitterly regrets liking his son too much, which highlights that it was his affection for the child that made the loss so difficult to bear.

When the dust had settled, historians of childhood came to agree that pre-modern European societies did think of childhood as a special period, albeit a short one – many children joined the labour market at a young age. However, it’s clear that a different meaning was attached to this stage of life. Ariès was right in saying that children were often seen as incomplete adults. Generally speaking, they were marginal figures and were not considered an important part of society.[12]

This didn’t necessarily affect parents’ enjoyment of their children’s cuteness, but it did have an impact on how it was perceived. Pre-modern Europeans tended not to like seeing children crawl, because it recalled the movements of animals.[13] So even when children’s cute appearance and innocence were recognised, they were still treated with ambivalence.

It’s not surprising that such contradictory attitudes existed; after all, every parent knows that children can be accommodating or stubborn, adorable or frustrating. The immaturity of children is, of course, a biological condition, but the culture we weave around this fact changes. In pre- and early-modern Europe parents loved their children, while also understanding that they might not live long. Children could be a drain on resources or could add to the family’s security. Enjoyment of childish antics was in tension with the concern that people felt for their offspring’s immortal souls. For all these reasons, it seems clear that the concepts of childish innocence and cuteness are more modern than we think.[14]

Cute children emerge in art

Japanese society a thousand years ago was very different from that of Europe. The Pillow Book testifies to the importance of women’s concerns in Heian-era literature, while the appreciation of playfulness in Japanese religious and public life is evident in the Scroll of Frolicking Animals. Although Europe had its cupids, the development of the modern cute aesthetic took another 600 years.

As noted above, most child portraits in Europe before the eighteenth century emphasised the social position of children within the family line. The animals that sometimes appeared with them were imbued with symbolism. A goldfinch held in a child’s hand, for instance, emphasised the child’s Christian upbringing,[15] while children’s faces tended to reflect their future adult status rather than their cuteness.[16]

Although psychologically realistic portraits of children were relatively rare at this time, there are a few exceptions. In The Chess Game (1555) by Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532–1625), a girl aged around seven wears a mischievous expression as she watches her sister lose a chess match. Sometimes described as the first major female painter of the Renaissance, Anguissola was barred from studying anatomy like her male counterparts, so she turned to her personal experience and became extraordinarily adept at depicting the emotional state of children and adolescents.[17]

For insight into The Chess Game I turned to Yukiho Suenaga, an artist and arts educator who had been my research assistant as a graduate student. She was struck by the stiffness of the sisters’ bodies. ‘They pose like robots,’ she said, ‘but the facial expression of the little girl is well observed, and the way her hand rests on the table is a bit awkward, like a real child’s.’ Anguissola was ahead of her time; artists were only just getting used to painting children realistically, and some were better at it than others. Adult men – even artists whose careers depended on accurate observation – simply weren’t that interested in children.

The Enlightenment ideas of philosophers such as John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) marked a sea change in how people thought about children.[18] Locke’s concept of the child as a ‘blank slate’ (tabula rasa) made the child important as an individual, not merely as an imperfect adult. Rousseau, meanwhile, insisted that children should be allowed to act according to their nature. The combined influence of these two thinkers created a new idea of the child. Rather than seeing only their future adulthood, people started to look at them as individuals and to value their innocence. Then something else changed: parents began to think that their children should be happy.

In traditional agricultural societies, childhood was not associated with happiness. Children had fun, but the idea that they were naturally cheerful, or that parents had a responsibility to make them happy, wasn’t common. Typically parents sought to instil morality and obedience in their offspring, often through harsh discipline.[19]

Pieter Bruegel’s 1560 painting Children’s Games shows more than 200 children playing more than eighty different games; they play with dolls, stage mock weddings, drag toy animals on leashes and blow into a pig’s bladder to make a balloon. However, only a few of them are smiling and although many have round faces, Bruegel’s children don’t follow Lorenz’s Kindchenschema. They simply don’t look cute. To me, the work has the feel of a medieval painting in which children look more like adults. In fact, considering its subject matter, its tone is surprisingly sombre.

Gradually, although they continued to place importance on discipline and obedience, parents came around to the modern idea that children’s happiness was both good for the family and important for their future.[20] In 1749 the British philosopher David Hartley wrote: ‘The most natural occasions of mirth and laughter in adults seem to be the little mistakes and follies of children.’[21]

Several social changes underlay the emergence of the modern idea of childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The importance of education was emphasised, and children were less often put to work at as young an age as possible, which turned them from an economic asset into a liability. Parents consequently sought to limit family size, since children now cost money instead of earning it. Gradually decreasing infant mortality aided this decision.[22] Finally, the Romantic movement (late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century) in literature and art spread the idea that children are essentially pure and innocent. In this way, as the popularity of playful cupids floating in the clouds waned, a new trend for the portrayal of happy individual children began, which eventually led to the aesthetic that came to be called cute.

This new aesthetic developed through portraiture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[23] Eighteenth-century British painters in particular created a consistent image of innocent childhood in their work that kept up with the current social trends.[24] Their paintings could have been used as illustrations for Rousseau’s texts, such as Emile, a treatise on education in which he recommended raising children with toys and play.[25] There are many examples, but a few are especially iconic.

Painted around 1770, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy was the most popular image of childhood by the beginning of the nineteenth century, with reproductions of the work in high demand. Mothers loved not only the boy’s cute face, but also the retro look of his blue suit, a century out of fashion when the portrait was painted.[26]

At least one modern-day mother has responded similarly to this painting. When I asked the arts educator Yukiho Suenaga about it, I was surprised by the fervour of her response. ‘This boy is so handsome!’ she said. ‘He could be a member of a boy band! I can feel his soft skin.’ But Yukiho wasn’t so enthused about the boy’s body. ‘I put my hand over his face,’ she said, ‘and this cute boy suddenly became a middle-aged man. There’s too much muscle on his calves, his belly is quite chubby, and his thighs are too thick. I see two different people in this painting: a boy’s face on the body of an adult man.’ The painters of this time were still in the process of working out how to realistically depict children.

In addition, the Romantic image of the innocent child reflected in eighteenth-century portraiture was often so highly elevated that it seems not quite of this world. The major aesthetic that guided Western works of art was the beautiful; and the pure, innocent children who most often appear in portraits of this time lacked the familiar, approachable warmth that we now associate with cuteness.

Sir Joshua Reynolds was the artist who contributed the most to this new, innocent image of childhood. Unlike most artists of his period, he enjoyed childish behaviour and paid attention to it. He sought to amuse his child models when they sat for him, while his contemporaries were more likely to have them whipped to encourage them to sit still.[27] Reynolds’s portrait The Age of Innocence from the 1780s shows a young girl sitting alone in a park-like setting, her hands clasped to her chest and her bare toes poking out from under a white dress. The art historian Anne Higonnet notes that the painting might as well be titled ‘The invention of innocence’, because before the eighteenth century such images of the naturally innocent child didn’t exist in art.[28]

We take it for granted that children are more innocent than adults, but this idea only took hold very gradually. From time immemorial, children had been a visible part of the adult world. Poor children were sent out to work; rich children accompanied their elders to exhibitions and the theatre. Even as children were increasingly seen as pure and naive, they were still exposed to adult behaviour, and for this reason the barrier between innocence and experience took time to develop. To take one example that is hard to imagine now, children drinking in taverns to the point of inebriation were not only common but also accepted, right up until the turn of the twentieth century. Children’s pantomimes often included jokes about alcohol, and no one seems to have objected until 1904, when a critic finally decried the drinking scenes in a pantomime at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in London as being inappropriate for a young audience.[29]

Children who showed talent in skills that were associated with adults had been favoured since medieval times.[30] Child prodigies like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart toured Europe and child actors were prominent on the stage. William Henry West Betty, a child actor who experienced great success on the London stage in the early nineteenth century playing adult roles from Hamlet to Romeo, was so popular that a range of products bearing his visage were produced, including souvenir medals, fans, paper dolls and snuffboxes.[31] Child prodigies were adored, due to the gap between their adult-like abilities and their childish appearance.

During the nineteenth century sweeping social changes meant childhood was more highly valued. Fewer children worked, and more went to school. Child mortality rates began to fall, and so did birthrates. Nuclear families became more common as people moved to cities for work. Parents began to lavish attention on the few children they had who were more likely to survive. The mother–child relationship in particular became closer and more idealised.[32]

With the rise of the middle class, the concept of childhood innocence became increasingly important, yet its delicacy could be threatened by any form of precocious, adult behaviour. Between the mid-1840s and the mid-1860s the satirical English magazine Punch included John Leech’s cartoons about ‘Very Acute’ children who drank, gambled, used slang and exhibited louche adult behaviour.[33] Leech’s far-from-adorable children show that the phenomenon of children acting like adults had started to take on negative associations because it undermined the new idea that they should be separated from the adult world.

In the Romantic period, writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb developed the notion of the primitive child – unsocialised, pure, close to nature – first espoused by Rousseau. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’ Wordsworth proclaimed in 1804,[34] neatly replacing the image of little sinners requiring discipline and instruction with Locke’s innocent ‘blank slates’. Children began to represent desirable qualities that adults had lost.

Many of the motifs that presented these qualities of childish innocence had been developed in eighteenth-century child portraiture. For example, depicting young children dressed in costumes, as Gainsborough had done with Blue Boy, made them seem timeless.[35] Reynolds’s Master Crewe as Henry VIII (1775) depicts a young boy dressed as the eponymous king, his evident enjoyment as he proudly poses adding to the cuteness of the composition. When I discussed this portrait with Yukiho Suenaga, she pointed out a slight awkwardness in his stance. In spite of his enthusiasm, young Master Crewe seems slightly unsure of how a king is supposed to pose.

The puppies frolicking at the boy’s feet are another new trope. Posing children alongside animals made the child seem less mature and more at one with nature.[36] All things considered, the painting has my vote for the cutest portrait of the eighteenth century.

Reynolds’ composition assumes that the adults who would view the painting wanted to see immaturity and awkwardness rather than ethereal perfection. It shows that children were becoming figures of nostalgia; the eighteenth century marked the start of an enduring trend that saw adults consuming images of childish innocence as a vicarious enjoyment of their own lost youth.[37] The modern cute aesthetic emerged a century later, when the child went from representing an almost holy purity to something more grounded in real life. Reynolds’s Master Crewe as Henry VIII foreshadowed this development, moving away from the elevated beauty of childhood innocence by adding playful elements like frolicking animals and awkward enthusiasm.

Although the change in the way people viewed children was clearly key to the later rise of cute culture, those puppies at Master Crewe’s feet reminded me that animals also had an influence. Luckily I found Stephanie Howard-Smith, a fellow Cute Studies academic whose research focuses on animal cuteness in the eighteenth century. From Stephanie, I learned that the upper-class penchant for lapdogs, which had originated in China and Japan, found its peak in a fad for the flat, charming faces of pugs.[38] They were popular not only as pets, but also as porcelain miniatures.

Stephanie has found that eighteenth-century women who owned pugs and collected porcelain models of these cute dogs, often cooing to them in baby talk and passionately acquiring more, were accused of self-indulgence and charged with putting their own interests ahead of their children and family.[39] Even today, people interested in cuteness are sometimes accused of being childish or infantile and turning away from adult respon-sibilities.[40] To find out how this happened, let us move from the old world to the new, for the cute aesthetic we are familiar with today has its roots in nineteenth-century America.

Barnum’s baby shows

P. T. Barnum, the legendary showman who founded a famous circus that bore his name, was a major influence on American popular culture in the nineteenth century.[41] In the 1850s, while organising flower, dog and poultry shows to advertise his American Museum, he was struck by the thought that the public would flock to a competition that judged babies on their features. However, displaying babies like plants, pets or livestock struck directly at the core of Victorian family values, which considered the bond between mother and child to be sacred. Pushback was swift, with critics decrying mothers who thrust their babies ‘unblushingly into the public eye’ as violators of the sanctity of motherhood.[42]

Despite this criticism, the general public seemed to disagree. Barnum’s first baby show, held in 1855, attracted more than 60,000 spectators, who each paid twenty-five cents to view the 143 contestants.[43] Women comprised three-quarters of the guests; they came to the baby shows for the very reason these competitions were criticised – to witness a spectacle that openly displayed something usually hidden from public view.[44] At this time, mass commercial entertainment was designed for a male audience.[45] Barnum not only created events that women wanted to see; he took pains to make them feel comfortable going out in public. He engaged a panel of women to judge the baby shows, and there was a nursery next to the main exhibition space that was run by a nurse, where men were forbidden.[46]

The proliferation of baby shows throughout the second half of the nineteenth century demonstrates changing attitudes about motherhood and children. They became commonplace at agricultural fairs in the countryside and at theatres in cities. They were mounted at exhibition halls and used for fundraising events, while children’s magazines instructed girls on how to hold baby shows for their dolls.[47]

In Europe, baby shows were seen as distinctly American and slightly vulgar, but drew in the crowds nonetheless.[48] They represented the rise of a new consumer culture that was dedicated to pleasure, spectacle and profit. This was the golden age of the patent medicine show that hawked fake cure-alls, the sideshow oddities of the dime museum and ethnographic exhibitions of tribal peoples like Native Americans, all of which were included in Barnum’s American Museum. Baby shows, however, became an opportunity for manufacturers to present new products like bassinets and baby carriages; mothers embraced these new items and the opportunities they afforded to show off their babies. At the end of the nineteenth century The New York Times referred to the parade of women pushing their newly acquired baby carriages on city streets as a ‘veritable baby show’.[49] Mothers had taken the reins and were displaying their babies by themselves.

The idea that children were pure and innocent, expressed so well in eighteenth-century portraiture, made the bond between mother and child seem deeply private, even holy, but baby shows gave women an alternative to the moral seriousness that had surrounded child-rearing by teaching them to see their own babies as sources of pleasure.[50] In this sense, they were a key event in the development of American cute culture. However, although reviews of the shows were splashed all over national and local newspapers, I have yet to locate a single one that called the babies ‘cute’. The word hadn’t yet attained its modern meaning.

Even reviews that criticised the public display of infants described the contestants in complimentary terms. The babies were referred to as handsome, beautiful, pretty, smart and fine-featured.[51] Prizes were given in categories according to age, and included twins, triplets and the fattest baby (considered a sign of health in an age of high infant mortality). First prize, however, went to the ‘finest’ baby – not the cutest.[52]

A New York Times column said of a champion in a baby show: ‘His form is the very perfection of infantile grace.’[53] In the mid-nineteenth century positive depictions of children continued to emphasise their innocence and purity, associating them with the elevated aesthetic of beauty rather than the everyday quality of cuteness. This led me to wonder whether a tipping point was reached when the meaning of the word ‘cute’ changed from clever to adorable. After the slow growth of interest in a feeling that nobody had bothered to name, a new word was needed to capture it. But why was that word ‘cute’?

In the 1850s the word was still a synonym for clever, and applied to behaviour rather than appearance. Although babies were called ‘bright’ or ‘intelligent-looking’, they did not display clever behaviour, so they were not called ‘cute’.[54] Barnum’s shows were a significant step in the creation of a new aesthetic that eventually prompted the word to attain its modern meaning. But why did ‘cute’ take hold, when the perfectly serviceable ‘adorable’ or ‘lovely’ already existed? Something about this evolving American aesthetic required an additional element, a mischievous exuberance that was captured by a word that connoted cleverness.

The baby shows were a sign of a cultural shift that would eventually cause a boom in cuteness. Between the 1870s and the 1930s many things changed. Child-labour reforms, along with the push for compulsory education, saw children of all classes become, as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer put it, ‘economically worthless but emotionally priceless’. The idea that children should be protected from adult responsibilities gradually spread through the concentrated efforts of a variety of social reformers, from educators and feminists to psychologists and union leaders.[55] In this way, children who had previously been pushed to the margins by adults became central to culture.[56]

Accordingly, childhood became something to value instead of something to get through as quickly as possible. When adults began to regard childhood as a psychological refuge from the pressures of adulthood, they found joy and delight by vicariously enjoying childish mischief and high jinks.[57] As adults began to embrace childhood as a vehicle for indulging in their own nostalgia, a new aesthetic developed.

Sigourney’s cat-people

In nineteenth-century North America a cluster of artistic motifs and literary themes allowed the age-old emotion of cuteness to be expressed in a new way. After a slow and uncertain birth, a new cute aesthetic rose up to conquer popular culture in the twentieth century. Angela Sorby is a literary scholar and poet at Marquette University in Milwaukee with a keen mind and a dry sense of humour. In two articles on early American cuteness, she described the emergence of the cute aesthetic in the mid-nineteenth century and explained why previous eras did not publicly celebrate the cuteness of children.

Angela has shown that the spectacular rise of cuteness in early-twentieth-century culture only occurred after adults began to consider their children as a source of pleasure, instead of as little sinners who were in danger of going to hell. Her deeper insight is that children became appreciated as a spectacle that could be shared with others beyond a domestic setting. This movement from the private to the public sphere is a key step in explaining how cuteness was able to take over popular culture, and her analysis hinges on an obscure writer of whom few people have heard.

Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865) was one of the most prolific authors in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and a paragon of nineteenth-century American womanhood.[58] At a time when the relationship between women and children was idolised, she embodied Victorian sentimentalism and moral rectitude.[59] We can see her tentative forays into the nascent aesthetic of cuteness in her contrasting childhood reactions to dolls and cats.

In her autobiography Letters of Life, Sigourney reveals that she had few toys as a child, writing: ‘In those early days of the republic our merchant vessels did not swell their freight with the toys of Germany and France. Dolls that opened their eyes, moved their joints, and moaned were unknown, and might have been deemed the work of necromancy.’ The budding author used to line up her few home-made dolls and deliver lectures in which she reproved their faults and ‘enforced a variety of moral obligations’. It’s a revealing anecdote about the attitude towards children that was prevalent in the late eighteenth century.[60]

Sigourney had a quite different relationship with her cats. As a child, she wrote a comical sketch called ‘Concerning Ye Catte’, which undertook to defend cats from accusations that they were ‘selfish, fawning or hypocritical’.[61] The young writer points out that while dogs are praised by the men they follow around, cats remain inside with women and their actions are less visible.[62] Interestingly, this same theory has been proposed to explain why cats were ascendant on the Internet 200 years later; their cute antics took place largely within sight of their owners – until the spread of online videos.[63]

Born in 1791, Sigourney grew up in an age when realistic dolls may well have been considered demonic, yet her spirited defence of cats exactly matches the way that cat-lovers think of their pets today. Sigourney taught her cats to stand on their hind legs and nuzzle her proffered hand, and the way she writes of a mother cat and her kittens (in a deliberately archaic style) provides a further insight into her tentative steps towards the cute aesthetic: ‘She playeth merrily with them, and frisketh at proper times. Yet hath she due regard unto their manners, and boxeth their small ears with a wide-spread paw, if they disobey or displease her. Is there any other four-footed creature that doeth these things?’[64] Sigourney both anthropomorphises her ‘cat-people’ and discovers a mixture of playfulness and discipline in them that was unusual at the time.

In Letters of Life Sigourney characterises her childhood as happy, yet she emphasises ‘industry, order and obedience’ more than play[65] – and it is clear that she did not support cuteness as a public spectacle. When P. T. Barnum tried to recruit her as a judge for his baby show, she didn’t even answer his invitation. Antebellum Americans like Sigourney, torn between the older idea of original sin and the romantic concept of the innocent child, were opposed to making a spectacle of what they saw as a sacred trust.[66] The child was a fraught figure in the debate between original sin and innocence; disobedience – however slight – signalled a child in danger of hellfire, while pictures of mischievous children from this period reprimanded parents for poor supervision.[67]

Childish mischief has always afforded private amusement to parents, but these moments were generally appreciated within the family or confided to private diaries.[68] In public writings, such behaviour was roundly criticised. Disobedience, whether in word or deed, was seen as perilous to the child’s immortal soul, under the doctrine of original sin. In the sixteenth century Montaigne decried the idea of adults taking pleasure in childish frolicking – he thought such behaviour was tantamount to loving children ‘for our amusement, like monkeys’.[69] In the seventeenth century moralists and educators chastised parents who seemed to regard their children as sources of entertainment, on the grounds that it stunted their development into rational beings and good Christians.[70] While Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Rousseau offered a contrasting view, presenting children as naturally innocent, their ideas were slow to take hold in the US where evangelical Christian women played a larger role in popular culture.[71]

The Victorians imbued childhood with an aura of sanctity, and innocence was the quality that not only separated children from adults, but also made them slightly mysterious. They were precious possessions that could be reclaimed by God at any moment, and they had to be divested of this spiritual quality before the new trend in cuteness could really take hold.[72]

Slowly a new secular concept emerged in the US that considered naughtiness neither good nor evil, but part of a child’s nature. A child’s flaws could be charming, and even funny. Childish mischief could be laughed off once the penchant for viewing a child as either the embodiment or lack of Christian virtue started to wear off. But since the older religious values were still around in mid-nineteenth-century society, representing the cuteness of children had to be carefully managed.[73]

Change depended upon the emergence of a mindset that enabled adults to see children in a new light. P. T. Barnum’s baby shows brought this novel way of thinking into the public sphere, but it also existed on the page. In 1864 Lydia Sigourney published a collection of domestic anecdotes, Sayings of Little Ones, that included stories of comic childish failings. Still the word ‘cute’ is absent – she struggled to find a way of describing children whose missteps were endearing rather than disobedient, funny rather than sinful. She noted that a combination of youthful beauty and childish cleverness, together with naivety and simplicity, could create a unique and amusing effect[74] – the cute aesthetic in a nutshell. Yet the word itself still eluded her.

While Sigourney was cataloguing the cute mistakes of children, Japan was a hermit kingdom that kept the outside world at bay. Sigourney’s struggles to reconcile a new, amusing aesthetic with her strict Christian principles wouldn’t have made sense to the Japanese. Their history of incorporating playfulness into art and literature, along with the traditions of valuing simplicity, impermanence and small things, means that cuteness had long had a presence in Japanese culture, and not only in the arts. The lapdogs that were so popular among the European upper classes may have originated in China, but they were often referred to as ‘Japanese dogs’, indicating that they may have made their way to Europe from Japan.[75] Now that we’ve seen the slow development of cuteness in Europe and the US, let’s take a look at the same period in Japan – and we’ll start with dogs.

Notes

1   The Medieval Bestiary, bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery213.htm (accessed 29 July 2022).

2   Jane Eade, ‘Portraiture’, in Anna French, ed., Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 282–99.

3   Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 34.

4   Sally A. Struthers, Donatello’s Putti: Their Genesis, Importance, and Influence on Quattrocento Sculpture and Painting, Vols I and II, Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1992, p. 42.

5   Ibid.

6   Ibid., pp. 74–5.

7   Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 44.

8   Ibid. See also Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), pp. 17–18.

9   Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, pp. 128–9. While Ariès did admit that the cuteness of children must have been appreciated by their mothers and nurses, he consigned this emotion to ‘the huge domain of unexpressed feelings’ that didn’t appear in the culture at large (ibid., p. 130).

10   Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 10.

11   Ibid., pp. 11, 13, 19.

12   Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), pp. 2–3, 11).

13   Stearns, Childhood in World History, p. 61.

14   Anna French, Innocence, in French, ed., Early Modern Childhood, p. 80.

15   Jane Eade, Portraiture, ibid., p. 295. In a similar fashion, dogs represented fidelity while the fecundity of rabbits made them a symbol of lust.

16   Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, pp. 17, 19. Before the seventeenth century children were painted to ‘indicate their future adult social status’. They were dressed, and behaved, like adults. Often they even looked like adults, though this gradually changed as artists learned to depict children realistically. Van Dyck’s children’s faces, for instance, are more childlike than their bodies.

17   Deborah Solomon, ‘Old mistresses turn tables on old masters’, The New York Times, 16 December 2019 (accessed 28 September 2022).

18   Heywood, A History of Childhood, p. 5.

19   Stearns, Childhood in World History, p. 166.

20   Ibid., p. 73.

21   David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, Vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson, 1801), p. 440.

22   See Stearns, Childhood in World History, pp. 74–5. In addition, increasingly bellicose nation-states took an interest in children in order to guarantee enough soldiers and workers and quell social unrest.

23   Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, pp. 46–7.

24   Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, pp. 9, 23. In addition to British artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) and John Hoppner (1758–1810), the French painter Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), who painted portraits of Marie Antoinette’s children, was known for being able to capture children’s emotional states in her paintings.

25   Ibid., p. 27.

26   Ibid., pp. 46–7. Revisioned in black velvet, the Blue Boy’s suit became the basis for the illustrations in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and spawned a new generation of nineteenth-century ‘cosplay’.

27   Ibid., p. 25.

28   Ibid., p. 15.

29   Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 17, 188.

30   Heywood, A History of Childhood, p. 43.

31   Marlis Schweitzer, ‘Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty’, in Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao, eds, The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2017), p. 127.

32   Stearns, Childhood in World History, pp. 74–6, 78.

33   Gubar, Artful Dodgers, p. 17.

34   William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.

35   Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, p. 33.

36   Ibid., pp. 34–5.

37   Sina Najafi and Anne Higonnet, ‘Picturing Innocence: An Interview with Anne Higonnet’, Cabinet Magazine 9 (Winter 2002/03), cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/najafi.php (accessed 30 September 2022).

38   Chi-ming Yang, ‘Culture in Miniature: Toy Dogs and Object Life’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 148–50.

39   Stephanie Howard-Smith, ‘Little Puggies: Consuming Cuteness and Deforming Motherhood in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, 3 (Spring 2022), pp. 307–31.

40   Tom Wyman, ‘Beware of Cupcake Fascism’, Guardian (8 April 2014), (accessed 28 October 2022). See also Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York: Basic, 2000).

41   Eric Fretz, ‘P. T. Barnum’s Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Exhibition’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 97.

42   E. Oakes Smith, ‘Barnum’s Baby Show – A Protest’, New York Herald (12 May 1855), The Lost Museum Archive, lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/barnums-baby-showa-protest-new-york-herald.

43   ‘The Baby Show Exhibit’, Lost Museum Archive, lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/exhibit/baby/ (accessed 30 September 2022).

44   ‘The Baby Show – Grand Infantile Display’, New York Times (6 June 1855).

45   Lori Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 193.

46   Susan J. Pearson, ‘“Infantile Specimens”: Showing Babies in Nineteenth-century America’, Journal of Social History (Winter 2008), pp. 354–5. Barnum sought to elevate the baby shows beyond mere spectacle by presenting them in a spirit of scientific enquiry, interviewing contestants about hygiene, diet and exercise and recording the answers.

47   Ibid., pp. 341, 343.

48   Ibid., p. 341.

49   Ibid., p. 358.

50   Angela Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby: Sigourney and the Origins of Cuteness’, in Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino, eds, Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural View (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), p. 136.

51   ‘The Baby Show: Grand Infantile Display’.

52   P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum (Buffalo, NY: Warren, Johnson & Co., 1872), p. 159.

53   ‘The Baby Show – Prodigious Jam and a Hot Time’, New York Times (7 June 1855).

54   ‘The Baby Show: Grand Infantile Display’.

55   Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 153.

56   Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3, 11.

57   Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 20.

58   Kete and Petrino, eds, Lydia Sigourney, pp. 1–2.

59   Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby’, p. 122.

60   Lydia Sigourney, Letters of Life (New York: Appleton, 1966), p. 27.

61   Ibid., p. 31.

62   Ibid., p. 125.

63   Sarah Hepola, ‘The Internet is made of kittens’, Salon, 10 February 2009, www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/ (accessed 13 October 2022).

64   Sigourney, Letters of Life, p. 167.

65   Ibid., p. 42.

66   As Angela Sorby writes: ‘Evangelical Christian women, who played a larger role in American popular culture than in British culture of the same period, were deeply invested in the moral seriousness of children and mothers.’ Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby’, p. 135.

67   Cross, The Cute and the Cool, pp. 46–7.

68   Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 130.

69   Ibid.

70   Ibid., pp. 131–2.

71   Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby’, p. 135.

72   Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics’, p. 188.

73   Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby’, pp. 129, 133, 135.

74   Ibid., p. 134.

75   Chi-ming Yang, ‘Culture in Miniature: Toy Dogs and Object Life’, pp. 149–50.

OceanofPDF.com

4

KAWAII IN THE HERMIT KINGDOM

Tracing the pre-twentieth-century history of cuteness in Western culture is like wandering in a desert; except for an oasis or two, there’s not much to see. Japan, however, is different. Cuteness may not have flourished throughout Japanese art history, but it was always there. And since kawaii is so popular today, museum exhibitions that display these works are common.

When I visited the Kawaii Edo Paintings exhibition at a Tokyo museum several years ago I was expecting to see cute things, but one of them in particular really blew me away. The exhibition displayed almost 200 works from Japan’s Edo era, which ran from 1603 to 1868, and there was an astonishing variety of cute motifs and themes adorning the walls. Puppies cavorted in the snow, and cats dressed in kimonos played musical instruments. Even Buddhist priests and armoured samurai were ‘cutified’. However, it was a small folding fan displayed in a glass case that caught my eye.

Fig. 4.1: Puppy on a fan by Nagasawa Rosetsu.

Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–1799) painted the puppy on the fan in the late eighteenth century. Its simplicity is captivating, but there’s a lot of technique behind it. The dog’s exposed belly and loose-limbed pose emphasise its tameness. The black-and-grey outlining (ryakugashiki), a technique that had appeared in the Scroll of Frolicking Animals centuries earlier, creates perspective by placing the head in front of the body and focusing attention on the animal’s characterful face. Rosetsu abandons realistic body proportions in favour of rounded lines to capture the feeling of a puppy eager to play. These techniques, which later became the foundation of manga, enabled artists to simplify drawings in a way that communicates a specific feeling to the viewer.[1]

The exhibition demonstrated that it was common for masters of the art world in this period to include cute subjects in their work – in stark contrast to Europe, where cuteness in the fine arts was only just beginning to emerge. What accounts for this disparity? As we have already seen, religion seems to be one factor. Another may be even more elemental. Unlike war-riven Europe, Japan was largely at peace.

It makes sense to me that countries convulsed by war wouldn’t have the time or energy to indulge in a taste for cute, harmless things. In fact Japan had enjoyed almost four centuries of peace during the Heian era that produced The Pillow Book and the Scroll of Frolicking Animals. Although the country subsequently entered a period of turbulence, the Edo era brought another long age without war; with the arrival of peace, the penchant for play in all its forms arose again.

The Edo era is well known for an isolationist foreign policy (sakoku) that restricted contact with the outside world. It’s often thought that Japanese culture was free from foreign influence during this time, but the reality is more interesting. Although only a trickle of Western knowledge entered Japan, it had a profound influence on the arts in general and on the development of the kawaii aesthetic in particular. The puppy on the fan would never have been painted without the influence of a giant in the Japanese art world whose works are still beloved. His name is Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795) and he was a genius at blending the old with the new.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the teenage Ōkyo began working in a Kyoto toyshop. The shop’s most popular products were pictures that looked three-dimensional when placed in front of a convex magnifying lens called a ‘Holland glass’.[2] In order to paint these special pictures, Ōkyo had to learn European linear perspective and then distort it into the ‘perspective view’ that created the 3D effect.

Fig. 4.2: Puppies by Maruyama Ōkyo.

Ōkyo’s interest in mathematics and art led him to study medicine, anatomy and botany while he trained as an artist.[3] His study of European artworks that had made their way to Japan led him to combine Western techniques of perspective and shading with his interest in nature.[4] He became a pioneer of a new form of realistic Japanese painting called shasei, based on sketching from life. A famous artist in his day, Ōkyo is now considered one of the all-time masters of Japanese painting.

As we have already seen, European artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds revolutionised child portraiture in the eighteenth century by depicting children as they really looked. Ōkyo, their Japanese contemporary, took this realism in a new direction that enhanced the cuteness of his subjects even further. However, rather than children, he chose to paint puppies.

Since it is impossible to convince wriggling puppies to pose, Ōkyo observed them at play and painted from memory. Along with his knowledge and talent, he used the traditional Japanese technique of reduction to represent the essence of the animals. His bold lights and darks appear simple, like a coarse-grained photograph. This graphic rendering produces an almost uncanny sense of naturalness.

Ōkyo’s puppies tend to cavort at the bottom of long, narrow scrolls. The propensity for leaving large areas of empty space in a composition is a traditional Japanese technique that, in Ōkyo’s hands, emphasises the smallness of the puppies. He employs realism to capture the characteristics of Lorenz’s ‘child schema’ – round bodies, short legs and wide faces – but the cuteness really shines through in their interactions. The puppies joyfully explore their new world together, the essence of playful friendship pouring from them.

Ōkyo’s new techniques were criticised by the conservative painting schools of his time for being too concerned with physical appearance. He was accused of being a slave to his subject matter, while the literati decreed that his paintings lacked dignity. However, his work was hugely popular among lay people, who loved its cuteness.[5] In Ōkyo’s later paintings he began to use more outlining. The pups’ fur was reduced to a single bodyline, which paradoxically made them seem even more real.[6]

Fig. 4.3: Close-up of Ōkyo’s puppies

While artists like Gainsborough and Reynolds sometimes included puppies in their child portraits, Ōkyo’s pups look more modern. He combined his technique with the traditional Japanese aesthetic practices of simplification and reduction that appeared in The Pillow Book and the Scroll of Frolicking Animals to achieve what we now call characterisation. Seen close up, these eighteenth-century puppies might be characters from a modern-day children’s book or film; his student Nagasawa Rosetsu employed these techniques when he painted the puppy on the fan.

Ōkyo and his students lived in a time when the arts were booming in Japan. The city of Edo – now called Tokyo – boasted the largest pre-modern urban population in the world, with over one million inhabitants. Most people in this period had little money, but they were willing to save up for a day watching sumo wrestling, an evening’s kabuki performance or a raucous group pilgrimage to a temple.[7] While paintings were expensive, cheap woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) became affordable. Their subjects ranged from subtle and satirical to funny and dramatic, but cute themes were quite popular – and one artist in particular was famous for his feline subjects.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861) was a renowned woodblock printmaker who loved cats. He would often walk around his studio with one tucked into the sleeve of his kimono, and he frequently made them the subject of his art. Sometimes they simply loll as women in elegant kimonos play with them; in other prints, kabuki actors are depicted with cat faces. In yet others, cat bodies stretch to spell out words for favourite feline treats, such as eel (unagi) and octopus (tako), with the face of each cat revealing its character. Another print, evocatively titled Spring Moon, Cats in Heat, depicts the bustling Yoshiwara pleasure quarter in Edo, with a cast of cats as customers, geisha and courtesans.

Although Western culture contains a certain ambivalence about cats that stems from their association with witchcraft and Satan in the Christian tradition, by the end of the nineteenth century anthropomorphised cats were also showing up in Western artworks. They were no match for Kuniyoshi’s, however – the master printmaker’s deep connection with the animals led him to imagine them in every conceivable situation; for fellow cat-lovers, his prints have an irresistible cuteness.[8]

While Kuniyoshi was inspired by the Scroll of Frolicking Animals, his personal library included Western artwork and, like Maruyama Ōkyo, he made a careful study of Western art techniques. Some of his prints incorporate perspective with a vanishing point and depict figures from different angles and poses.[9]

Although kawaii has roots in traditional Japanese aesthetics, it developed using European techniques filtered through the sensibilities of animal-loving artists like Ōkyo and Kuniyoshi. The fact that even master artists in Japan were open to new influences would serve the entire country well in the next era of its history, when much of the world became obsessed with all things Japanese.

Japonisme, the cult of Japan

Japanese culture has long shown an affinity for small things, while also valuing simplicity and appreciating the transient. Underneath all this is a deep love of the amusing and playful. Many cultures share these preferences, but in Japan they came together in a way that enabled cuteness to emerge in the arts earlier than elsewhere. In addition, Japanese cuteness flourished during a few long periods of peace, times of fervent creativity in which new genres were created and new techniques explored. In the Edo era, the slow drip of Western knowledge led to novel artistic techniques. And as the nineteenth century ended, Japanese kawaii began to influence the development of cuteness in North America.

In 1853 the US Navy steamed into the harbour near Tokyo to demand trade concessions from the Japanese government, leaving them no choice but to open the country’s borders. A pre-industrialised nation with few natural resources, Japan was reliant on artists and artisans producing goods for export, and their efforts proved remarkably successful. The European craze for Japanese artworks and decorative objects began in the 1860s and lasted for the rest of the nineteenth century.

Japonisme, the ‘cult of Japan’, began with bohemian artists like Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Whistler, Tissot and Klimt, who started a craze for woodblock prints before moving on to screens, scrolls and kimonos. Monet’s house is full of Japanese prints and paintings. In 1876 he painted his wife wearing a kimono and holding a fan, and his later Water Lilies paintings were directly inspired by Japanese prints. Van Gogh painted a self-portrait dressed as a Buddhist priest in 1888. In 1869 James Tissot did three paintings of young women admiring Japanese objects from his own collection, including kimonos and dolls.[10]

In time, practically all European and American artists were wowed by the Japanese sense of aesthetics. The lack of depth and attention to surface detail found in the woodblock prints of artists like Kuniyoshi, along with the naturalism of artists like Ōkyo, helped to portray nature as full of light, motion, feeling and colour. This was a revelation to Western artists, who found the energy and playfulness displayed in woodblock prints and paintings a force of liberation from the conventional, stiff portraits and landscapes of the day.[11]

Japan began promoting products for export at the international exhibitions, later called world’s fairs, that were all the rage in the late nineteenth century. These displayed new technologies and innovations, along with the culture and art of countries around the world. After the 1878 Universal Exhibition one reviewer wrote that enthusiasm for Japanese art and design had swept through Paris like flaming gunpowder, due to its ‘imagination that is ingenious, playful, rich in surprises and of a beautiful temper’.[12] Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote a dozen popular books on Japan, described the whole country as exquisite. In Japan, he wrote, ‘curiosities and dainty objects bewilder you by their very multitude.’[13]

Fig. 4.4: The cover of Bunkio Matsuki’s Catalogue of Japanese Artists’ Materials.

Although the cult of Japan began with artists and intellectuals, exhibitions, operas and books helped to spread the fascination with all things Japanese to the growing middle classes in Europe and America. Folding fans, porcelain and dolls were perfect for the new consumer culture in which women were making more decisions about interior decoration.[14] Goods displayed at the exhibitions were also on sale, and shops dedicated to Japanese art soon opened in many cities as the country produced more and more objects at varying price points. While Japan came to be viewed as a playful, exotic wonderland in the minds of delighted Westerners, the Japanese didn’t hesitate to use this image in their pursuit of economic prosperity.[15]

Fig. 4.5: The white rabbit logo of Bunkio Matsuki’s Boston shop.

In 1895 a Japanese merchant named Bunkio Matsuki opened a shop in Boston called the White Rabbit, which stocked more than 20,000 imported artworks and household items.[16] A catalogue from 1904 features an illustration of a Japanese man drawing rabbits that come to life and hop off the page, in a style that recalls the twelfth-century Scroll of Frolicking Animals.

I love the iconic simplicity of the smiling rabbit logo at the top, which dates from 1899 and appeared on all printed materials related to Matsuki’s shop.[17]

The 1904 catalogue includes artists’ materials such as brushes, ink, stencils and design books that enabled his customers, most of whom were middle-class women, to make their own Japanese-style designs.[18] In this way, cute images like the rabbit logo made their way into American homes as an artistic inspiration.

However, when the fad for all things Japanese infiltrated Western consumer culture, Japanese people came to be stereotyped as mere extensions of their artistic sensibility. Pierre Loti’s 1887 memoir Madame Chrysanthème, the inspiration for Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, refers to Japanese people with a confetti shower of diminutives. The story relates the author’s ‘temporary marriage’ to an eighteen-year-old girl in Nagasaki, which he arranged by paying her family so that he could live with her for the duration of his stay. As he samples the sights of Nagasaki accompanied by his paid companion, Loti repeatedly describes the girl and her friends as ‘little Nipponese dolls’ and ‘little dancing dogs’. The country is full of smiling ‘little men and little women’ who look ‘like little monkeys, like little china ornaments’. In fact the word petit appears 357 times in this short work. Such condescending racism was not unusual at the time, and Madame Chrysanthème became a runaway success. Just five years after its publication, twenty-five editions of Loti’s memoir had appeared in several languages.[19]

The popularity of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, along with Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, sparked a boom in Japan-themed theatrical productions in the early twentieth century. The Japanese characters were almost always played by white actors in ‘Asian’ make-up. The actress Blanche Bates relied on her Japanese maid, Suki, for instruction on how to walk, sit and fan herself like a Japanese woman – behaviours that the actor referred to as ‘Geisha coquetry’.[20] Stereotypes of Japanese women were varied and included stoicism and subservience, but also qualities such as simplicity, sweetness and ‘innocent sexuality’.[21] As we’ll see later, the idea of innocent flirtation in particular took on a wide appeal and became the epitome of girlish cuteness for everything from dolls to child actors like Shirley Temple.

Journalists of the period noted that young American women enjoyed seeing such roles performed onstage even though they saw themselves differently, as intelligent, self-assertive and resourceful.[22] White women found it liberating to explore different forms of femininity by embodying the popular fantasy of the Japanese woman, and dressing up in Japanese kimonos and putting on make-up to look ‘Japanese’ became a nationwide fad.[23] University and amateur theatrical performances with a Japanese theme were popular, as was dressing up in the style for costume parties and photo sessions.[24]

Blanche Bates said that she played her Japanese roles as ‘the tiny figure of an immature child-woman’.[25] This stereotype of Japanese people as small and adorable was widespread. The Japanese American writer Kathleen Tamagawa wrote in 1893 about her irritation at being characterised as a ‘cute little Japanese’ or a ‘Japanese doll’.[26] She recalled that people who thought of her as cute would introduce her as the ‘little Japanese lady’ despite being considerably shorter than she was. ‘I felt that out of sheer politeness I should shrink,’ she wrote.[27]

The connections between cuteness and attitudes towards Asian people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are far from positive. Erica Kanesaka, another Cute Studies scholar, is Japanese American herself and knows, from personal experience, how cuteness can become a stereotype. She points out that in the early twentieth century the popularity of Japanese imports, from dolls to kimonos, enabled Americans to bring the exotic Oriental other into the domestic sphere on their own terms. However, when real Japanese children and women were called cute at that time, it was in the context of a new racist ideology that was sweeping the US: the ‘yellow peril’.[28]

At first, only adult men came from Asia to work in the US. When women began to arrive, the press began to fan fears that ‘unassimilated’ Asian immigrants would overcome the rule of white supremacy. Erica discovered a 1920 photograph from the San Francisco Examiner that neatly encapsulates this paranoia. It shows two Congressmen with a small Asian child, and the caption reads: ‘Cute, but Yellow’. Below, the child is identified as ‘one of the chief causes for California’s fear of the Oriental flood’.[29]

Erica’s research helped me to see that believers of the ‘yellow peril’ ideology recognised that the cuteness of Japanese children and women creates empathy. However, because white Americans refused to allow Asian immigrants to become part of American society, they treated this cuteness with suspicion. Seen in the light of this racism, it is ironic that Japan was widely regarded as a paradise for children. It was first called this in 1863 in a memoir by Sir Rutherford Alcock, the first British minister in Japan. Later travellers to the country followed suit, and the sentiment soon became an accepted fact. Tourists saw that the Japanese didn’t physically punish misbehaving children in public, a common sight at home. They saw Japanese girls taking care of their younger siblings by carrying them around on their backs, an adorable image that became a popular subject in souvenir postcards.[30]

The idea that Japan was a paradise for children morphed into the idea that all Japanese people – including adults – were childlike. Japan was considered to be full of innocent, happy people who lived aesthetically pleasing lives close to nature. The Western world was besotted by this image of an ‘Eastern Eden’;[31] it’s no accident that this image formed at a time when Western countries were reconsidering the importance of childhood and wished to return to a more innocent time.

Japan has long been stereotyped as a land full of cute things and cute people, but the reality is that the twentieth-century rise of kawaii was due to factors similar to those that caused the ascent of the American cute aesthetic. For example, industrialising economies require more educated workers, and the introduction of universal education allowed a new youth culture to emerge in both the US and Japan. In Japan, the advent of girls’ education greatly influenced the spread of kawaii.

The birth of the romantic schoolgirl

In 1899 Japan’s government implemented universal secondary education for girls, causing literacy rates to skyrocket.[32] In 1895 only 1.5 per cent of girls attended secondary school; by 1940 this had risen to 22 per cent.[33]

Japan was rapidly industrialising during this period. However, the cultural impact of making education accessible to girls was more than the government had bargained for. For most girls in pre-war Japan life was hard. Having left school, they would generally marry and move in with their husband’s family, where they were often treated as servants and judged by their ability to bear children.

The compulsory education system gave girls some breathing space between childhood and marriage, especially if they went to live in a dormitory near their school.[34] A unique culture of girlhood developed due to this period between childhood and adulthood, further helped by the fact that Japan’s new education system taught boys and girls separately.[35]

The culture that coalesced around newly literate schoolgirls who had the leisure time to dream of a better future was the ground upon which modern kawaii was built. New genres of girls’ novels and illustrated magazines circulated nationwide and helped to create this new culture.

Few of these stories or magazine images depicted life at small rural schoolhouses. Instead they focused on schoolgirls who attended the private academies that were only affordable to upper- and middle-class families.[36] A new word for girl, shōjo, implied the refined manners of the upper classes.[37] Girls from other social classes dreamed of the sophisticated life offered by these exclusive girls’ academies, where students were surrounded by walls that separated them from life outside and where parental funding allowed a life of leisure.[38] And one author in particular offered visions of this life by publishing stories in the magazines that she had loved as a girl.

The writer Nobuko Yoshiya was born in 1896 into a former samurai family that clung tightly to tradition. Growing up in the countryside, she didn’t have access to the wider world in the form of films or theatre. ‘Perhaps it was because I did not have the opportunity to seek such pleasures,’ she writes, ‘that one monthly issue of a cheap girls’ magazine inspired the passion of this girl and gave her such immense pleasure.’

Yoshiya treasured the illustrations in girls’ magazines that bore ‘charming titles like A Doll’s Banquet and were graced with flower images appropriate for each month’.[39]

When Yoshiya graduated from high school she moved to Tokyo, against the wishes of her family, and began to write stories for the magazines that had inspired her passion. She was among the first Japanese writers of fiction for girls and is credited with creating the genre of girls’ fiction.[40] ‘There is not a single woman alive who doesn’t know who Yoshiya Nobuko is,’ declared a 1935 profile of the writer.[41]

Yoshiya’s series Flower Tales comprises fifty-two stories that revolve around passionate friendships between two schoolgirls. Known as ‘S relationships’ (or S-kankei), with the ‘S’ standing for the English word ‘sister’, this became a popular genre.[42] By removing men from her stories, Yoshiya intensified the focus on a self-created girls’ world with its own aesthetic values, a world of romance without housework or motherhood.

Yoshiya’s lyrical writing style reflected an ideal girls’ world back to her young readers. Her prose was dreamy and wistful, with sensual imagery that expressed colours, fragrances and sounds. Her style has been called hirahira in Japanese, an onomatopoeic word that expresses a fluttering movement, rather like the flight of butterflies or falling cherry blossoms.[43] Working with equally well-known illustrators brought her flowery tales of same-sex boarding-school romances to life; she provided the setting and plot, and they brought a visual dimension that further developed kawaii culture.

Magazines for girls like the one that had inspired Yoshiya proliferated in the early twentieth century. They included columns that published comments, personal experiences, drawings and poetry by the girls themselves, giving them a source of creative expression and active participation in a nationwide network.[44] In this way, magazines helped to form a new, shared identity for girls of all classes.[45]

Working under the inspiration of lively and continuous reader feedback, artists, illustrators, designers and writers both catered to and created the kawaii world of the schoolgirl.[46] They drew girls with dreamy expressions suited to the stories of writers such as Yoshiya and dressed them in cutting-edge fashion. Three illustrators in particular became key figures in this kawaii revolution: Yumeji Takehisa, Junichi Nakahara and Rune Naito.

Yumeji Takehisa

The elegant girls in the illustrations of Yumeji Takehisa (1884–1934) stare into the distance as if they are daydreaming, a standard shōjo image from the 1910s. Talented but untrained, Yumeji created a signature look that used Western elements such as long eyelashes and eye make-up to emphasise the emotive character of his subjects.[47] His depictions of female faces – in particular the large eyes and prominent nose – were direct opposites of the traditional way women had been depicted in art since the Heian era of The Pillow Book.[48] The Yumeji look caught on, and increasing numbers of women imitating his look appeared on the streets in the early 1900s.[49]

Describing the young women who began to imitate the Yumeji style by appearing in public with the long lashes, eye make-up and trendy hairstyles that featured in his work, the writer Sasei Murō was struck by their look: ‘The eyes of young women were opened widely, their faces made ready for a new stage. They began to dream. With eyes shining like fireflies, these young girls ushered in a new song of revolution in the history of Japanese girls.’[50] For Murō, these girls represented a transition from the old notion of passive femininity to the modern woman who was poised to shake up Japan’s rigid gender hierarchy.

Yumeji referred to his designs as kawaii, which helped to popularise the word.[51] In 1914 he opened a shop in Tokyo that sold his own line of products, including writing paper, fans, scarves, decorated umbrellas and dolls. His whimsical designs were popular with young girls; they mixed familiar Japanese motifs with contemporary European elements, from playing cards to musical notes. The shop’s logo was a ship riding the waves with birds flying overhead, suggesting exotic foreign imports.[52] The word kawaii appeared alongside this logo on flyers promoting the shop.[53]

By advertising goods from his shop in the magazines that featured his illustrations, this enterprising artist offered girls the opportunity to buy into the Yumeji look.[54] Yumeji was one of the first artists to create his own brand, which enabled girls to bring his kawaii style into their lives by purchasing products for daily use rather than merely looking at his illustrations in magazines.[55]

Junichi Nakahara

A few decades later Junichi Nakahara (1913–1983) also became very popular for his illustrations, which appeared alongside the stories of writers like Nobuko Yoshiya in girls’ magazines. Like Yumeji, his work combined traditional Japanese and Western elements, but he enlarged the eyes of his girls even further, placing shining lights in them to add a sense of depth, along with thick eyelids and eyebrows that made them appear even more expressive.[56]

Like Yumeji, Nakahara didn’t just reflect trends in shōjo culture – he created them. His talents included fashion design, and his illustrations of shōjo looked like shop mannequins modelling the latest styles.[57] Nakahara had made French-style dolls as a teenager, and the eyes of his shōjo illustrations look like shining glass dolls’ eyes.[58]

Fig. 4.6: In Junichi Nakahara’s 1941 cover illustration for the magazine The Shōjo’s Friend, a young girl with a dreamy expression wears a traditional yukata along with a Western hairstyle and bow.

Although Nakahara fell out of fashion for a time, a postwar revival of his style made him an influential figure in the later development of the kawaii aesthetic. There is still a shop dedicated to his designs in Tokyo’s upmarket Hiro-o neighbourhood. When I visited the shop, I looked on as an elderly customer made a purchase that totalled hundreds of dollars. A saleswoman told me that most of their customers are women in their eighties and nineties who have been Nakahara fans since girlhood. As she spoke, a few women in their twenties wandered into the shop, exclaiming, ‘What’s all this? It’s cute!’ They had never heard of Nakahara, but were attracted by the kawaii designs in the shop window.

Nakahara’s appeal spans the generations. His illustrations influenced Japan’s major post-war fashion designers – and they were also key in the development of girls’ manga, which eventually set the new standard for kawaii culture.[59]

Rune Naito

The Second World War reduced Japan to rubble and left its population more interested in finding their next meal than in cute things. But as the country’s economic recovery began, kawaii also made a resurgence. In 1948 Junichi Nakahara founded Sunflower (Himawari), one of the first post-war magazines for young girls. It captured the attention of Rune Naito (1932–2007), a talented sixteen-year-old schoolboy who dreamed of becoming an illustrator. He began to send unsolicited drawings to Nakahara, who hired him three years later. Naito’s designs would subsequently become a major influence on kawaii culture over the next several decades. He often referred to them as kawaii, which helped to expand the use of the word – just as had happened with Yumeji Takehisa.[60]

Fig. 4.7: Rune Naito’s 1971 character Rune Panda.

Naito’s signature style included large eyes, small foreshortened faces, thick outlines and vivid colours. He simplified his designs by reducing detail, a long-standing traditional Japanese aesthetic dating back to the Scroll of Frolicking Animals, to concentrate the kawaii effect. He also drew figures with heads much larger than their bodies, a style that now appears in everything from Pokémon to manga characters. Unlike the sentimental girls of Yumeji and Nakahara, Naito’s aesthetic was energetic and charming, and most of his motifs were Western.[61]

Like Yumeji before him, Naito was a pioneer of the ‘fancy goods’ business, which involved decorating typically drab items, from stationery to ceramics, with cute designs.[62] He created more than 10,000 designs during his career, the most famous of which is ‘Rune Panda’, a design he came up with in 1971 following a visit to London Zoo. In a stroke of luck for Naito, a Tokyo zoo received its first panda the following year. A panda craze swept Japan, and Rune Panda became a nationwide hit. A few years later a company called Sanrio introduced their own ‘fancy goods’ character, which they called Hello Kitty.

Part of Rune Panda’s cuteness stems from its youthful features. Earlier we looked at Lorenz’s child schema, which proposed that a common set of traits was linked to a baby-like appearance in both young humans and animals. The persistence of juvenile traits into adulthood is called neoteny, and it’s a biological phenomenon that is found in both domesticated animals and in our own species. We could say that neoteny is the biological term for cuteness.

The cultural history of cuteness is bound up with neoteny in interesting ways; measuring a neotenous appearance reveals surprising trends among some of the most popular cultural cute icons, including teddy bears and Mickey Mouse. It also has implications for the importance of cuteness in our own evolution as a species.

Notes

1   Museum of Fuchu City, Very Cute Pictures of Old Edo, ‘Kawaii’ (Tokyo: KyuryuDo, 2013).

2   The technology for 3D ‘Holland glasses’ had entered Japan through the single Dutch trading port in Nagasaki that was allowed to import European technology, books and artworks into the closed country. Timon Screech, The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), p. 99.

3   ‘Maruyama Okyo melded styles to pioneer a new path in art’, Japan Times, 15 November 2016, www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/11/15/arts/maruyama-okyo-melded-styles-pioneer-new-path-art/.

4   Seiroku Noma, The Arts of Japan: Late Medieval to Modern (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978), p. 150.

5   Ibid.

6   Museum of Fuchu City, Very Cute Pictures of Old Edo, ‘Kawaii’.

7   Iwao Takamatsu, ‘Manga/Animation and Lifeworld Culture of Ordinary People in Edo’, Seminars on Academic Research of Manga and Anime Part 8 (13 December 2005), nippon.zaidan.info/seikabutsu/2006/00258/contents/0021.htm.

8   Nobuhisa Kaneko, trans. Pamela Miki, Ukiyo-e Paper Book: Cats by Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Daifukushorin, 2015).

9   Martin LaFlamme, ‘Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the undisputed master of warrior prints’, review of Rossella Menegazzo, ed., ‘Kuniyoshi: Visionary of the Floating World’, Japan Times (12 January 2019), www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2019/01/12/books/utagawa-kuniyoshi-undisputed-master-warrior-prints/ (accessed 6 September 2022).

10   Susan J. Napier, From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 21–44.

11   Ibid.

12   Ernest Chesneau quoted in Napier, From Impressionism to Anime, p. 29.

13   Lafcadio Hearn quoted ibid., pp. 60–61.

14   Ibid., p. 31.

15   Ibid., p. 27.

16   Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 39. See also Tara Rodman, ‘A Modernist Audience: The Kawakami Troupe, Matsuki Bunkio, and Boston Japonisme’, Theatre Journal 65, 4 (December 2013), p. 496.

17   Rodman, ‘A Modernist Audience’, p. 496.

18   Yoshihara, Embracing the East, p. 39.

19   Jan Van Rij, Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2001), p. 29.

20   Yoshihara, Embracing the East, p. 82.

21   Ibid., pp. 5, 91–2.

22   Ibid., pp. 92–3.

23   Ibid., p. 78.

24   Ibid., pp. 97–8.

25   Ibid., p. 86.

26   Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, ‘Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything: Asian Exclusion and the 1927 US–Japan Doll Exchange’, Journal of Asian American Studies 23, 1 (January 2020), p. 97.

27   Kathleen Tamagawa, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear: A Japanese American Memoir (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p. 90.

28   Kalnay, ‘Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything’, pp. 97–101.

29   Ibid., pp. 99–100.

30   Harald Salomon, ‘“A Paradise for Children”: Western Perception of Children in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Johns Hopkins University Press, 11 [3], (Fall 2018), pp. 341–62.

31   Ibid., p. 344.

32   Barbara Sato, ‘Gender, Consumerism and Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan’, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media, ed. Fabienne Darling-Wolf (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 41.

33   Kenko Kawasaki, ‘Osaki Midori and the role of the girl in Shōwa Modernism’, trans. Lucy Fraser and Tomoko Aoyama, Asian Studies Review 32 (2008), p. 294.

34   Sarah Frederick, ‘Girls’ Magazines and the Creation of Shōjo Identities’, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media, ed. Darling-Wolf, p. 26.

35   Kanako Shiokawa, ‘Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics’, Themes and Issues in Asian Cartoning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A. Lent (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), p. 99.

36   Mizuki Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2013), p. 116.

37   Ibid., p. 115. See also Deborah Shamoon, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012), p. 2.

38   Kawasaki, ‘Osaki Midori and the role of the girl in Shōwa Modernism’, p. 297.

39   Frederick, ‘Girls’ Magazines and the Creation of Shōjo Identities’, p. 22.

40   Shamoon, Passionate Friendship, p. 70.

41   Sabrina Imbler, ‘The Beloved Japanese Novelist Who Became a Queer Manga Icon’, Atlas Obscura (4 April 2019), www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yoshiya-nobuko-queer-manga.

42   Shamoon, Passionate Friendship, pp. 11, 35.

43   Masako Honda, ‘Hirahira no keifu (The Genealogy of Hirahira)’, Ibunka to shite no kodomo (The Child as Another Culture), (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1992), pp. 148–85.

44   Shamoon, Passionate Friendship, p. 70. Meetings of magazine readers were held in major cities that included speeches, theatrical productions and motion-picture shows. In addition, readers’ columns in girls’ magazines took up more space and were much more vibrant than the ones in magazines for boys. Frederick, ‘Girls’ Magazines and the Creation of Shōjo Identities’, p. 30.

45   Sato, ‘Gender, Consumerism and Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan’, p. 39.

46   Kawasaki, ‘Osaki Midori and the role of the girl in Shōwa Modernism’, p. 294.

47   Nozomi Masuda, ‘Shōjo Manga and its Acceptance: What is the Power of Shōjo Manga?’, in Masami Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture (London: Routledge Press, 2018), p. 24.

48   Ibid.

49   Nozomi Naoi, ‘Beauties and Beyond: Situating Takehisa Yumeji and the Yumeji-shiki’, Andon 98 (December 2014), p. 32.

50   Yumeji Takehisa’s fame lives on today. There are six museums in Japan dedicated to his works. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

51   K. Nakamura, interview in M. Ozaki and G. Johnson, eds, Kawaii! Japan’s Culture of Cute (Munich: Prestel, 2013), pp. 10–13.

52   Naoi, ‘Beauties and Beyond’, p. 34.

53   Masanobu Hosono, Takehisa Yumeji (Yumeji Takehisa), (Tokyo: Hoikusha, 1972), p. 123.

54   Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, p. 117.

55   Naoi, ‘Beauties and Beyond’, p. 35.

56   Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, p. 120.

57   Ibid., pp. 119, 125.

58   Masuda, ‘Shōjo Manga and its Acceptance’, p. 24.

59   Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, p. 119.

60   K. Nakamura, interview in Ozaki and Johnson, eds, Kawaii! Japan’s Culture of Cute, p. 14.

61   Ibid.

62   Naito collaborated to produce kawaii designs with his long-term partner Ryu Fujita. In the 1970s both produced illustrations for Barazoku, Japan’s first mass-market magazine for gay men. Naito represents a connection between gay men and the kawaii aesthetic that often goes unmentioned.

OceanofPDF.com

5

GROWTH IN REVERSE: NEOTENY AND THE NEURAL CREST

The Izu Peninsula, a few hours from Tokyo, has a dramatic rocky coastline, hot springs, fresh fish for sushi – and a teddy-bear museum. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d just finished writing about teddy bears and was eager to check a strange fact that I’d read about them – it seems that these stuffed animals have, over the decades, become younger in their appearance. Having started as adults, they steadily aged in reverse to become cubs. There is hard evidence to support this theory. When zoologists Robert A. Hinde and L. A. Barden closely examined the teddy bears in an exhibition at the Cambridge & County Folk Museum (now the Museum of Cambridge) in the UK, they found that later bears had the large foreheads and short snouts that are characteristics of Lorenz’s child schema. Earlier bears, on the other hand, had the low foreheads and long snouts that were characteristic of adults.[1]

Teddy Girl

Before the invention of the teddy, bears had been used in jack-in-the-boxes to give children a scare; early teddies were often fitted with soundboxes that produced growls.[2] The earliest specimen that Hinde and Barden measured, a bear from 1903, even sported a muzzle.[3] Reading all this, I’d started to see these early bears as reflecting the image that people once had of children. As we saw earlier, the societal idea of the child had evolved from that of an unsocialised primitive whose misdeeds deserved punishment into an adorable imp whose mischief was indulged. I expected to find some of that wildness reflected in the first teddy bears, but then I went to the Izu Teddy Bear Museum and came face-to-face with Teddy Girl, an early bear that the museum purchased at auction in 1994.

Made in 1904 by Steiff, Teddy Girl had been the lifelong companion of Colonel Bob Henderson, who took the bear with him wherever he went – including Normandy for the D-Day landings in 1944. The origin of the teddy bear is usually credited to a newspaper report about Teddy Roosevelt sparing a bear cub during a hunt in 1902, which inspired two Brooklyn entrepreneurs to begin making and selling teddies the following year. However, the Steiff factory claims that the mohair-plush bear with movable joints that it designed in 1902 is the world’s first stuffed bear.[4]

Whether they were American or German in origin, all stuffed bears were soon known as teddies. And they all had similar proportions, including long snouts and low foreheads. Hinde and Barden’s graphs and charts had convinced me that the earliest bears looked more animalistic and wilder than later ones. Teddy Girl does indeed have a narrow snout, low forehead, long arms and large feet. But her cinnamon-coloured fur is still fluffy after 120 years, and her large ears frame a face full of personality. The museum has a photo of her sitting next to an elderly Colonel Henderson and it’s easy to see why he kept this adorable bear next to him his whole life – she’s undeniably cute.

Teddy bears tend not to be gendered in the way that dolls often are. Teddy Girl, for example, had been called Teddy Boy until Colonel Henderson’s daughter put a frilly dress on the bear one night, causing her to be rechristened. Soft, plush bears were an innovation in the early twentieth century – toy animals had previously been made of wood or felt. Because bears had none of the feminine associations of dolls, teddies became a popular gift for boys. Photos of small boys clutching teddy bears were a new way of appreciating the cuteness of both boy and bear, and quickly became a fad.[5]

I could describe for pages the exhibits that fill the rest of the museum. The Teddy Bear Express is a life-sized train car with bears as passengers and attendants; near it is a miniature carnival, complete with small bears riding the carousel. The Teddy Bear Factory is a large mechanical diorama in which bears manufacture other bears, from sewing to shipping. The exhibit on the second floor is even more unique. Installed in a long hallway is a Shinto shrine populated entirely by teddy bears: they sweep the grounds and attend the gates, dressed in traditional robes, while stone bears stand in for Jizo guardian statues instead of the usual foxes. The shrine contains a small teddy as the object of worship, and the hallway ends with a series of food stalls with bears making candy floss and the like. The whole thing was very well designed, if slightly mad. Cries of ‘Kawaii!’ came from everyone who wasn’t a bear.

As I explored the museum and saw bears from later decades, it was clear that the zoologists were right: teddy bears did become increasingly juvenile in appearance. Since they were cute from the moment they appeared (adult features notwithstanding), I wasn’t sure why they became more cub-like over time – but it turned out that Mickey Mouse held the answer to that question.[6]

Tricky Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse is an American icon, instantly recognised in every corner of the world. Gentle and innocent, he appeals to people regardless of their class and nationality.[7] Yet when he made his screen debut in Steamboat Willie (1928), he was naughty and manipulative – a trickster. He blows a raspberry at the steamboat captain, throws a bucket of water over a parrot that laughs at him, and hauls Minnie on board by a hook through her underwear. When a goat eats Minnie’s ukulele, the two crank the goat’s tail to play it, inspiring Mickey to use the other animals for the same purpose. He pulls a cat’s tail to make her wails match the rhythm, before swinging her around and tossing her aside; squeezes a duck to make it honk in time; pulls piglets’ tails to add their oinks to the song; and pounds a cow’s teeth and tongue with a hammer like a xylophone. The boat’s captain sentences Mickey to peel potatoes as punishment, and the short film ends with the mouse laughing hysterically after he throws a potato at the parrot and knocks it into the river.

Although he was enthralling to children, parents were less enthusiastic about the impudence and violence shown by the early Mickey. By the early 1930s they were writing to Disney complaining that Mickey set a bad example for their children. They wanted to see a friendlier character, and the studio responded by turning its iconic mouse into the inoffensive ‘all-American boy’ he is today.[8]

Fig. 5.1: The features of ‘Teddy Girl’, a bear from 1904, are more adult compared to later bears.

Mickey’s behaviour is not the only thing that changed about him over the years. When the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould watched Steamboat Willie fifty years after the cartoon’s debut, he was struck by the fact that the mouse’s appearance had also undergone significant change. As Mickey’s behaviour matured, so his appearance grew more juvenile, a counter-intuitive process that Gould dubs ‘growth in reverse’.[9]

In an article titled ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’ Gould describes how he made quantitative measurements of Mickey’s increasing juvenility. He found that over the course of five decades the mouse’s head and eyes had grown larger while his legs and feet became short and stocky. His cranium bulged while his snout shrank. Mickey’s changes replicate the biological process of neoteny, in which juvenile features are retained into adulthood. In other words, Mickey grew to resemble Konrad Lorenz’s child schema, which lists these same characteristics. Removing the trickiness from Mickey’s character was the first step in a set of iterations that saw Disney’s animators progressively redesign their famous mouse until he became sweet and inoffensive.[10]

Gould’s article on the juvenilisation of Mickey Mouse inspired Hinde and Barden to measure teddy bears to test his theory on ‘parallel evolution in an unrelated species’, as they wryly put it. So what had triggered this march towards neotenous, juvenile features in both Mickey Mouse and teddy bears?

A neotenous appearance includes a large, round head and eyes, together with a short, plump body. It signals childlike qualities that are characteristic of an animal’s socialisation period, such as curiosity, openness and approachability – traits that, as we shall see, became strongly associated with children in early-twentieth-century American culture. In the same period, newspapers began running comics that featured characters with large heads and eyes and short bodies. This set of juvenile features and behaviours became part of the formula that artists and designers gradually developed as the fad for cuteness gained momentum.

The evolution of Mickey Mouse, teddy bears and comic strips reveals a cultural shift away from mischievous cuteness and towards sweet, youthful cuteness. There is no evidence that this transition in cuteness was planned. Rather, teddy-bear designers, Disney animators and newspaper editors all seem to have unconsciously followed the child schema because the public preferred it.

Gould says that our ability to abstract the qualities that make children cute in order to transfer them to animals and cartoon characters is a ‘biological illusion’: an inappropriate response to triggers that should fire only towards young members of our own species.[11] Konrad Lorenz believed this as well. His child schema was intended to show that cuteness is too profligate, allowing us to regard anything with the features of young children as cute.

I think there’s more to cuteness than this. I believe that our ability to wrap children, animals and characters in the warm glow of cute feelings, far from being a flaw, is a feature of the human operating system. However, although Gould’s conception of cuteness may be too narrow, his focus on neoteny will help me make the case that cuteness was important in human evolution.

Although Gould’s essay is called ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, he doesn’t see any connection between cute cultural products like Mickey and evolutionary biology. Rather, his thesis is that the increasingly juvenile mouse matches a similar evolutionary transformation of the human species. In other words, we also grew cuter over time.

Adult humans resemble baby apes more than they do adult apes. We change as we mature, of course, but these changes are less extensive than those that apes or the wild ancestors of domesticated species undergo. Along with this neotenous retention of juvenile traits in human adults, Gould is fascinated by the human behaviours that persist into adulthood, due to our long maturation period.

Behavioural neoteny

Humans are the most neotenous of all mammals. In addition, we’re a learning animal; children take much longer to develop than other species because we are evolutionarily programmed to learn rather than to act by instinct. A delay in our development enabled a larger, more complex brain. It also meant that, in order to survive, humans needed extended care and instruction by adults.[12] In fact, the extended care that we provide for children has many benefits. A longer period of learning allows us to acquire new skills and explore the world around us. It helps shape our cognitive processes, whether social, linguistic or emotional.[13] And this cognitive development doesn’t just happen when we are children; it persists throughout our lives.

Like many mammals, we are cutest when we are young and possess the juvenile traits of Lorenz’s child schema. Although it fades thereafter, even human adults look more neotenous than adults of other mammalian species. Although this has long been known, until recently there was no convincing theory to explain why our neotenous appearance is important. Neotenous behaviour, on the other hand, has long been characterised as vital to our evolution.

As I mentioned earlier, Konrad Lorenz thought our ability to see cuteness in everything from small animals to dolls evolved as a specific mechanism to encourage us to nurture our children. However, he was a big supporter of behavioural neoteny, believing the maintenance of our exploratory, creative capabilities into adulthood to be a key component of our evolution. Citing the aphorism that an old dog can’t learn new tricks, Lorenz points out that individuals of every species noted for its curiosity lose this quality as they age – except for humans, whom he calls ‘specialists in non-specialisation’.[14] Gould takes this idea in a very interesting direction.

The link between our neotenous appearance and our comparative slowness to mature behaviourally was never clear. Scientists tended to consider the latter to be more important. But Gould argues that neoteny is such a clear characteristic of human evolution that we should consider both aspects of it as vital to our overall development.[15]

He was writing in the depths of the Cold War, before the astonishing results of the experiment showing how Siberian foxes could be tamed had been widely disseminated. Although he knew that all domesticated animals are more neotenous than their wild forebears, the fox experiment allows us to see this process at work. When the tame Siberian foxes grow up, they retain juvenile features and behaviour. It seems that selection for a single trait – friendliness – is the precondition for a cascade of changes that are both neotenous and cute.

We’ll look at how this happens later on. For now, let’s examine the connection between neotenous looks and behaviour – between cuteness and friendliness – through a cultural lens, by returning to Japan to look at the most famous manga artist of them all: Osamu Tezuka.

The ‘God of Manga’

Walt Disney was the premier purveyor of cuteness in twentieth-century American culture. He is said to have pinned a note above the desk of each of his animators with the reminder: ‘Keep it cute!’[16] However, Japan’s equivalent managed to push cuteness even beyond the level found in Disney films. His name is Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) and he is also known as the ‘God of Manga’.

As we have seen, some people trace the origins of manga all the way back to the twelfth-century Scroll of Frolicking Animals. In the Edo period the word ‘manga’ referred to a collection of unrelated sketches in an artist’s notebook. Hokusai (c.1760–1849), the famed print artist, published fifteen volumes of such sketches, with subjects that included catalogues of facial expressions, animals and plants, along with half-human monsters and mythological creatures, many imbued with a satirical sense of humour. Hokusai’s manga greatly influenced artists such as Monet, Degas, Gauguin and Lautrec when they fortuitously made their way to Paris in 1856, perhaps as packing material in a crate of porcelain.[17]

Modern manga was inspired by the American comic strips that a Japanese newspaper reporter brought back from the US in 1919.[18] By the 1930s, scores of characters, comics and cartoons in both the US and Japan were being drawn with a juvenile, cute appearance.

Immersed in this milieu, Tezuka began drawing his own manga in elementary school. Schoolboys would often caricature their classmates and teachers; usually their manga would be confiscated immediately, but Tezuka was a rare exception. By the time he was eleven his stories were eagerly awaited by teachers and fellow students alike. I’ve seen a rare surviving volume of his student work in a Tokyo museum, and the vitality and personality he could infuse into his drawings at such a young age are astonishing.

After the war Tezuka gave up a career in medicine to become a full-time manga artist. Unlike Walt Disney, he created his own stories and didn’t shy away from violence, but he did make his manga cute. Tezuka is the reason that Japanese kawaii is often more neotenous than the American style of cuteness. He progressively enlarged foreheads and eyes, made cheeks bulge and body forms rounder, until his characters were even cuter than those of the Disney films he had been inspired by.[19]

Tezuka’s boy robot, Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) is arguably Japan’s most iconic character – their equivalent of Mickey Mouse.[20] A robot boy with a nuclear reactor as a heart and a computer for a brain, he possesses a sweet, altruistic nature and childlike features. In Tezuka’s story, the boy robot is created to replace a scientist’s son lost in an accident. The scientist, realising that his robot son will never grow up, sells him to a circus, but Astro Boy never wavers in his desire to defend both the human and robot worlds. He leads a robot rebellion that wins mechanical beings their own Bill of Rights, then continues the fight against injustice by building a community of robots and humans who work together.

Astro Boy is a high-tech superhero whose powers are tamed by the innocent cuteness that makes him a boy for ever. Always available to help those in need, he remains a national icon to this day.[21] Like other characters created by Tezuka, he represents a childlike purity that offered Japan a chance to leave behind the imperialist ideology that had led the country into a disastrous war. By making his protagonists cute, Tezuka could express an alternative to the overtly masculine and utilitarian aesthetic that had informed Japan’s fascist imperialism.[22]

It wasn’t the look of his characters alone that enabled Tezuka to do this. In fact, cute characters had previously been used in precisely the opposite manner, in the pursuit of fascist or imperialist goals. Some pre-war Japanese animation, for example, portrayed colonial people as cute animals, happy to help the Japanese construct an airstrip or military base.[23]

Although Astro Boy looks like a kid, the narratives in Tezuka’s manga are far from childish. Childlike features allow characters to personify juvenile characteristics, through which they offer an alternative to the actions of supposedly mature adults in stories concerning the struggle for power and status.

The manga and anime scholar Thomas Lamarre points out that Astro Boy presents a perfect example of Gould’s ‘growth in reverse’; the fact that this robot boy can never grow up allows Tezuka to present childlike virtues as progressive values. Astro Boy’s cuteness offers an alternative to the assumption that the mature, strong and powerful must prevail over the young, weak and harmless – his youthful naivety is as much a source of strength as his robot body is. For this reason, Lamarre argues that we shouldn’t see cuteness as limited to the set of visual attributes depicted in Lorenz’s child schema; we should recognise it as something that involves action rather than mere appearance.[24]

If innocence and naivety were the only strengths associated with cuteness, we’d still be trapped in the Romantic notion that childhood is a lost Eden. However, neoteny also includes juvenile behaviours such as friendliness, curiosity, mental plasticity and flexibility. Expanding the definition of cuteness to include these qualities not only helps explain the popularity of cultural icons like Mickey Mouse and Astro Boy; it also opens another view into our evolution.

The March of Progress is a famous illustration of the supposed stages of human evolution. One the left is an ape, its knuckles on the ground. Various hominids follow, each standing a little straighter and taller. The line culminates in Homo sapiens, striding off into a bright future. This idea of evolution as linear and progressive has been discredited in the scientific community, but it endures in culture at large. On the other hand, neoteny challenges the idea of maturity as a march of progress.

Mickey Mouse, teddy bears, domesticated animals and human beings are all neotenous. Furthermore, as Tezuka’s work on Astro Boy shows, the persistence of juvenile traits into adulthood offers potential benefits. What at first seemed like a mere preference for cuteness now appears to have hidden depths. Next, we’ll explore those depths by focusing on a specific feature of neoteny that provides a window into the soul of the cute.

The whites of our eyes

A key technique in Tezuka’s deployment of neoteny lies in his characters’ large eyes. Big eyes were a feature of the cute characters in the earliest newspaper cartoons as well as in Disney animation, but Tezuka made them even more prominent. Large eyes that encompass more white space on the page are not only cute, but also capture the readers’ attention by showing us what the characters are feeling – and there are sound biological principles behind Tezuka’s technique.

The enigmatic eyes of cats, like the soulful eyes of dogs, are entirely coloured outside the pupil. Humans are the only species with a white sclera, the outer coating that surrounds the eyeball,[25] and our eyes are extraordinarily elongated compared to those of other primates.[26] These differences are extremely useful. First, they make our eyes more visible; there’s three times more white area visible in human eyes when we are looking straight ahead than in the brown sclerae of orangutans.[27] Second, we are drawn to the whites of the eyes from a very young age. Both children and adults prefer stuffed animals with visible white sclerae.[28] Following the gaze of others is important for developing social cognition – experiments have found that great apes follow head movements more than eye movements, while human babies follow eye movements almost exclusively.[29] In addition, seven-month-old infants quickly respond to social cues flashed by the whites of eyes, such as fearful gazes, even before conscious awareness is possible.[30]

After we mature, our eyes signal our presence in a community. When researchers placed eye stickers on an ‘honesty box’ for coffee expenses at an office, they found that people contributed almost 30 per cent more money.[31] According to a theory known as the ‘cooperative eye hypothesis’,[32] white sclerae evolved due to the human need for enhanced levels of social interaction that require mutual attention and cooperation.[33] Other animals don’t have white sclerae because they make them too visible to predators; we must have them because the communicative advantages outweighed the dangers. A fortuitous mutation indeed – but perhaps it was part of something much larger.

A new theory places white sclerae within the framework of the domestication syndrome, the suite of physical and behavioural traits common to domesticated animals.[34] This might sound strange – after all, humans are the only animals that have large white eyes – but domesticated animals, from dogs and cats to horses and cows, often have white blazes on their faces or white socks on their paws. It seems that the biological mechanism responsible for both the whites of our eyes and our pets’ white socks may answer one of Darwin’s questions about domestication: how could these different traits appear if no one was deliberately selecting them? But this new hypothesis goes beyond explaining the similarities among domesticated animals to offer a completely different view of our place in the animal kingdom. It also places cuteness at the heart of being human.

The neural crest

Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work on pea plants showed that one gene can make a yellow plant while another can make one green, but we now know that some genes have many jobs. They can control not only different features of the body but also the timing at which development occurs. It all depends on which part of the body they regulate.[35]

A few weeks after conception, the embryos of all vertebrates develop special cells that appear where the spine will grow. A type of stem cell, these neural-crest cells migrate to various parts of the body to assist in the development of different traits. A slight reduction in their number, a delay in their migration or a reduced ability to proliferate produces different results in the many features they regulate,[36] a striking number of which are associated with the domestication syndrome. For example, when these cells move towards an animal’s head, legs and tail they affect the production of melanin; if they never quite arrive at these extremities, the result is white patches of fur on foreheads, paws and the tip of tails – or white eyes in humans.[37]

Neural-crest cells also affect the development of cartilage in the ears and tail. Fewer cells cause floppy ears and shorter, curly tails. Darwin found that floppy ears, most common in dogs, pigs and the tame Siberian foxes, can appear in every domesticated mammalian species.[38] These cells also affect the development of the jaw and teeth in a similar way: fewer cells in these areas account for the small jaws, short snouts, flat faces and smaller teeth of domesticated animals.[39] These features of domestication are also neotenous. An adult dog looks more like a wolf pup than an adult wolf because wolves lose these characteristics as they mature, while dogs do not. So if domesticated animals are neotenous like humans, and they became so due to changes regulated by the neural crest, then are humans domesticated like dogs and cats?

There is one big problem with this theory. Neural-crest cells also affect brain development; if they arrive more slowly or in fewer numbers, the brain will grow more slowly and end up smaller. Domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild forebears, a trait that has been linked to reduced neural-crest-cell activity.[40] Humans, however, have large brains. The parallel between the neotenous appearance of domesticated animals and human beings surely must end here, but we should also consider the shape of our skulls.

The most unique feature of the human skull is its globular shape, which makes our heads rounded, like balloons. As Brian Hare and Vanessa Williams put it, Neanderthal heads were shaped like footballs. Going back even further, Homo erectus had a loaf-shaped head.[41]

We’re born with brains that are only 25 per cent of their adult size, but they grow rapidly, giving young children the large, round heads that appear in Lorenz’s child schema.[42] Neural-crest cells affect the development of most cranial bones, resulting in our rounded heads.[43] In addition, globular skulls prepare our brains for higher cognitive abilities and language development.[44]

This suggests that the effects of neural-crest cells are not limited to appearance. In fact they have a significant role in the development of the systems that regulate stress, fear and aggression.[45] Delays in neural-crest-cell migration, possibly due to more serotonin in early development, result in smaller adrenal glands and lowered stress responses.[46] Increased serotonin, which makes for a calmer, more friendly personality, was one of the first changes noted in the Siberian foxes. One of the hallmarks of domestication, an increase in serotonin is also the most likely reason for both the brain shrinkage in domesticated animals noted above and for our balloon-shaped heads.[47]

Some of the traits considered unique to humans, such as white eyes and round heads, seem to be part of the suite of traits that make animals tamer, friendlier and cuter than their wild counterparts. The neural-crest hypothesis links a neotenous appearance to these social behaviours. Taken together, they are a roadmap to the way cuteness may have influenced our evolution as well as that of our companion animals.

In early-twentieth-century America the combination of a youthful, neotenous appearance and highly social behaviour suddenly exploded in popularity. From its very beginning, the twentieth century was called ‘the century of the child’. The word ‘cute’ attained its modern meaning just before this boom commenced. Before continuing to discern how cuteness may have influenced our evolution, let’s turn back to its rise in American culture.

Notes

1   Robert A. Hinde and Les A. Barden, ‘The Evolution of the Teddy Bear’, Animal Behavior 33 (1985), pp. 1371–3.

2   Cross, The Cute and the Cool, p. 54.

3   Hinde and Barden, ‘The Evolution of the Teddy Bear’, p. 1371.

4   Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commericialization of American Girlhood 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 93 n.3.

5   Cross, The Cute and the Cool, p. 54.

6   This trend is not limited to American cute. Godzilla, a slumbering prehistoric beast awakened by nuclear radiation from American atomic-bomb tests, has undergone a similar evolution. As Norihiro Katō points out, as the Godzilla series continued, the once-fearsome monster started a family and had an adorable baby named Minilla. Now many of the Godzilla miniatures on sale in Tokyo’s otaku mecca of Akahabara have been cutified to look kawaii (Norihiro Katō, ‘Goodbye Godzilla, Hello Kitty: The Origins and Meaning of Japanese Cuteness’, The American Interest (September/October, 2006), p. 78.

7   Thomas M. Inge, ‘Mickey Mouse’, in Dennis Hall and Susan G. Hall, eds, American Icons (Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), p. 473.

8   Ibid., p. 475.

9   Stephen Jay Gould, ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 104.

10   By 1932 Walt Disney was focused on making his films as cute as possible. Animator Fred Moore, assigned to Three Little Pigs, used the elasticity that animators called ‘stretch and squash’ to morph the porcine characters from one appealing shape to another. There was nothing of the grotesque contortions of Steamboat Willie in the pigs’ plasticity: rather, Moore infused them with cute feeling, personality and charm. Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), p. 95. Later, Moore was responsible for creating the cute look of the dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As Barrier writes, thanks to Moore’s efforts: ‘The dwarfs went through a neotenic evolution, growing younger (despite their white beards and jowls), cuddlier, and more immediately appealing.’ Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 202.

11   Gould, ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, p. 104.

12   Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977) pp. 401–2.

13   Šimić et al., ‘Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication: Keys for Understanding Emotional and Social Communication from an Evolutionary Perspective’, Biomolecules 11, 2 (22 December 2020), p. 13, dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom11010002.

14   Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Vol. 2, pp. 173–9.

15   Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 365.

16   Gary Genosko, ‘Natures and Cultures of Cuteness’, Invisble Culture – An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 9 (2005), n.p.

17   Napier, From Impressionism to Anime, p. 37. See also Ota Memorial Museum of Art, ‘Is it true that Ukiyo-e crossed the sea as wrapping paper for ceramics?’ (浮世絵が陶磁器の包み紙として海を渡ったのは本当？という話) (27 February 2021), otakinen-museum. note.jp/n/n01248684801c (accessed 5 September 2022).

18   Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006) p. 53.

19   Thomas Lamarre, ‘Speciesism, Part III: Neoteny and the Politics of Life’, Mechademia 6 (2011), p. 125. The influence may have well gone both ways. Tezuka’s work Kimba the White Lion was quite similar to Disney’s The Lion King.

20   Allison, Millennial, p. 59.

21   Ibid., pp. 57–60. Astro Boy was also the hero of the first television anime series. It triggered a new trend in children’s culture – namely, cartoons drawn from previously popular comics that engendered profitable lines of toy merchandise – that was copied successfully time and again.

22   Slade, ‘Cute men in contemporary Japan’, pp. 79–80.

23   Lamarre, ‘Speciesism, Part III’, p. 78.

24   Ibid., pp. 125–6.

25   Nancy L. Segal et al., ‘Preferences for Visible White Sclera in Adults, Children and Autism Spectrum Disorder Children: Implications of the Cooperative Eye Hypothesis’, Evolution and Human Behavior 37, 1 (January 2016), pp. 35–9, doi.org/10.1016/j. evolhumbehav.2015.06.006.

26   H. Kobayashi and S. Kohshima, ‘“Unique Morphology of the Human Eye and its Adaptive Meaning”: Comparative Studies on External Morphology of the Primate Eye’, Journal of Human Evolution 40, 5 (May 2001), pp. 419–35, doi:10.1006/jhev.2001.0468.

27   G. Kaplan and L. J. Rogers, ‘Patterns of Gazing in Orangutans’, International Journal of Primatology 23 (2002), pp. 501–26, doi.org/10.1023/A:1014913532057.

28   Segal et al., ‘Preferences for Visible White Sclera in Adults, Children and Autism Spectrum Disorder Children’, pp. 35–9.

29   Michael Tomasello et al., ‘Reliance on Head Versus Eyes in the Gaze Following of Great Apes and Human Infants: the Cooperative Eye Hypothesis’, Journal of Human Evolution 52 (2007), pp. 314–20, doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2006.10.001.

30   Sarah Jessen and Tobias Grossman, ‘Processing Eye Cues in the Infant Brain’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 11, 45 (November 2014), pp. 16208–13, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1411333111.

31   Melissa Bateson et al., ‘Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting’, Biology Letters 2 (2006), pp. 412–14, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2006.0509.

32   Tomasello et al., ‘Reliance on Head Versus Eyes’.

33   Jessen and Grossman, ‘Processing Eye Cues in the Infant Brain’.

34   Brian Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality’, Annual Review of Psychology 68, 1 (2017), pp. 155–86, doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044201.

35   Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity (New York: Random House, 2020), p. 83.

36   Wilkins et al., ‘The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals’, pp. 795–808.

37   Ibid. For sclerae, see Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest’, pp. 155–86.

38   Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. 2 (London: Murray, 1868). Human ears may be too small for the delay in neural-crest cell migration to have any effect. See Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), p. 80.

39   Šimić et al., ‘Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication’, pp. 1–39.

40   Wilkins et al., ‘The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals, p. 795. Whether or not anatomically modern humans have smaller brains than our forebears is still under contention, but the size of our skulls has been shrinking. See Šimić et al., ‘Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication’, and Hare and Woods, Survival of the Friendliest.

41   Hare and Woods, Survival of the Friendliest, pp. 71–2.

42   Hare, ‘Survival of the Friendliest’, p. 174.

43   Šimić et al., ‘Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication’. See also A. Benítez-Burraco et al., ‘Language Impairments in ASD Resulting from a Failed Domestication of the Human Brain’, Frontiers in Neuroscience 10, 373 (29 August 2016), doi:10.3389/fnins.2016.00373.

44   Benítez-Burraco et al., ‘Language Impairments in ASD’.

45   Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox.

46   Wilkins et al., ‘The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals’.

47   Hare and Woods, Survival of the Friendliest, pp. 71–3.

OceanofPDF.com

6

CUTE ATTAINS ITS MODERN MEANING

The line ‘Wasn’t that a cute answer for a six-year-old to make?’ appears in an 1841 short story by T. H. Arthur.[1] As comical domestic anecdotes began to circulate in magazines in the mid-nineteenth century, a few of them began to use the word ‘cute’ to describe the precocious behaviour of children. A letter to the editor of the Knickerbocker referred to children’s ‘cute sayings’ in 1856, and the same phrase appeared in an issue of the Ladies’ Repository in 1857.[2] Readers soon began to submit their own domestic anecdotes. The literary scholar Angela Sorby suggests that this caused a feedback loop in which readers came to expect the ‘small jolts of pleasure’ delivered by childish antics from their own children, once they had encountered it on the page.[3]

Although the cute aesthetic had started to emerge in popular culture by the mid-nineteenth century, the word was still limited to describing cleverness and novelty and had yet to be associated with appearance. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the modern use of ‘cute’ to 1834 and 1857, when the word was first used to refer to things rather than people. Scholars often identify these usages – especially the 1857 example, ‘What cute little socks!’ – as the word’s first modern appearances.[4] They may well be right, but ‘cute’ was commonly used as a synonym for ‘clever’ at that time. The little socks cited by the OED belonged to a doll,[5] and cleverly made things might be described as cute, no matter what they looked like.

This was still an important step, however, as previously ‘cute’ had been applied only to cunning behaviour. In the 1870s this began to change. St. Nicholas magazine, a popular American children’s periodical, provides a telling example. Before 1870 it used the word as a synonym for clever, describing jokes, tricks and schoolmasters as cute. In the 1870s the magazine also began to use it to describe the appearance of diminutive things like birds and, finally, children.

In an 1872 story from a similar publication called Our Young Folks, a five-year-old boy wakes up to find his baby clothes missing. His mother dresses him in a ‘pretty plaid jacket’ with white ruffles, gold-coloured buttons, pantaloons and a little bow for a cravat: ‘How cute he looks!’ she exclaims.[6] While this adult penchant for dressing children in vintage costumes dated back to eighteenth-century child portraiture, it had taken a hundred years to be called cute.[7]

A little later adults’ magazines began to adopt the new usage by treating ‘cute’ as a form of slang. An 1890 Harper’s Weekly article entitled ‘Monarchs of Dogdom’ imagines a trendy young woman, using the word to describe a Chinese pug’s face.[8] The arrival of the word’s modern meaning was no accident. It came at a time when cuteness was increasingly visible in popular culture. In the early twentieth century the aesthetic would flower in a way it never had before.

The century of the child

Eliza Lee Follen’s poem ‘Three Little Kittens’ (who lost their mittens), along with Lydia Sigourney’s ‘Concerning ye Catte’, heralded a proliferation of cute cats that slowly grew during the nineteenth century.[9] Their positive animalistic qualities were later associated with children, as the new tolerance for naughtiness spread.

This process was well under way by the late nineteenth century, as the Victorian air of moral seriousness began to evolve into a new appreciation of childhood. Three centuries since Montaigne had railed against viewing children as performing monkeys, they became valued as a source of diversion – and ways of enjoying this new form of entertainment proliferated.

Another of P. T. Barnum’s brainstorms was to promote the marriage of two little people, General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton) and Lavinia Warren, as a public spectacle. Held in 1863, the wedding captured the imagination of the entire nation, with the newly-weds received by President Lincoln the following day.[10] A New York Times article about the event includes a list of compliments rained down by the admiring crowd, estimated to include 20,000 women. The wedding was called pretty, graceful, beautiful, queenly, charming, dear and lovely. The word ‘cute’ may have been absent, but what happened next shows how popular culture was increasingly attuned to spectacles that would shortly be described by this new word.

Soon towns and cities across America were holding their own versions of Stratton and Warren’s wedding ceremony by ‘marrying’ two children. These ‘Tom Thumb weddings’ endured well into the twentieth century and could be very elaborate. As many as fifty children might be allocated a role in a single event, as adults watched from the sidelines.[11] Published guides for such weddings advised on the use of elaborate costumes and contained scripts filled with satirical vows, such as detailed promises about the household chores that the groom promised to perform.[12] Like baby shows, Tom Thumb weddings carved out a space for adults, and especially women, to enjoy cuteness in public.[13]

From the 1870s stage plays designed to appeal to children became popular with adults.[14] Theatrical reviews of such productions would often proclaim that they were ‘for children of all ages’, to use a phrase for which Barnum became known.[15] Events like the baby shows and child weddings, combined with the boom in child characters appearing onstage, taught adults to see the child as a spectacle, an entertaining nostalgic figure.[16]

Embracing the cuteness of children enabled adults to indulge in what Angela Sorby calls ‘an ethos of novelty, emotional release, and public entertainment’.[17] However, we’ll see later on that the aesthetic of cute didn’t really take off until the idea emerged that children’s naughtiness could be publicly appreciated.[18]

Children were so central to transatlantic mass culture between 1880 and 1920 that writers dubbed the phenomenon the ‘cult of the child’ and proclaimed the twentieth century to be ‘the century of the child’.[19] One possible reason concerned anxieties about class stratification and racial tensions, caused by the rise of consumer capitalism. Because adults presumed that childhood was remote from the corruptions of adulthood, child characters became figures who could defuse these tensions and, at least on the page or onstage, help everyone get along.[20]

The new American cute aesthetic had an anarchic quality that combined sentimentality with playfulness, and the softness that accompanied the shortening of ‘acute’ to ‘cute’ was key to its expression. As the literary scholar Marah Gubar writes, by the late nineteenth century the child had been set up as ‘the epitome of attractiveness, a figure whose power to charm can literally and figuratively stop traffic’.[21] The cute child was seen as capable of bridging social divisions among adults by inhabiting a liminal space between two worlds: between child and adult, of course, but also between male and female, rich and poor and black and white.[22]

In this way, the idea took hold that the overwhelming feeling of cuteness could melt hearts in spite of social conventions. Depending on how it was used, this quality could either challenge or reinforce nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mores in regard to one of the most pressing social issues of the time: racial difference.

The race to cute

P. T. Barnum’s baby shows were widely imitated, but they were also explicitly racist. Barnum declared that the babies would be judged ‘especially on the crowning merit of their being genuine original American stock’, and he did not permit Black, Asian or Native American infants to enter. Although Irish and German babies were allowed, they were also singled out in newspaper articles with disparaging remarks about thick parental accents and poor hygiene.[23]

Not all newspapers supported Barnum. A sharp exchange of letters in the New York Tribune between a reader and Barnum ended with the editorial comment ‘Can there be any truly National Baby Show from which so large a part of the nation is excluded?’ And in fact Barnum’s competitors launched ‘coloured baby shows’, sometimes organised to occur simultaneously with the impresario’s contests. Reflecting the racist attitudes of the times, however, the non-white baby competitions tended to be lauded for their novelty, with contestants accorded fewer accolades.[24]

Still, these ‘coloured’ baby shows gave white audiences a chance to observe real babies rather than stereotypical fictional characters. African Americans were aware of the pitfalls of offering their children up as objects of public entertainment, but many also welcomed the chance to show that their babies belonged to the culture of middle-class domesticity.[25]

This didn’t necessarily mean that cuteness defused racism. After a ‘coloured’ baby show in the late 1890s printed handbills that described the babies as ‘little coons’ and ‘piccaninnies’, a delegation of Black mothers wrote a letter of protest to the Los Angeles Times.[26] When this failed to halt the racist advertising, almost all the mothers withdrew their babies from the show.[27] Although they viewed the contest as an opportunity to showcase African American domesticity, they were also acutely aware of how quickly even the cuteness of their babies could be turned against them.

The ‘piccaninny’ is a stereotypically racist depiction of the Black child (‘pick’ comes from ‘picking cotton’) that first appeared in blackface minstrel shows.[28] A uniquely American form of entertainment that began in the early nineteenth century and persisted into the early twentieth, minstrel performances featured white performers who put on make-up and pretended to be African American, while presenting stereotyped tales along with comic songs and dances. During their century-long run, minstrel groups became so popular that they even crossed the Atlantic and toured Europe.

The white men who performed blackface stole speech patterns, gestures and songs from free and enslaved African Americans, altering them to suit a white audience. This was both racist and reprehensible; minstrel shows were staged under the pretence that slavery was amusing, just and natural.[29]

Minstrel performers employed stereotypes of African Americans in their appearance and their behaviour, with exaggerated wide eyes and mouths; a loose-limbed, shuffling dance style; comic pratfalls and violent accidents; and trickster-like behaviour that both reinforced and undercut social norms about racial relations. They were absorbed into the evolving American cute culture when the stereotyped characters began to include children in the form of the ‘piccaninny’. By the mid-nineteenth century minstrel companies included many child performers, and their shows were advertised as suitable for the whole family. Reviews noted that children were highly entertained by these stage performances that featured adults acting like children, and vice versa.[30]

Cheerful and full of youthful energy, the child performers in blackface played fantastical characters that existed outside the concept of childhood innocence.[31] They would later inspire animated characters like Mickey Mouse – and one character in particular can show us how this happened.

Topsy and her progeny

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate hit when it was published in 1852. The novel neatly bifurcates two notions of childhood in the characters of the innocent Eva, who is white, and the cunning trickster Topsy, who is black. The selfless Eva takes care of all the adults around her, while Topsy showcases comical, adorable mischief – which was especially evident when the novel made the transition to the stage. Later in the nineteenth century these two characteristics became melded together to form the new American cute aesthetic.

Popular as the book was, the stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that soon arrived in theatres around the US, and then Europe, were even more successful. The first version debuted in the year that the novel was published, and P. T. Barnum, ever alert to the latest spectacle, mounted one the following year. Featuring a white child in blackface playing Topsy, these stage versions turned this stereotypical character into a nationwide hit.[32]

Onstage, Topsy became the comic stereotype of an impudent black child, and Stowe’s argument that enslaved children were also innocent was lost. When Topsy’s comic antics are highlighted, any question of her innocence becomes moot.[33]

Topsy became the star of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin stage productions, and child actors playing the role often received top billing. In the proliferation of stage versions, there were sometimes two Topsies onstage simultaneously.[34] Topsy was pure spectacle, more a plaything than a human character:

‘You are too cute – you are cuter than I am; and I’m Cute by name and cute by nature.’

Gumption Cute to Topsy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Act V, Scene II

(George L. Aiken version, first staged 1853)

The playwright George Aiken’s stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin incorporated many elements from minstrelsy, including a new character called Gumption Cute – a white scallywag whose rapid-fire dialogue is drawn from the blackface minstrel-show tradition.[35] The above passage comes after Topsy has got the upper hand in a bout of wordplay. A cunning young girl played in blackface for a white audience, she brought together the clever and the adorable at a time when the word ‘cute’ was still linked to behaviour rather than appearance.

An icon of the distinctive image of minstrelsy,[36] the character of Topsy inspired countless imitations: whole vaudeville acts of ‘picks’ appeared in her wake.[37] Stereotypical ‘piccanniny’ images of Black children adorned countless consumer goods, from salt-and-pepper shakers to restaurant menus; only when the Civil Rights movement gained momentum were they consigned to attics and junk shops.

Through minstrel shows, nineteenth-century mass culture persistently depicted African Americans as comical, inept and childlike.[38] While its popularity flagged at the turn of the twentieth century, blackface minstrelsy directly inspired cute icons including Mickey Mouse, Shirley Temple, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz and Raggedy Ann dolls.[39] In addition, the demise of minstrelsy coincided with the arrival of animation, in which new, cute characters could be stretched, deformed and abused in a way that wasn’t possible on the theatre stage.

Animated minstrels and tricky boys

The designs of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat and other early animated characters were clearly influenced by the minstrel-show tradition.[40] The black heads and bodies, wide white-rimmed mouths, large white round eyes and white gloves that made these characters’ paws resemble human hands were all drawn directly from minstrelsy.[41] This influence extended to the characters’ onscreen antics, too. Animated characters exhibited a kind of feral cleverness that attracted large audiences, especially among children, while giving many parents cause for concern.[42]

Early animated characters were following more than just the minstrel tradition. Slapstick comedy had been around for a long time. In 1900 five-year-old Buster Keaton made his vaudeville debut as ‘The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged’. Part of a family act, he appeared dressed as a miniature version of his father, Joe. The boy plays tricks on the elder Keaton until his patience snaps, causing him to toss the little boy into the wings, the orchestra pit or even the audience. When the boy gets revenge by hitting his father with a broom, Joe responds by using Buster as ‘The Human Mop’ and wiping the stage with him.[43]

The Keaton family were incredibly popular in the US, especially with schoolchildren, who would flock onto the stage after the show, where Buster handed out sweets. Yet when the act toured in London, audiences were astonished to see a child flung across the stage.[44] Alfred Butt, the theatre manager who had booked their show, demanded to know if Buster was the real son of the family. ‘Judging by the way you threw him around,’ he said, ‘I thought he must be adopted and that you didn’t give one damn about him.’[45] While Buster’s father was not amused, the violence of the Keaton family act demonstrated how the developing American cute aesthetic melded two contrasting strands of thinking about the child: pure childhood innocence and the earlier view of children as animalistic creatures that needed to be tamed.

The cute look: New Kids and Kewpie dolls

Gary Cross is one of the first scholars to investigate the rise of cuteness in American culture. Thanks to him, I have come to understand that cuteness only exploded in popular culture when children’s innocence combined with an appreciation of their impish energy. When adults began to accept that children are both naughty and nice, the word ‘cute’ drifted away from describing mere cleverness. As Gary writes, the barely tolerated ‘acute’ child became the popular ‘cute’ child when wilful – and even devious – behaviour in children was redeemed in adult eyes by their goodness of heart.[46]

This change occurred at a time when children’s desires were increasingly seen as natural, and parents were being told to indulge them. Children’s headstrong enthusiasm, even if it led to mischief, was becoming something to be cherished rather than punished; mischievous characters represented a new form of cuteness.[47]

In the late nineteenth century companies that had previously used images of adults in their advertising began switching to children. Broad social changes informed this shift. Infant mortality dropped rapidly from the 1880s. Child-labour rates fell steadily, and school attendance rose. Scandals about food purity, along with a growing awareness of the importance of nutrition, led adults to focus on the health and vitality of children. As consumption grew and women became more influential in the public sphere, companies began to market more child-oriented products and to use more children in advertisements.[48]

Known collectively as the New Kid, these images created a childhood ideal that exuded youthful confidence, initiative, personality, smartness and wit.[49] They had round faces, chubby cheeks and wide eyes, features on Lorenz’s child schema of attributes that stimulate a cuteness response. New Kid images were of white children – red-cheeked and active – such as the Uneeda Biscuit girl and the Campbell Soup kid, or ‘piccaninny’ characters such as the Gold Dust Twins and the Pears Soap children.[50] A well-known advert for the latter product shows a black child whose skin turns white in the bath. The New Kid image reflected a distinctly American representation of happiness – at least for those who were not put off by racist stereotypes.[51]

The New Kid didn’t just appear in advertising. As the nineteenth century ended, the invention of halftone screenprinting improved image resolution in print magazines and advertisements. The publishing industry boomed, and newspapers had to either attract readers or perish. The colour Sunday comic supplement, introduced in 1894 by the New York World, proved popular and was swiftly imitated. Editors and cartoonists dispensed with satirical cartoons and humorous writing when they realised that their customers appreciated the visual aspects of the new comics; they were not readers so much as spectators.[52]

Sunday supplements soon began to employ an editor, who was charged with giving the public what they wanted. Every suggestion was considered, whether it came from the editorial team, the artists or was an idea sent in by a reader. If sales rose, the new comic would run until the public tired of it. On the other hand, as one observer noted in 1905, ‘If they fall flat, they are dropped at once, like a hot potato.’[53]

At this time of fervid experimentation, cartoonists began to cohere around a new visual style. They took cues from the New Kid image, and youthful features began to dominate. But cartoonists and editors were aware of the need to create ‘habit builders’ that would encourage readers to buy every Sunday paper with the latest instalment of their favourite strip.[54] Accordingly, comics increasingly embodied Lorenz’s child schema; cuteness drew the reader in and created an attachment to recurring characters, which in turn drove newspaper sales.[55] The first cute innovation was to give characters big, round eyes.

The Brownies were pot-bellied, long-limbed creatures with large eyes that easily conveyed expressions of surprise and delight. They appeared in a series of illustrations by Palmer Cox that made their debut in St Nicholas in 1879, and dolls, toys and novelty items soon followed. They were often based on ethnic stereotypes, from Chinese and Arab to Irish, but they got along by sharing adventures and doing good deeds.[56] Visually, the Brownies represented a transitional stage in the development of the new cute aesthetic. Their stick-like legs recalled the emaciated figures that populated earlier comics, but they also had large, saucer-like eyes on oversized heads.[57]

Fig. 6.1: A postcard from 1914 shows a Kewpie agitating for women’s suffrage.

The New Kid style reached its apotheosis when Rosie O’Neill created the Kewpies, who became the world’s best-known characters until Mickey Mouse came along. Cupids were undergoing a revival in magazines as a sentimental and romantic motif adorning the edges of illustrations, but O’Neill envisioned something quite different.[58] Though the Kewpies had tiny white wings, they looked more like real toddlers with big eyes, button noses and an impish charm.[59] These characters pushed Konrad Lorenz’s child schema to its limits. In fact Lorenz himself remarked that a little more exaggeration in their design would tip the Kewpies from delightfully cute into eerily grotesque.[60]

The Kewpies first appeared in 1909 in Ladies’ Home Journal. Although they were referred to with male pronouns,[61] in O’Neill’s stories the Kewpies had explicitly feminist values; with ‘a dose of love’, they helped neglected children in urban slums, confronted anti-suffragists, raised civil-rights questions and demanded votes for women.[62] When O’Neill introduced the Kewpies in Good Housekeeping magazine, she wrote: ‘Cupids are always getting people into trouble. Kewpies are always getting them out.’[63]

The Kewpies were popular as cartoon characters, but it was when O’Neill began producing Kewpie dolls from unglazed porcelain that they achieved worldwide fame. Upon their introduction in 1913 it took thirty German factories to keep up with the demand, and five million Kewpie dolls were sold in the first year.[64] The dolls had international appeal. Kewpie Mayonnaise in Japan adopted the character as the face of its brand in 1925 and have kept it to this day.

As characters on the page, the Kewpies were social activists whose identity emerged from their relationship to others.[65] When they became three-dimensional dolls, however, they left politics behind and spread love as a generic antidote to ill feeling. During the First World War the US enforced a blockade against German-made products, but four ships full of Kewpie dolls were allowed to pass through.[66] I’m not sure why they were exempted from the embargo, but the fact that the dolls were an icon of innocent cuteness might have rendered their country of manufacture moot, even in a time of war. In fact during the war Kewpie dolls were dressed in military uniforms and even carried weapons. It was asserted, however, that the dolls didn’t fight each other, but rather fought against the idea of war itself.[67]

Fig. 6.2: Kewpie Mayonnaise jar from 1925.

Despite this, Kewpie dolls were often posed in a stereotypically feminine way, with a bashful sideways gaze.[68] As cuteness became increasingly widespread, it became gendered. Boys were seen as having an unruly wild side that became cute when it was domesticated. When it was associated with girls, however, mischievousness became associated with coquettishness.

By this time, impish behaviour in children was regarded as natural, but for girls it began to be associated with flirtation. When the New Kid image arrived, it sparked a dramatic change in American dolls. Victorian china dolls had been highly stylised, with small lips and eyes. German doll-makers, by contrast, had specialised in more natural looks with ambivalent expressions.[69] But American manufacturers began to make dolls with a sense of humour, more saucy than sweet.[70]

Girl dolls with a coquettish look were given names like Miss Mischief, Naughty Marietta, Miss Coquette and Flossie Flirt. As Gary Cross writes, these dolls ‘appealed to the adult’s admiration for the spunky, even slightly manipulative and self-centred child’. ‘Goo-goo’ eyes that looked askance or rolled from side to side appeared amusing and charming when attached to dolls, because children were seen as being apart from adult sexuality.[71]

By the late nineteenth century North America had largely dispensed with the doctrine of original sin. Children were seen as uncorrupted, and a new conception of childhood sexual purity[72] was especially apparent in the media representation of girls. An early use of the word ‘cute’ applied to adorable children appeared in 1909 when Harper’s Weekly published a story with the sentence ‘I like cute little girls that look up at you and take your hands and cuddle right up to you.’[73] This was the era of the ‘Daddy’s girl’, particularly visible in the films of the most famous child star of all time: Shirley Temple.

Melting hearts through cuteness

Shirley Temple rose to fame at the age of six and was the most popular star in the world between 1935 and 1938, with box-office returns during this period that trumped those of Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.[74] According to Time magazine, she was the most photographed person in the world in 1936.[75] A global role model, Shirley had fan clubs with more than 380 branches around the world with 3.8 million members[76] – and her signature style influenced cuteness worldwide.

From underwear to coats, soap to books, Shirley Temple’s image was plastered onto anything that would sell. In 1935 Shirley Temple dolls accounted for almost one-third of all doll sales in the US. Made by the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company (the same company that had launched the teddy bear), even the smallest of the dolls cost three dollars – not cheap in the midst of the Great Depression. In the 1850s P. T. Barnum’s baby shows had demonstrated that children had entertainment value; in the 1930s Shirley Temple’s popularity not only encouraged parents to recast their daughters in her image, but also influenced the way girls imagined themselves.[77]

Shirley’s famous blonde ringlets helped make her an icon of mainstream white cuteness, but her image was carefully managed by Twentieth Century Fox. Her childlike features included a broad forehead, small nose and chin, plump body and short arms and legs, and the studio consciously accentuated them through costumes and camerawork. The blonde curls that her mother set every night made her head seem larger. Frontal close-ups broadened her forehead and foreshortened her nose. Taller-than-average co-stars accentuated her smallness, and her height was consistently under-reported. Her youth was exaggerated by reducing the number of candles on onscreen birthday cakes.[78]

Shirley’s characters included plenty of New Kid flirtation – in fact they are replete with sexual innuendo. Darryl Zanuck, a Twentieth Century Fox executive, ordered, ‘Keep her skirts high. Have co-stars lift her up whenever possible to create the illusion now selling so well. Preserve babyhood.’[79] The signature shots of the little girl’s underpants seem to have been part of the marketing ploy, alongside her innocence. Indeed her ‘seduction’ of older men seems inappropriate today. In Poor Little Rich Girl, Shirley sings of her desire to marry her father, while cuddling in his lap and caressing him. In Bright Eyes she sings her famous song ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ in a plane surrounded by men who lift her up and pass her from one to another.

A Shirley Temple film would often begin with her as an orphan and end with her finding acceptance within a new family. But Shirley’s characters are not just helpless, feminine Daddy’s girls. She was also a tomboy who displayed pluck and courage to resolve disputes and heal rifts between adults.[80]

As a girl hero, Shirley shows a mischievous side that was usually associated with boys. She brings her pet duck and horse into the orphanage in Curly Top, performs a radio show against her aunt’s orders in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and fires a slingshot at a Yankee officer in The Littlest Rebel. She had her own signature form of cuteness that was both flirtatious and naughty, a blend of innocent charm and impish cunning. Shirley’s onscreen persona deployed looks and actions to bring people together as an active agent of cuteness. She offered a vision of social boundaries made permeable, albeit through the sentimentality of false narratives that papered over real social problems.

Shirley’s prominence in the media was tied to her youth. She not only had to act like a child – she had to be a child. Twentieth Century Fox ordered her mother to hide the true extent of her fame from her daughter, so that her onscreen presence would remain innocent.[81] This concern revealed an anxiety surrounding her career; the little girl would invariably grow up. The media coverage of Shirley’s birthday parties was practically a countdown – every year they speculated on when she would lose her popularity.[82] ‘Hollywood Is Asking: How Long Will Shirley Temple Remain a Star?’ trumpeted the Boston Globe in 1937.[83] At this point, the child actor had recently celebrated her eighth birthday.

When cute culture took off in the twentieth century, it was fuelled by an appreciation of childlike characteristics that appeared in everything from newspaper comics and advertising to movie actors. In the last-named, this appreciation was accompanied by an awareness that these charms would soon fade. Japan had long valued the ephemeral and perishable in its art and literature, while Europe had preferred the lasting and permanent. When American culture pivoted towards the cute, it may have been influenced by the centuries-old values that infused Japanese art and design.

While cuteness might sometimes feel like a modern invention, if its roots are in our biology, then it must always have been with us. A while ago I organised a Cute Studies conference panel and included an image of one of my favourite Japanese sculptures in my presentation. An 800-year-old wooden statue of a puppy, it was a favourite possession of the Buddhist monk Myōe (1173–1232), who also acquired the Scroll of Frolicking Animals. The puppy is sitting, but the curve of its back makes it look as if it’s about to leap up and start playing. To me, this statue captures the essence of puppy playfulness.

My aunt and uncle were watching my presentation over Zoom, 7,000 miles away in Vermont. When the wooden puppy appeared on their computer screen, their dog Dell leapt up and began to bark. When I showed a close-up of the puppy’s face, he barked again. The gulf of eight centuries had collapsed in an instant. It was like time-travel.

Dell often barks when he sees another dog on TV, but this was the first time he’d done it when faced with a dog statue. Yet a bigger miracle is the way he ended up on my aunt’s lap in the first place. How did wolves become dogs? And, more to the point, to what extent did cuteness influence the domestication process?

Notes

1   Angela Sorby, ‘“A Dimple in the Tomb”: Cuteness in Emily Dickinson’, ESQ 63, 2 (2018), p. 42.

2   Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby: Sigourney and the Origins of Cuteness’, pp. 132–3.

3   Ibid., p. 133.

4   Ibid., pp. 132–3; Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 59.

5   David Hunter Strother, Virginia Illustrated: Containing a Visit to the Virginian Canaan, and the Adventures of Porte Crayon and His Cousins (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857), p. 166.

6   Margaret T. Canby, ‘Birdie’s Birthday Party’, Our Young Folks: An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls, ed. J. T. Trowbridge and Lucy Larcom, Vol. VIII (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1872), p. 687.

7   In 1873 a story in Our Young Folks referred to a box of dresses that ‘look so cute!’ See Our Young Folks, Vol. IX (1873).

8   Pug dogs, which were bred 2,000 years ago in China and were brought to the Netherlands and England in the sixteenth century, made it to the US in the nineteenth century. From the 1860s they were being bred for shorter legs and a flatter face: in other words, for cuteness.

9   Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby’, p. 125.

10   Betsy Golden Kellem, ‘At Tom Thumb Weddings, Children get Faux-Married to Each Other’, Atlas Obscura, 7 July 2017, www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tom-thumb-weddings (accessed 3 October 2022).

11   Ibid.

12   Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 120.

13   Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics, p. 194.

14   Gubar, Artful Dodgers, pp. 182–3.

15   Ibid., p. 187; Marah Gubar, ‘Entertaining Children of All Ages: Nineteenth-Century Popular Theater as Children’s Theater’, American Quarterly 66, 1 (March 2014), p. 28.

16   Gubar, Artful Dodgers, p. 186. See also Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics, p. 190.

17   Sorby, ‘Baby to Baby’, p. 123.

18   Ibid., p. 129.

19   Marah Gubar, ‘The Cult of the Child Revisited: Making Fun of Fauntleroy’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 398–413. See also Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics’, p. 196.

20   Gubar, ‘The Cult of the Child Revisited’, p. 399.

21   Ibid., p. 399.

22   Ibid., p. 400.

23   ‘Barnum’s Booby Show’, New York Tribune (6 June 1855), lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/barnums-booby-show-new-york-tribune-june-6 (accessed 5 October 2022).

24   Pearson, ‘“Infantile Specimens”’, p. 350. See also Chad Sirois, ‘19th Century Toddlers and Tiaras’, Worchester Historical Museum, www.worcesterhistory.org/blog/baby-show/ (accessed 5 October 2022).

25   Ibid., p. 358.

26   Pearson, ‘“Infantile specimens”’, p. 358.

27   Ibid.

28   Gubar, ‘Entertaining Children of All Ages’, p. 21.

29   Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xi, 4.

30   Gubar, ‘Entertaining Children of All Ages’, p. 20.

31   Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), p. 35.

32   Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also performed in countless home parlours in the form of dramatic readings, plays or vignettes of illustrations from the book. So many souvenirs and products associated with the book appeared during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – from handkerchiefs and card games, dolls and jam jars to tobacco tins – that they garnered their own name: ‘Tomitudes’. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, p. 9.

33   Ibid., p. 48.

34   Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Racial Kitsch and Black Performance’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, 2 (2002), p. 376.

35   Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), p. 125.

36   The Topsy character moved into visual culture in the form of stereotypical piccanniny and golliwogg images of Black children.

37   Gubar, ‘Entertaining Children of All Ages’, p. 21.

38   Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics’, p. 198.

39   See Bernstein, Racial Innocence, pp. 166, 181; Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 2; and Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics’, pp. 185–203. Children’s culture often contains echoes of long-abandoned adult concerns. Children’s riddles such as ‘Why does the chicken cross the road?’ or ‘Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?’ originated in nineteenth-century minstrel shows created for adults. See Robert C. Toll, On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 95.

40   Sammond, Birth of an Industry, p. 2.

41   Ibid., pp. 1, 3; and Inge, ‘Mickey Mouse’, p. 475.

42   Ibid., p. 71.

43   Gubar, ‘Entertaining Children of All Ages’, pp. 21–2.

44   Ibid., p. 22.

45   Buster Keaton, with Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York: Da Capo, 1960), p. 62.

46   Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 59.

47   Ibid., pp. 40–43.

48   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, p. 90; and Cross, The Cute and the Cool, p. 53.

49   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, pp. 90–91. The teddy bear was arguably the first New Kid doll. Ibid., p. 95.

50   Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics’, pp. 196, 198.

51   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, p. 102.

52   Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor Mccay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), p. 106.

53   Ibid.

54   Ibid., p. 108.

55   Ibid.

56   Cross, The Cute and the Cool, p. 32.

57   Smolderen, The Origins of Comics, p. 108. According to Smolderen, the ‘graphic gene’ of cuteness in print (minus the Brownies’ large eyes) started with the pseudo-Gothic illuminated picture book, especially those by the German illustrator Ludwig Richter. This style was dominant in American children’s magazines like St. Nicholas after the 1840s.

58   Shelley Armitage, Kewpies and Beyond: The World of Rose O’Neill (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), pp. 110, 113.

59   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, p. 102. Kewpies had red chubby cheeks and a tuft of blonde hair in coloured illustrations, though O’Neill occasionally included a Black Kewpie. Armitage, Kewpies and Beyond, p. 122.

60   Konrad Lorenz, The Foundations of Ethology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), p. 164.

61   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, p. 124.

62   Ibid., pp. 126–7.

63   Armitage, Kewpies and Beyond, p. 113.

64   Toni Fitzgerald, ‘The Kewpie Craze’, Doll Reader 36, 8 (2008), p. 37.

65   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, p. 131.

66   Ibid., p. 137.

67   Emily Wolverton, ‘Rosie O’Neill and the Kewpie Collection’, The Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures, 45 (5 February 2014).

68   Ibid., pp. 132–3.

69   Cross, The Cute and the Cool, p. 51.

70   Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, p. 103.

71   Cross, The Cute and the Cool, p. 51.

72   Bernstein, Racial Innocence, p. 41.

73   Harper’s Weekly 53, Part 1 (1909), p. 13.

74   Ara Osterweil, ‘Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence’, Camera Obscura 72, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2009), pp. 5–6.

75   Blake Stimpson, ‘Andy Warhol’s Red Beard’, The Art Bulletin 83, 3 (September 2001), p. 528.

76   John F. Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), p. 115.

77   Ibid., p. 5.

78   Ibid., pp. 159–61.

79   Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), p. 116.

80   Natalie Ngai, ‘The temptation of performing cuteness: Shirley Temple’s birthday parties during the Great Depression, Feminist Media Studies, p. 5, doi:10.1080/14680777.2022.2098800.

81   Ibid., p. 12.

82   Ibid., p. 9.

83   Mayme Peak, ‘Hollywood is Asking: How Long Will Shirley Temple Remain a Star?’, Boston Globe, 14 May 1937.

OceanofPDF.com

7

THE EVOLUTIONARY SUBSTRATE OF CUTENESS

Science has answered many questions about our evolutionary past. For instance, we now know that many people have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, which demonstrates that we were able to interbreed with them – just as wolves and dogs can today. However, figuring out how people behaved many thousands of years ago can require a judicious mix of science and speculation. The origins of dog domestication, a subject of much scientific debate, are a prime example.

As we saw earlier, domesticated animals become calmer and enjoy playing even as they mature. Their faces widen, their jaws shorten and their teeth get smaller, their bodies and limbs become smaller and shorter, and floppy ears and white patches of fur may appear. Furthermore, domesticated animals can forge relationships with members of other species, even as adults. Yet to most of us, what scientists call neoteny is simply cute.

We’ve also seen that cells in the neural crest may be a factor in domestication. Friendly individuals of some species seem to possess genes that cause a slower migration of neural-crest cells to other areas of the body, which results in a neotenous appearance and behaviour.

Dmitri Belyaev simply chose the friendliest foxes to breed in Siberia sixty years ago, but the question of what triggered the domestication process thousands of years back remains. Some species may have become tame by stumbling into a specific ecological niche. When birds arrived in New Zealand – a land without predators – they became calm, fearless, and some of them even lost their wings. In other parts of the world it might have been the human preference for tame, friendly animals that enabled domestication to occur through selective breeding.

In this chapter we’ll first look at why certain species are tameable while others aren’t. Then we’ll focus on the first domesticated animal, the dog, and the possibility that cuteness may have been a factor in its evolutionary path. Finally we’ll explore the cognitive framework that many scientists believe is behind the transformation of fierce wolves into lovable dogs.

The man followed by geese: imprinting and the socialisation period

Konrad Lorenz may have codified cuteness with his child schema, but it was his investigation of the social imprinting mechanism in animals – the instinct that causes baby animals to bond with their own species – that won him a Nobel Prize. Instead of being born with an image of their mother in their heads, Lorenz believed that baby geese instinctively followed the first moving object they saw. He called this an ‘instinctual releasing mechanism’ because the instinct released a certain behaviour.

To test his theory, Lorenz hand-raised some goslings, ensuring that he was the first thing they saw upon hatching. From then on, the goslings paid no attention to their mother and faithfully followed Lorenz around. Pictures of the eminent scientist walking in a field or swimming in a lake accompanied by his gosling brood appeared in many biology textbooks.

Lorenz’s goslings, like all geese, were already domesticated. But many baby animals, both tame and wild, experience a sensitive period in which they fearlessly explore their environment and can form lasting bonds. This socialisation window begins as soon as baby animals open their eyes and closes when they start to fear the unknown.

Domestication lengthens this period; the tame Siberian foxes show an expanded socialisation period of four months (rather than forty-five days) and a delayed fear response.[1] To test this, the Russian scientists measured stress hormones to see if the tame pups had lower levels. Although the levels in all foxes rose as the socialisation window closed, the especially tame animals experienced a much later and lower spike: a full 50 per cent lower than the control foxes.[2]

It’s often assumed that newborn babies’ need for constant care is what triggers us to think they’re cute. However, studies show that we regard a baby, whether human or animal, as most adorable when it has matured enough to explore and form connections with others.[3] Anyone who has raised a puppy, kitten or child is familiar with the wide-eyed wonder and headlong abandon that has us fawning over their cuteness one moment and fearing for their lives the next. The social connections and cognitive skills that young creatures develop during this period contribute to their later ability to survive; in other words, cuteness helps babies join the family.

Genes for love cause dogs to bond with us

Before any other domesticated species existed, we had dogs as hunting partners, sentries and sled-pullers. But were they our friends? Or did that come much later, after we had put them to work?

Canine behaviourist Clive Wynne answers the question of what causes dogs to bond with us with a word seldom used by data-driven scientists. ‘The essence of dog is love,’ he writes.[4] Wynne defines canine love as an extreme hyper-sociality that would be considered abnormal in a human.[5] He points out that interacting with people activates the reward centres of a dog’s brain, just as food does.[6] However, while dogs inherit structures in their brains that prepare them for relationships with humans, they still require exposure to people to cement a loving and lasting bond.[7] In this way their love for people is both inherited and acquired.

When a team of researchers presented people with pictures of dogs at various ages, they judged puppies to be cutest at eight weeks old, exactly the age when their mothers are kicking them out of the den. The cuter the puppy, these researchers believe, the more likely it is to be adopted by humans and thus able to pass on genes to the next generation.[8] It may be the nature of dogs to love, but the full expression of this quality also requires human nurture.

When I met the New Guinea singing dogs in San Diego, they all but fell over themselves in excitement at meeting a new human.[9] The Siberian foxes, in contrast, possessed a certain reserve. The singing dogs were full of love because Amy and Dave Bassett at the JAB Canid Education and Conservation Center had raised them from puppyhood. According to Wynne, imprinting during the socialisation period is ‘the crucial missing link between genes for love … and a dog that actually loves people’.[10] If we could tap into these ‘genes for love’, perhaps we could make any animal just as domesticated and lovable. Imagine a tame bear fetching your slippers in the morning, or a friendly lion giving your child a ride on its back.

If I could choose any animal to tame, I’d pick the zebra. You’d think that taming them wouldn’t be that difficult. After all, they’re so closely related to horses that the two can mate – even if the offspring that result, zebroids, are sterile and not especially docile. If we found a few calm zebras, bred them together and repeated the process, surely we’d end up with zebras that love us as much as we love them? After all, such selection for tameness worked in the Siberian-fox experiment.

Unfortunately this technique doesn’t seem to work with all animals. European horse-breeders, having settled in South Africa in the seventeenth century, tried unsuccessfully to tame zebras for several centuries. Horses were crucial to European colonialism, but many perished in Africa from diseases to which zebras were immune. So why do all zebra offspring remain as wild as their striped forebears? The author Jared Diamond offers two reasons. First, zebras are highly aggressive – you might be surprised to learn that they injure more zookeepers than tigers do. Second, the wide peripheral vision and head-flick reflex of zebras make them good at escaping attempts to tame them. For example, they are impossible to lasso with a rope.[11]

This may offer a clue as to why only fourteen of the 148 large mammal species on Earth have been domesticated – fifteen if we include the newly tame Siberian foxes.[12] It’s not from lack of trying; it seems that robust traits have evolved in some species that stand in the way of domestication.

People only had the idea of trying to tame zebras because other animals were already domesticated, so how did prehistoric people decide to domesticate wolves at a time when there were no previous models to guide them? Charles Darwin’s greatest discovery involving domesticated animals was ‘unconscious selection’, which mirrored what he had observed in nature. Humans, he suggested, selected individual animals to keep nearby that provided them with some value or advantage, without any thought of improving the breed overall.[13] In other words, Darwin believed that certain wolves must have had a special appeal to prehistoric humans – but it’s hard for us to see the attraction in keeping a ferocious wolf nearby.

Darwin’s unconscious selection only worked on certain species, with dogs being the prime example. However, wolves are both aggressive and shy – qualities that can even override artificial selection – so how did they turn into dogs?

The dog’s wolf ancestor derived from the Etruscan wolf (Canis etruscus), a carnivore that appeared 1.7–1.9 million years ago during the Ice Age and spread across Europe, Africa and Asia before crossing the land bridge into North America – an explosive expansion known as the Wolf Event.[14]

Homo sapiens was just starting to leave Africa at that time. Our own population expansion to all corners of the globe didn’t occur until later, but 15,000 years into it we had driven virtually every large carnivore to the brink of extinction – except, that is, for wolves.[15]

In fact wolves represented significant competition to early humans – and natural selection would have pushed us further apart. The wild ancestors of horses, pigs and cattle may have been shy and aggressive, but none of them were carnivorous predators. Surely wolves were the least likely candidates for successful domestication?

However, we should remember that individual wild animals raised in captivity can become habituated to humans, exactly like the calm but disinterested fox that sat on my lap at Zaō Fox Village. Circus animals like lions and tigers are other examples of wild animals that are trained not merely to tolerate us, but to do the bidding of humans. The key is to raise the animals when they are very young. They must be within Konrad Lorenz’s socialisation window if they are to accept people as friends.

But wild animals can never become truly tame; their fierce nature can suddenly assert itself, with tragic results. The magicians Siegfried and Roy performed with a hand-raised white tiger named Mantacore until he suddenly attacked Roy in front of a horrified audience in 2003, leaving him seriously injured. The offspring of trained wild animals are always wild – each generation must be hand-raised if they are to tolerate people, and they remain unpredictable even then. Domesticated animals, on the other hand, are calmer than their wild counterparts from birth. Tameness is part of their genetic heritage.

Solving the mystery of how animals transition from wild to tame is crucial to discovering the importance of cuteness in our furry companions. At some point wolf pups stopped turning fierce, suspicious and wild as they grew up, remaining friendly, playful and relatively docile. When these factors became built into their genome as inherited traits, wolves became dogs. Darwin’s concept of unconscious selection doesn’t describe how this happened, but two possible theories have arisen: the pet-adoption theory and the rubbish-dump theory.

The pet-adoption theory

One of the competing ideas that might explain how our canine companions became friendly is the ‘pet adoption’ theory. According to this hypothesis, long the accepted view, somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago people began bringing wolf puppies home with them. They raised them, played with them and eventually bred the friendliest of their pets together. Over time they created the dog, the world’s first domesticated animal.

Making wolves accustomed to humans requires the pups to be separated from their mothers when their eyes are still closed. This is because the socialisation window – the period in which puppies will accept strangers – is only open for the first few weeks of their lives. But raising wolf puppies is a demanding task. For example, how could prehistoric people have fed wolf pups that were not old enough to eat solid food? Some scientists have suggested that they must have been breastfed by the people who adopted them.

The evolutionary biologist Kathryn Lord begs to differ. ‘It’s a horrific idea to me,’ she says. ‘Wolves have extremely sharp teeth and when they don’t get enough milk, they start biting really hard.’[16] As part of her research into how dogs and wolves develop, Lord has hand-raised more than forty wolf pups by hand to socialise them – and, sleeping next to her charges, she had to be vigilant every time they became hungry. Lord paints such a vivid picture that I was surprised to find that the idea that women once breastfed wolf puppies has significant support among biologists. It turns out that the way wolf pups were fed is a crucial part of the answer to the contentious question of how they turned into dogs.

When I first encountered the pet-adoption theory, I assumed that people had brought wolf puppies into their care because they were irresistibly cute, so I was delighted to discover that some scientists speculate that cuteness was the most likely explanation.[17] It follows that the desire for adorability drove people to breed dogs, creatures that are cute for their entire lives.

Although Lord’s observation about the impossibility of breastfeeding wolf pups seems to put this idea to rest, many scientists continue to support the pet-adoption theory. Before we get to the second theory of wolf domestication, let’s look more closely at the pet-keeping hypothesis, while keeping those sharp wolf puppy teeth in mind.

The first person to suggest that animal domestication began with pet adoption was Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin,[18] who was fascinated by indigenous people all over the world who kept wild animals as pets. ‘It is a fact familiar to all travellers,’ he wrote in 1865, ‘that savages frequently capture young animals of various kinds, and rear them as favourites, and sell or present them as curiosities.’[19] He suggested that the desire to tame cute baby animals is a universal aspect of human nature,[20] which explained how animals were originally domesticated. In making his case, he pointed to tameness as the top selection criteria for domestication.[21]

This scenario would explain the origin of our desire to surround ourselves with cute companions. The idea was that prehistoric people stumbled on a dead or dying mother wolf and were so struck by her cute pups that they brought them home to live with them. Scientists who support the pet-adoption theory point out that many aboriginal societies adopted various kinds of baby wild animals as village pets, often because they were cute. Squirrels, monkeys, otters, racoons, toucans, parrots, opossums and even bear cubs were brought in from the wild and raised in villages all over the world. There are many reports from early anthropologists that various village pets were breastfed by women, but these are most often anecdotal tales rather than documented accounts.[22]

I was surprised to find photographic evidence of women breastfeeding piglets among the island peoples of the Pacific.[23] However, as Kathryn Lord points out, there’s a big difference between piglets and wolf puppies, whose sharp teeth remain a barrier to the pet-adoption theory in our search to explain the development of the dog.

The rubbish-dump theory

The second theory of wolf domestication was proposed by Konrad Lorenz himself. In 1953 he published a book called Man Meets Dog, which begins by imagining a prehistoric scene. Some 50,000 years ago, Lorenz writes, bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers attained such success with hunting that scavengers began to follow them around, hoping for leftovers. Over time the hunter-gatherers noticed that these animals had useful functions, such as howling and barking whenever they smelled a nearby predator. Eventually the tamest and cleverest of these animals started accompanying hunting expeditions and earned a share of the spoils. In this way, the dog was born.[24]

Lorenz’s fable became known as the scavenger or rubbish-dump theory, but it took a half-century for scientists to take the idea seriously. In the early 2000s Ray and Lorna Coppinger expanded on it, using the example of dogs that live on rubbish dumps.[25] A majority of the world’s estimated one billion dogs are free-range ‘village dogs’ that don’t belong to anyone[26] and survive mainly by eating rubbish and human faeces. The Coppingers proposed that feeding on human refuse represented an opportunity for wild animals to carve out a niche as scavengers. The animals that thrived in such an environment would have had a slightly lower flight reflex and a slightly higher tolerance for the presence of humans – just like the initial Siberian-fox cubs that were chosen to breed the next generation.

Only around 10 per cent of the original foxes in Dmitri Belyaev’s experiment showed less fear of humans than the others. If the same spectrum exists in wolves, each new generation of scavenger wolves would have contained a few individuals that were slightly more tolerant of strangers. These wolves would have been able to stay longer near their new food source without running away at the first sign of a human. And since they were hanging out together, they bred with each other.

This is the theory that Kathryn Lord prefers. ‘The ability to stay close to humans became a key evolutionary development,’ she says. ‘They could outcompete wild wolves because the flight distance decreases.’[27] The semi-feral dogs that live on human refuse are unsocialised, but they are accustomed to the presence of humans as long as they don’t get too close – a bit like pigeons in a park.

On an aesthetic level, the rubbish-dump theory lacks the appeal of the pet-adoption hypothesis. Instead of proposing that dogs are the descendants of cute wolf puppies that were adopted by humans, it suggests that wolves living off human rubbish evolved into our canine companions. But in addition to resolving the conundrum raised by the wolf pups’ sharp teeth, it solves another problem with the pet-adoption hypothesis: even if early humans did adopt wolf puppies, a typical litter consists of just four pups – an inadequate population from which to choose the friendliest individuals without excessive inbreeding.

Under the rubbish-dump theory, a viable breeding population of friendlier wolves would have developed without human intervention. The fox experiment tells us that the domestication syndrome can begin to manifest after only a few generations. Although wolves undoubtedly took much longer than that to become dogs, eating human leftovers may have started them on that path.

As time went by, prehistoric people would have noticed that the animals hanging around their rubbish heaps had changed. The new arrivals would have had a cuter appearance and a friendlier demeanour. At first they would have been ignored, but these proto-dogs would have been open to human contact. Once people responded to their friendliness, a new relationship could begin. The most interesting aspect of the rubbish-dump theory is that wolves may have effectively tamed themselves.[28] If that’s right, then the cuteness of animals encouraged our appreciation of it, which in turn resulted in more cuteness.

How to feed a wolf

Despite the appeal of this theory, scientists who favour the pet-adoption theory cite recent research that indicates a problem with the rubbish-dump hypothesis. Ray and Lorna Coppinger have estimated that it would take a community of 280 people to generate enough waste to feed a founder group of wolves.[29] The Coppingers assumed that domestication took place around 8,000 years ago, but current thinking sets the date of wolf domestication to at least 15,000 years ago, and possibly earlier still.[30] At that time, people lived in small groups and moved around a lot; considering that one wolf needs up to six or seven pounds of high-protein food per day, the maths just doesn’t add up.[31]

However, a new hypothesis offers an explanation for how humans may have fed wolves. Maria Lahtinen of the Finnish Food Authority and a team of researchers have pointed out that wolves became domesticated during the latter part of the Ice Age, when glaciers covered much of western Eurasia. The shortness of the growing season meant that people in that part of the world relied on hunting, yet eating too much protein causes a host of medical problems in humans.[32]

Wolves, on the other hand, are perfectly adapted to a high-protein diet. Lahtinen and her team found that humans would have produced more protein than they could have safely consumed, especially in the winter months; their leftover meat could have provided food for their wolf companions, with both species benefiting. The wolves received food, and the humans were warned of approaching predators.[33]

In their suggestion that humans deliberately captured and fed wolf pups, Lahtinen’s team supports the pet-adoption theory rather than the rubbish-dump theory.[34] However, this doesn’t address Kathryn Lord’s point about the impossibility of feeding wolf puppies before they were able to digest meat – a real sticking point.

One last piece of supporting evidence for the pet-adoption theory offers a speculative, yet evocative account of the relationship between humans and wolves, but first I want to address a lingering question. The success of the Siberian-fox experiment shows that other canines are adaptable enough to become domesticated, yet only wolves became tame. Why isn’t there a lovable jackal lying at my feet right now?

Earlier we saw that Konrad Lorenz was the first to propose the rubbish-dump theory of domestication. In fact, he believed that dogs had evolved not from wolves but from the golden jackal, a natural scavenger.[35] Wolves, Lorenz thought, were too independent to account for dogs’ indiscriminate friendliness towards people.[36] He later retracted this idea. Dogs, unlike jackals, can cross-breed with wolves, and other details of jackal behaviour don’t match.

What was it that gave wolves the advantage? ‘The canid genome is rather like a Swiss Army knife,’ writes John Bradshaw in Dog Sense, ‘a social toolkit that has remained resistant to evolutionary change and can be used to cope with a wide variety of circumstances.’[37] Bradshaw’s canid toolkit includes a good nose and hunting skills, but the most important element is flexible sociality. It is their thirst for company, he maintains, that enabled wolves to be domesticated. The key point is their ability to make cross-species connections; in other words, to view other animals as family.

For Bradshaw, the lure of the pack is what distinguishes wolves from other canids like jackals or foxes. Wolves practise cooperative breeding, which means that younger pack members often help to raise their baby brothers and sisters. Thus wolf packs, rather than being dominated by ‘alpha’ individuals, are family units that operate cooperatively. By inserting ourselves into this flexible family structure, humans were able to domesticate them.[38] We hijacked their normal kin-recognition mechanisms – just as Konrad Lorenz did with his geese.[39]

Bradshaw believes that wolf domestication might have been an accident of genetics. A mutation that reduced the fear of strangers in a few wolves, which enabled them to bond with another species, could have lain dormant until it was activated through human contact. In other words, a small percentage of wolves could have been genetically pre-adapted for coexistence with people.[40] The Siberian-fox experiment shows that a small percentage of foxes also had this inborn pre-adaption, and it may be a part of other species’ genomes, too.

In most environments this ‘friendliness gene’ wouldn’t confer a survival advantage. On the other hand, if the overall environment became more peaceful, it would encourage selection for friendly individuals. This is where the rubbish-dump theory and the pet-adoption theory have common ground.[41] No matter how they were fed, it’s probable that a small percentage of wolves that were amenable to cross-species attachment eventually became dogs.

Still, however, a question remains: how could the friendlier wolves have been made accustomed to humans during their short socialisation window? In the early 1770s the English explorer Samuel Hearne published a diary of his trip around the Hudson Bay area of what is now Canada. According to Hearne, wolves ‘always burrow under-ground to bring forth their young; and though it is natural to suppose them very fierce at those times, yet I have frequently seen the Indians go to their dens and take out the young ones and play with them’.[42]

When I first read Hearne’s account, I wondered how this practice would have begun. Who was first to stick their hand into a wolf den? I was on the verge of dismissing his anecdote when I read this statement by wolf-behaviour expert Benson Ginsburg: ‘It is my experience that if you put your hand into a pen with newborn wolves, a certain percentage will come immediately and never want you to leave … Other pups will run away and still others will be stuck in avoidance-approach. As adults, the social ones can become sociable to humans.’[43]

In fact James Serpell, an expert on human–animal interactions, quotes Hearne’s account as evidence of the pet-adoption theory. He points out that only a minority of such hand-fondled wolf pups would have hung around people after they matured, but those that did may have bred with each other and eventually became dogs.[44]

Wolves had a spiritual importance for many hunter-gatherer and semi-nomadic pastoral tribal groups, who considered them to be important totemic spirits, teachers and even spiritual brothers.[45] All Native American tribes believe that wolves have much to teach human beings.[46] Even more striking is the fact that various Native oral histories include stories about feeding or sharing food with wolves.[47] Did this attitude exist many thousands of years ago? If so, maybe a respectful relationship with adult wolves extended to a playful one with their cute puppies. It’s fascinating to think that mutual play between humans and wolf puppies may be the final piece of the puzzle explaining how wolves became dogs.

Playfulness is deeply imbued in Japan’s animist spiritual tradition, which may be why anthropomorphic animals appeared so often in its art. Contemporary Japanese culture is in love with live animals, too. These days, when I see a pram on the streets of Tokyo, its occupant is as likely to be canine as human. However, there is one dog in particular that represents the Japanese attachment to both cuteness and canine virtues. His name is Hachiko.

Notes

1   Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication’, p. 6.

2   Dugatkin and Trut, How to Tame a Fox, p. 80. The HPA (hypothalamic pituitary adrenal) axis, which regulates stress response, was attenuated in the tame foxes. Both basal and stress-induced cortisol levels were three to five times lower in the tame foxes compared to the control population. Serotonin, which inhibits aggressive behaviour and promotes calmness, was also found at significantly higher levels in the tame foxes. Trut et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication, pp. 6–10.

3   For a review of studies on peak cuteness levels in children, see Gary D. Sherman and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Cuteness and Disgust: The Humanizing and Dehumanizing Effects of Emotion’, Emotion Review 3, 3 (2011) pp. 4–5, doi:10.1177/1754073911402396. For peak cuteness in puppies, see Nadine Chersini et al., ‘Dog Pups’ Attractiveness to Humans Peaks at Weaning Age’, Anthrozoös 31, 3 (2018) pp. 309–18, doi:10.1080/08927936.2018.1455454.

4   Clive D. L. Wynne, Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019), p. 155.

5   Ibid., p. 8.

6   Ibid., p. 129. See also Gregory S. Berns et al., ‘Scent of the familiar: An fMRI study of canine brain responses to familiar and unfamiliar human and dog odors’, Behavioural Processes 110 (2015), pp. 37–46, doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2014.02.011.

7   Wynne, Dog Is Love, p. 32.

8   Chersini et al., ‘Dog Pups’ Attractiveness to Humans Peaks at Weaning Age’.

9   New Guinea singing dogs were separated from people for thousands of years, but they still retain the ability to become lovable canine companions. This behaviour is even more striking considering that they don’t have all the abilities of modern dogs.

10   Wynne, Dog Is Love, p. 209.

11   Jared Diamond, ‘Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication’, Nature 418 (8 August 2002), pp: 700–07, doi.org/10.1038/nature01019.

12   Ibid., p. 702. The number of domesticated animal species goes up to around forty if birds and fish are included.

13   Claudio J. Bidau, ‘Domestication through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes’, Gayana 73, Supplement 1 (2009), p. 62, dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0717-65382009000300006. The concept of unconscious selection helps to explain divergence, a crucial element in Darwin’s theory of natural selection that explains speciation and evolution. In domesticated species, different populations can develop distinct characteristics even when they are subjected to similar breeding practices. Thus domestication, in Darwin’s analysis, is homogenous to natural selection (ibid., p. 68).

14   A. Azzaroli, ‘Quaternary Mammals and the “End-Villafranchian” Dispersal Event – A Turning Point in the History of Eurasia’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 44 (1983), pp. 117–39, doi:10.1016/0031-0182(83)90008-1. See also Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 22.

15   Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 29.

16   Neil Sandell, ‘From scavenger to household royalty: How dogs evolved from wolves to pampered pets’, Ideas Podcast (CBC Radio, 1 March 2021), www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/from-scavenger-to-household-royalty-how-dogs-evolved-from-wolves-to-pampered-pets-1.5930345.

17   See Bradshaw, Dog Sense, pp. 49–50; Adam Winston, ‘In the beginning: dogs and wolves’, Dogs in Our World Podcast, Episode 1 (5 January 2017), podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-beginning-dogs-and-wolves/id1163100723?i=1000379664063; and Francis Galton, ‘The First Steps towards the Domestication of Animals’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 3 (1865), p. 123.

18   Galton was also a pioneer of eugenics – in fact he coined the word.

19   Galton, ‘The First Steps towards the Domestication of Animals’, p. 123.

20   Ibid.

21   Ibid., p. 137.

22   Bradshaw, Dog Sense, pp. 48–50. See also Frederick J. Simoons and James A. Baldwin, ‘Breast-Feeding of Animals by Women: Its Socio-Cultural Context and Geographic Occurrence’, Anthropos Bd. 77, H. 3./4. (1982), pp. 422–3, www.jstor.org/stable/40460478.

23   Simoons and Baldwin, ‘Breast-Feeding of Animals by Women’, p. 427 Fig. 2.

24   Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–10.

25   Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution (New York: Scribner, 2001).

26   Kurt Kotrschal, ‘How Wolves Turned into Dogs and How Dogs Are Valuable in Meeting Human Social Needs’, People and Animals: The International Journal of Research and Practice 1, 1, Article 6 (2018), p. 12, docs.lib.purdue.edu/paij/vol1/iss1/6.

27   Sandell, ‘From scavenger to household royalty’.

28   Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, pp. 89–90.

29   Christoph Jung and Daniela Pörtl, ‘Scavenging Hypothesis: Lack of evidence for Dog Domestication on the Waste Dump’, Dog Behavior 2 (2018), p. 43.

30   Ibid., p. 42.

31   J. A. Serpell, ‘Commensalism or Cross-Species Adoption? A Critical Review of Theories of Wolf Domestication’, Frontiers of Veterinary Science 8, 662370 (2021), p. 3, doi:10.3389/fvets.2021.662370.

32   Maria Lahtinen et al., ‘Excess protein enabled dog domestication during severe Ice Age winters’, Scientific Reports 11, 7 (2021), p. 1.

33   Ibid., p. 3.

34   Lahtinen’s team also points out that the digestive systems of early dogs were not yet adopted to a human diet; thus it’s more likely that they were fed lean meat. Ibid., p. 3, 4.

35   Lorenz, Man Meets Dog, p. 9.

36   Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 4.

37   Ibid., p. 6.

38   Ibid., pp. 16, 81.

39   Ibid., p. 128.

40   Ibid., pp. 51–2.

41   Bradshaw, who favours the rubbish-dump theory, points out that it’s hard to get even hand-raised wolves to bond with people.

42   Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wale’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1911), p. 803.

43   Benson Ginsburg quoted in Brandy R. Fogg et al., ‘Relationships Between Indigenous American Peoples and Wolves, 1: Wolves as Teachers and Guides’, Journal of Ethnobiology 35, 2 (2015), p. 278, doi:10.2993/etbi-35-02-262-285.1.

44   Serpell, ‘Commensalism or Cross-Species Adoption?’, p. 7.

45   Kotrschal, ‘How Wolves Turned into Dogs’, p. 7.

46   Fogg et al., ‘Relationships Between Indigenous American Peoples and Wolves’, p. 279.

47   Ibid., p. 272. Samuel Hearne writes: ‘I never knew a Northern Indian (to) hurt one of them: on the contrary, they always put them carefully into the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the young Wolves with vermillion, or red ochre.’ Red ochre has been used for ceremonial and ritual body adornment by indigenous people in many parts of the world for thousands upon thousands of years. Using it to mark wolf faces suggests a connection to these animals that runs deeper than just wanting to play with cute puppies. Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wale’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean, p. 803.

OceanofPDF.com

8

KAWAII IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN

Hachiko is the most famous dog in Japan. From the time he was a puppy in 1924 he walked with his owner, Professor Hidesaburō Ueno, to Shibuya train station every morning. In the evening Hachiko returned to the station on his own to meet the professor. One day his owner didn’t come back. The professor had died of a brain haemorrhage during a lecture. Hachiko went home alone that night, but returned to the station every evening for more than nine years, until he died himself. Taken as a display of loyalty and love, Hachiko’s actions touched the hearts of the Japanese people. He became famous nationwide, and a statue of the dog was erected in front of Shibuya station near what is now called the Hachiko exit.

Fig. 8.1: Shibuyu ward’s Hachiko bus.

Fig. 8.2: Grave of the beloved dog Hachiko.

Did Hachiko really expect his master’s return or was he simply following a habit? We can’t know for sure, but his huge popularity, which began while he was still alive, was encouraged by an imperialist government, which used the dog as a model of unwavering loyalty. When the story of Hachiko appeared in a primary-school textbook in 1934 it became required reading for children across the Japanese empire.[1]

Hachiko is a beloved icon even today. His ashes were interred in a corner of Professor Ueno’s grave in Aoyama cemetery and are marked by a miniature stone shrine, with a small model of an Akita dog standing as the object of veneration. People still leave offerings of flowers and small toys to Hachiko. The Hachiko bus, a minibus that services neighbourhoods near Shibuya station, is festooned with cute cartoon versions of the dog.

In the last chapter we saw that dogs and other animals became cuter as they were domesticated. I think Hachiko continues to inspire people because he embodies kenage, a Japanese word often used to describe something small that is doing its best to overcome an obstacle. We can see how this applies to cuteness when we look at the history of kawaii. Just as ‘cute’ came from ‘acute’, so kawaii originally meant something different – and the evolution of the word gives a clue to the difference between Japanese kawaii and American cute.

The etymology of kawaii

The word kawaii derives from the archaic term kawahayushi, a compound of ‘face’ (kao) and ‘flushed or dazzled’ (hayushi). Directly translated, it means that one’s face has turned red from excitement or embarrassment.[2] This original meaning still has resonance in the modern term kawaii. Characters in manga and anime commonly blush when they see something kawaii, and there is empirical evidence to support this visual convention. A recent cross-cultural study in Japan and Italy found that people who are shown cute images often experience a rise in facial temperature.[3]

In the medieval period the word kawahayushi took on a shorter form and the meaning shifted from ‘embarrassed’ to ‘pitiable’ or ‘piteous’. The word kawayui was used to signify sympathy towards weaker members of society, and this is where I find a link to Hachiko. Though there is now another word in Japanese for pitiable (kawaisō), the modern word kawaii is still used for little things that need care and attention, like a small, lonely dog doing its best to be reunited with his human companion. I think that’s the reason why the story of Hachiko still speaks to people today.[4]

The scholar Inuhiko Yomota traces the first appearance of the word kawaii to 1603, when the word ‘cauaij’ appeared in a Japanese–Portuguese dictionary compiled by the Society of Jesuits in Nagasaki.[5] We’ve seen that cuteness was increasingly common in the arts as that era progressed, yet the word seldom appeared in print.

Since the feeling of cuteness seems to have a basis in human biology, it’s not surprising that the English and Japanese terms can work in the same way. When you see something and exclaim ‘Cute!’, you’re feeling the same thing that makes someone else, say, ‘Kawaii!’ However, the English word has a different nuance – because it derives from ‘acute’, it can express an ironic detachment or a suspicion that one is being manipulated. Kawaii is more immediate and less filtered; it is only about the feeling.[6] Perhaps this is one reason why it came to permeate contemporary Japanese culture.

Cuteness is everywhere in Japan, and it’s not just for the young.[7] Bank cards sporting cute characters are not meant for children; neither are smiling anthropomorphic condoms. There are aeroplanes adorned with Pikachu cartoons, and bullet trains decorated inside and out with Hello Kitty motifs. Smiling four-foot-tall mannequins depicting cutified police officers stand outside the Harajuku police station. Japan’s army uses anime characters in its recruiting drives, and the Red Cross puts them on their appeals for blood donation.

Fig. 8.3: A small girl meets a yuru kyara mascot character at the 2018 Yuru Kyara Grand Prix in Osaka.

Throughout Japan more than a thousand mascots promote local regions, and every single one of them is cute. On city streets, road-construction barriers feature adorable frogs, Hello Kitty or kimono-clad princesses. Even shrines and temples sell cute charms as protection from misfortune.[8] While I was writing this book I noticed that the manhole covers in my neighbourhood of Tokyo had been replaced with ones sporting cute designs from a popular anime that took place nearby.[9]

How did this explosion of cuteness happen? We’ve seen that the adorable has been a theme in Japanese literature and art for more than a thousand years, but it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that kawaii really began to flourish. This roughly corresponded with the rise of cuteness in the US, and some of the reasons behind it are similar – new printing technologies, an emphasis on childhood and the development of mass consumer culture. But other things are different.

In late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America, cuteness rose to prominence because it was aimed at everybody, whether in Disney or Kewpie dolls, newspaper comics or New Kid advertising. While Japan had some of this kind of cuteness as well, kawaii was more tightly intertwined with a developing girls’ culture (shōjo bunka). Generations of schoolgirls grew up with kawaii as part of their world, and it became a visual and emotional language that they spoke better than anyone else.

In the late twentieth century, however, this began to change. Young men became interested in kawaii and created a new, softer image of masculinity under its influence. For boys and men, borrowing kawaii from girls’ culture functioned as an exit strategy from rigid gender expectations and a glacial rate of social change. At the centre of this vortex of cuteness, however, remains the iconic figure of the schoolgirl.

Cutequake

The 1960s saw cultural and social upheavals all around the world. Student activists were protesting, hippies were dropping out and The Beatles and The Rolling Stones ruled the music scenes. The miniskirt had arrived, and young women began dressing in bold colours. Twiggy, the famously slender teenage model with short-cropped hair and huge eyes, epitomised a youthful look that became enormously popular. Observing this cultural movement in London, Vogue editor Diana Vreeland dubbed it the ‘Youthquake’.

In the US this Youthquake was fuelled by the conviction that student protests had helped to end the Vietnam War. The 1960s counter-culture morphed into the ‘Me generation’ as baby-boomers gained social and political power. In Japan, however, student protests had focused on ending the nation’s security treaty with US and, when this failed, left-wing factions became increasingly extreme. When the protests struggled to make an impact, disillusioned students turned their backs on the adult world. Rather than a Youthquake, fashion scholar Toby Slade dubs Japan’s version the ‘Cutequake’.[10]

As the hippie style morphed into the glam fashion of the 1970s, the Youthquake remained focused on adult sex appeal. In Japan, on the other hand, the pursuit of the kawaii aesthetic became a form of self-expression that symbolised the rejection not only of adult values, but also of maturity. Unlike the student protest movement, kawaii culture was not an act of open rebellion. Rather, young adults adopted a childish or innocent style in order to reject the adult authority valued by their elders. While the Youthquake demanded that young people be taken seriously, the Japanese Cutequake used kawaii to reject maturity entirely.[11]

The Cutequake had a noticeable impact on Japanese fashion. In the 1970s brands specialising in frilly, layered kawaii women’s clothes, such as Milk and Shirley Temple, helped kick off the Lolita fashion subculture in which girls (and nowadays some boys) dress in over-the-top kawaii outfits. Since kawaii was already a large part of girls’ culture, its presence in women’s fashion is unsurprising. Yet men’s fashion also began to embrace a softer, more androgynous look, emphasising slenderness rather than muscularity.

This look is not unique to Japan, but the country has long had two conceptions of masculinity: artistic expression was admired alongside the warrior ethos of the samurai. In The Tale of Genji, a Heian-era masterpiece written not long after The Pillow Book, the ‘shining prince’ Genji is not a warrior but a sensitive and sophisticated poet. The special status given to literary and aesthetic skills in the Heian era provided an alternative to traditional masculinity that has persisted in Japanese culture to this day.[12]

From the 1970s, the increasing independence of women in Japan also had an impact on men’s styling and presentation. Men tried to appear more sensitive, since that was what many women preferred. For example, they would imitate the fashion of the many boy bands, with their baby-faced looks and bright, cute costumes. When these pop stars grow up they are often still considered kawaii, providing a model for adult men to imitate. Former boy band member Takuya Kimura often appears in the media caring for his children, cooking and sharing his feelings. In 1996 a popular advertisement for the lipstick-maker Kanebo featured him with long hair and make-up, applying lipstick; in another ad in the series, a woman paints his mouth with lipstick.[13]

Though light-hearted and fun, this kind of kawaii self-expression in men was also seen as brave, because of its departure from traditional social norms.[14] In this way, the development of kawaii masculinity could be seen as mirroring changes in Japanese society that gave women more influence on social trends.[15]

Young women emerge as lifestyle leaders

In the 1960s educational opportunities for Japanese women increased, but they were still constrained from full-time permanent employment and largely defined by society as wives and mothers.[16] Virtually barred from having corporate careers, working women were expected to work for several years after graduating before finding a husband – ideally one employed by the same company. Though rigid and sexist, these social expectations allowed women a brief but crucial degree of freedom that men didn’t have. In their years of employment, women had more leisure time because they could leave the office at five o’clock without having to work hours of overtime. Since they usually lived at home, they had significant disposable income and were willing to spend it on things they enjoyed. In the 1970s young working women became both the chief producers and consumers of cute culture, and their spending habits were soon noticed by corporations and the media alike.[17]

When the media began to regard young women as not only consumers but trendsetters, kawaii became more widely visible and began its steady expansion. Women in their early twenties emerged as the key demographic, a trend that would continue for decades.[18] Advertisers seized on young women as model consumers and attempted to market their free-living, free-spending lifestyle to the rest of Japan. They were featured in domestic tourism campaigns and in the advertisements of department stores like Parco, which became so popular that it transformed the entire neighbourhood of Shibuya in Tokyo from a boring commuter hub into a shopping and entertainment zone.[19]

By the late 1980s young women had become style leaders and ‘catalysts of consumer society’.[20] During the nationwide recession in the 1990s they were the consumer demographic with the most money to spend and the desire to spend it freely.[21] The mass media’s focus on girls’ culture had made it into an aspirational model of social freedom. Young women created cute cultural trends that gradually built up until they influenced Japanese society as a whole and even had a global impact.

Japanese schoolgirls and the birth of emoji

Japanese girls had been fond of writing letters to one another long before Yumeji Takehisa began to sell cute writing sets in his shop in the early twentieth century. In the 1970s the fancy-goods industry had huge success with notebooks and letter paper that featured cute designs, such as Hello Kitty. Mechanical pencils that produced fine, even lines also arrived on the market. These innovations were perfect for writing notes to friends, and schoolgirls responded by turning the old way of writing – a pillar of traditional Japanese culture – on its head.

All students were taught to write Japanese vertically and in a calligraphic style that emphasised beauty and elegance. But schoolgirls, inspired by their new notepaper, began to write horizontally and from left to right, like English and other European languages. They started to punctuate their messages by drawing hearts, stars and faces with their mechanical pencils – little proto-emoji – and sprinkled them with English words like ‘love’ and ‘friend’ to add extra cachet. When asked why they had developed this new style, the answer was invariably, ‘Because it’s kawaii.’[22]

The biggest difference in the new style, however, was in the characters themselves. Rather than the imported Chinese characters called kanji, the girls used hiragana, the syllabic script indigenous to Japan – and the script in which Sei Shonagan had written her list of cute things in The Pillow Book a thousand years earlier. To bring it up to date and make it their own, schoolgirls ‘cutified’ every character by making it more rounded. This highly stylised method was difficult both to write and to read. Reading Japanese without kanji is like reading English without any spaces between the words. It drove teachers crazy, and some schools banned the cute writing style entirely.[23]

This rounded style of writing, with inserted little drawings and English words, was a rebellion against traditional Japanese culture. It was a new kawaii language invented by the young, which they used to express themselves freely and establish intimate relationships.[24] It was so successful that many boys started to use it as well.[25]

As the 1980s progressed, this rounded script spread far beyond the youth who invented it. It was used by magazines, in advertising and in packaging, and Apple Macintosh added it as a font in their computers.[26] The kawaii writing style was also enthusiastically embraced by shōjo manga artists, who took it further by adding cascades of stars and flowers to the margins of their works, in order to highlight their characters’ emotional state.[27] This cute writing style is a prime example of how kawaii came to dominate popular culture in the 1980s by crossing media platforms – from advertising to literature – and saturating consumer goods and services.[28]

In the mid-1990s handwritten letters fell out of fashion as new telecommunication technologies emerged. Pagers with text-messaging capabilities appeared first, followed by mobile phones – and Japanese teenage girls were at the forefront of this communication revolution. Pagers had first been developed for on-call doctors and businessmen tethered to the office, but they were enthusiastically adopted by young Japanese women. In 1996 ten million people used them, the majority of whom were teenage girls. By then the messaging functions on these devices had come to include hearts and smiley faces, proto-emoji that recall the kawaii writing style developed by an earlier generation of girls in the 1970s.[29]

Emoji is a term derived from the Japanese words for ‘picture’ and ‘letter’. Emoji arrived on mobile phones in the late 1990s and quickly became an indispensable communication tool, with young women becoming the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. But there was a hitch: at that time, each mobile-phone company had its own emoji palette that was incompatible with the others. As a result, sending emoji to a different mobile phone resulted in a string of random characters. A wide range of emoji soon became a crucial selling point for a mobile, and boyfriends and husbands had to choose the same carrier as their female partners if they wanted to understand their text messages. Any new phone model that wasn’t popular with women soon vanished from the market.[30]

The iPhone was a worldwide hit when it went on sale in 2007, apart from in Japan, where it failed miserably. The reason? There was no way of sending emoji in text messages. When Apple realised their mistake, they teamed up with Google to create an international standard for the little pictograms, which was introduced in 2011.[31] As a result, much of the world is now happily expressing their feelings through tiny, cute images – a revolution in communication that originally developed out of the desire of Japanese schoolgirls to share their feelings through the medium of kawaii.

Japanese schoolgirls didn’t invent emoji, but they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for their influence. Young women now lead the way not only in fashion trends and style, but in technology. However, Japanese teenage girls have also been influential in the ‘cutification’ of another medium that has attained immense popularity in global youth culture: manga, a central pillar of Japan’s global cultural influence.

Manga: the eyes have it

The Kyoto International Manga Museum is located in a former elementary school. The only sound is the creaking of the old wooden floors as visitors browse the 300,000 volumes in their collection. While this is a small fraction of the total number of published titles, it is still the largest collection in the world.

In the main gallery, tall bookshelves line the walls, with all the manga organised chronologically. The first shelf is dedicated to the early twentieth century, when modern manga first appeared. It used Japanese drawing styles that dated back to the Scroll of Frolicking Animals, but was also influenced by Western styles found in British satirical cartoons and cute American comic strips.[32]

After the Second World War the illustrated magazines that had been so popular with girls were almost entirely replaced by manga.[33] In the Manga Museum the number of shelves dedicated to each decade grows as more and more manga appear. Various American cartoons, from Popeye and Superman to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, were translated and became popular in the 1950s, but the post-war manga boom had started by then, with the work of Osamu Tezuka.[34]

Tezuka was the main reason that manga became taken seriously as an art form and was often read by adults. The ‘God of Manga’ pioneered cinematic techniques, such as close-ups and changing points of view, and also created fully realised characters and dense storylines.[35] Earlier, we saw that he made kawaii even more neotenous, or youthful, than Disney. One way he did this was to enlarge the eyes of his characters. Larger white eyes made his characters pop from the page; we are biologically disposed to pay attention to what eyes are signalling, and it’s their white sclera that captures our attention.

However, the pupils of Tezuka’s eyes were flat and black, very different from the exaggerated eyes that are a standard convention for manga and anime characters today. The change began when the manga artist Macoto Takahashi, who started publishing in 1957, began to add sparkles and stars to his characters’ eyes. This trend had already appeared in Junichi Nakahara’s illustrations, in which girls gazed directly at the viewer, their eyes shining. By adjusting the number, shape and arrangement of these highlights, Takahashi was able to convey characters’ emotions and advance the story without the use of dialogue.[36] His starry-eyed style was quickly imitated by other manga artists; by the 1970s some characters’ eyes were so large they could occupy half their face.[37] Today the main character in a shōjo manga tends to have the biggest eyes; her emotional state is key to advancing the story, and eyes are the mirror of the soul.[38]

I’d seen some of Takahashi’s artwork online and reproduced in books, along with other examples from artists who were influenced by his starry-eyed technique. I could see the technical expertise in these illustrations, but for some reason I’d never really felt a connection to the characters. But in the manga museum, with these works lining the walls, I took down volume after volume of girls’ manga and looked at random pages with my thumb over the dialogue. I was astonished at the results. I was used to the crystal clarity of the high-quality reproductions that I’d seen, where each star and sparkle was precisely rendered. But now I was seeing these characters as the artists had intended, as greyscale images in cheaply printed volumes. Somehow they had used the limitations of the medium to enhance the effect. There was so much depth that the girls’ eyes seemed three-dimensional; I could tell what they were feeling even without reading the dialogue. This girl had been betrayed by a friend; that one was resolved to fight; a third was realising she was in love. It was phenomenal.

Boys’ manga from this time included cute characters, but kept Tezuka’s large, flat black eyes, which seemed to fit the action-focused tales of sports or adventures. While girls’ manga went deep into the minutiae of human emotions, almost all the artists who drew it were men.

By the 1960s manga’s explosion in popularity had left publishers in dire need of new artists. They responded by holding competitions that solicited contributions from readers – girls as well as boys. The winners not only received prize money, but also won the chance to see their work published. Such competitions enabled women to enter a field that had previously been dominated by men. In addition, by finding new artists among their readership and often hiring them straight out of high school, publishers established an even closer connection between creators and consumers. Unlike their male predecessors, the women who became manga artists had been girls who loved reading manga. They knew what girls wanted.[39]

In 1972 Riyoko Ikeda launched her eleven-volume manga series The Rose of Versailles. Over the course of some 1,700 pages it told the epic story of the French court until the revolution, through the eyes of Marie Antoinette and a dashing commander of the guards named Oscar, who was actually a girl who had been raised as a boy. This combination of historical fiction and gender-bending romance made for a huge hit that was read by practically every girl in Japan.[40] When Oscar was killed off, it was reported that teachers across the country were forced to cancel classes because all the girls were sobbing uncontrollably.[41]

In The Rose of Versailles, like other girls’ manga in the 1970s, kawaii was not simply expressed by starry eyes – it was added to the narrative in complex ways. Ikeda surrounded her characters with flowers at key emotional moments and dispensed with the conventional panel layout in order to show large close-ups of their faces. As Marie Antoinette realises she has become the crown princess of France, she appears in a full-body portrait bathed in rays of moonlight and surrounded by roses.

The huge eyes, close-ups of faces and bodies, non-linear page design and emphasis on the subtle exploration of human relationships made girls’ manga difficult to comprehend for anyone used to the action-driven narrative and straightforward layout of boys’ manga. It was as if girls’ manga used a secret code that had to be deciphered in order to access its complex inner world of love, friendship and trendy fashion.[42]

The Rose of Versailles was more than just a romance. Its complex story also focused on the political upheavals that led to the French Revolution, while marginal notes included detailed historical information. It became one of the best-selling girls’ manga of all time, and the story was adapted to a television anime series, a live-action film and several musicals.

In spite of The Rose of Versailles’s mainstream success, it received little attention from male critics, who focused their attention on the boys’ manga with which they were familiar.[43] However, the work of Moto Hagio, another giant of the manga scene, attracted not only critical attention but also many male readers. The crossover appeal of works by women manga artists in the 1970s was one factor in the spread of kawaii beyond girls’ culture.

Hagio’s breakout success was They Were Eleven, a 1975 science-fiction tale about ten young cadets undergoing a field examination aboard a decommissioned spaceship. Upon arriving, they find there are eleven of them, not ten – and nobody knows who the extra person is or why they are there. Then a few bombs go off mysteriously and the spaceship slowly begins to heat up. To survive, the cadets must work together with the knowledge that a saboteur is hiding among them.

Hagio was the first manga artist to create science fiction that could be enjoyed by adults as well as teenagers. They Were Eleven is a cracking story, and I wish I’d had the chance to read it when I was an adolescent. However, I did find the conventions of girls’ manga difficult to decipher at first. When the cadets first enter the spacecraft and take off their helmets, one is surprised to notice a woman, Frol, in what he’d thought was an all-male group. Frol has a slender frame and long, blonde curly hair, but over the course of the story we discover that he is intersex, but identifies as male. I wasn’t surprised that Hagio had included intersex characters – she was influenced by American science-fiction writers like Ursula K. Le Guin – but initially I had assumed from her drawings that half of the group were women. Hagio habitually draws male characters as androgynous, with long hair and features that I thought were feminine.

This gender fluidity is typical of girls’ manga,[44] and it’s one reason why young men who felt alienated from Japan’s rigid standards of masculinity and its presumption of heterosexuality increasingly found themselves drawn to it.[45] For these reasons, the distinctive cute style of girls’ manga was increasingly read by adult women and men alike.[46]

As well as being a visual style, kawaii is a communicative tool that facilitates relationships. While boys’ manga often prized brute strength, girls’ manga valued adaptability, flexibility and cooperation.[47] The latest trend is to blend aspects of both. An example is Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, the most successful anime series of all time.[48] Its cute girl characters (bishōjo) are ‘magical girls’. Schoolgirls by day, they become powerful fighters when they transform into their alter egos.

Sailor Moon combines action with innocence and presents a ‘feminine way of fighting’.[49] It also features stories of gay couples and transgender warriors, and this sexual/gender fluidity struck a chord with fans all over the world. As Moto Hagio says: ‘The concept of shōjo [girl] now lives not only in Japan, but all over the world. The sensitivity that girls have is different from that of boys, but I believe that it exists in males also, making shōjo manga works universally appealing.’[50]

The Japanese government is banking on the universality of kawaii’s appeal in the same way it did more than a hundred years ago. However, instead of displaying folding fans and hanging scrolls, today’s international cultural expos and fan conventions often feature kawaii exhibitions and events sponsored by the government. One such exhibition, the Japan Expo in Paris, attracts a quarter of a million visitors each year. At Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con, which I attended in 2022 along with 100,000 others, the Japanese consulate and All Nippon Airways both had stands.

But the government does more than simply send representatives to these events. In 2009 Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs designated three women in their twenties as ‘kawaii ambassadors’. Fashion model Yū Kimura represented Harajuku style, from the neighbourhood that’s often called the centre of kawaii. Misako Aoki was chosen to represent Lolita fashion, while the actor and stylist Shizuka Fujioka represented schoolgirl fashion.[51]

The culture of kawaii wouldn’t have travelled so far or so easily if the values it expressed – so evident in girls’ manga – hadn’t resonated so widely. Its ideals of cooperation and communication flow from valuing cuteness, a quality that finds power in the small and vulnerable, the childlike and unthreatening. However, although cuteness seems to be encoded in our genes, the human species is also notable for violence, war and conflict. A love of the cute seems to have played a role in our evolution, but how big a part did it play? How much does cuteness matter?

Notes

1   Aaron Herald Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 1–2.

2   Inuhiko Yomota, Essay on ‘Kawaii’ (Kawaii Ron), (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2006), pp. 29, 30. This word first appeared in the late twelfth century, after Sei Shonogan wrote The Pillow Book. It was a slang word used by the lower classes, while The Pillow Book employs the upper-class word utsukushi for her list of cute things (ibid., p. 33).

3   G. Esposito et al., ‘Baby, You Light-Up My Face: Culture-General Physiological Responses to Infants and Culture-Specific Cognitive Judgements of Adults’, PLoS ONE 9, 10: e106705 (2014), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106705.

4   Yomota, Essay on ‘Kawaii’, pp. 34, 73. See also Nittono, ‘The Two-Layer Model of “Kawaii”’, p. 81.

5   Yomota, Essay on ‘Kawaii’, p. 34.

6   Nittono, ‘The Two-Layer Model of “Kawaii”’, p. 82.

7   Masuda, ‘Shōjo Manga and its Acceptance’, p. 21.

8   Alisha Saikia, ‘Kyara in Japanese Religious Spaces’, Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 13 (2021), p. 258.

9   Unique ‘design manholes’ are common across Japan, and dedicated enthusiasts travel the country to see them. See Allan Richarz, ‘On the hunt for Japan’s elaborate, colorful manhole covers’, Atlas Obscura (15 March 2019), www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-manhole-covers (accessed 5 October 2022).

10   Slade, ‘Cute men in contemporary Japan’, p. 83.

11   Ibid., p. 84.

12   Masafumi Monden, ‘The Beautiful Shōnen of the Deep and Moonless Night: The Boyish Aesthetic in Modern Japan’, ASIEN 147 (April 2018), pp. 66, 86.

13   Slade, ‘Cute men in contemporary Japan’, pp. 85–6.

14   Ibid., p. 87. One reason for this is that kawaii is not merely a ‘look’, but is also a set of behavioural norms and expectations. This applies to the rest of the world as well, because when men embrace the childlike and whimsical through cuteness, and willingly display vulnerability, kindness and sensitivity, they disrupt the claim made by traditional masculinity that men are the more mature, serious, strong and socially useful gender. Ibid., pp. 79, 85–6.

15   Monden, ‘The Beautiful Shōnen of the Deep and Moonless Night’, p. 85. Kawaii culture’s impact on Japanese masculinity has continued to grow. ‘Kawaii masculinity is omnipresent in contemporary Japanese culture, from advertising to television programs, from magazines to fashion media, exerting influence upon the self-image of contemporary Japanese men.’ Ibid., p. 65.

16   Leila Madge, ‘Capitalizing on “Cuteness”: The Aesthetics of Social Relations in a New Postwar Japanese Order’, Japanstudien 9, 1 (1998), p. 160.

17   Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, ed. L. Skove and B. Moeran (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), pp. 243–5.

18   Tomiko Yoda, ‘Girlscape: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan’, Media Theory in Japan, ed. Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahiten (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 178.

19   Ibid., pp. 173–99.

20   Jennifer S. Prough, Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), p. 110.

21   Shamoon, Passionate Friendship, p. 140.

22   Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, pp. 222–4. See also Mio Bryce, ‘Cuteness needed: The new language/communication device in a global society’, International Journal of the Humanities 2, 3 (2006), p. 2269.

23   Ibid., p. 222. See also Mio Bryce, ‘Visuality of writing in our modern world of multimedia and mass communication: Focusing on the written Japanese’, Proceedings of the Marking Our Difference Conference (Melbourne: School of Languages, University of Melbourne, 2003), pp. 245–6.

24   Bryce, ‘Visuality of writing in our modern world of multimedia and mass communication’, p. 245.

25   Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, pp. 223–4. By the mid-1980s 10 per cent of male middle-school and 17.5 per cent of male high-school students were also using this kawaii handwriting style, and it was estimated that more than five million young people were using the new script in total. (Ibid.)

26   Ibid., p. 222.

27   Orbaugh, ‘Busty Battlin’ Babes’, p. 213.

28   Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, p. 220. As the schoolgirls who invented the cute writing style became adults, they continued their love of the kawaii aesthetic, which had a broad influence on the design of everything from fashion to household objects. Eiji Ōtsuka, Girls’ United Red Army: Subculture and Postwar Democracy (Kanojo tachi no rengô sekigun: sabukaruchâ to sengo minshushugi), (Tokyo: Bungeishunjûsha, 1996), pp. 183–6.

29   Matt Alt, Pure Invention: How Japan’s pop culture conquered the world (New York: Random House, 2020), p. 189.

30   Ibid., pp. 192–3.

31   These days, however, Japanese schoolgirls have moved on. Emoji have been supplanted by animated drawings called stamps or stickers that communicate a precise burst of kawaii emotion.

32   Kinko Ito, ‘Manga in Japanese History’, in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 26, 29–32.

33   Deborah Shamoon, ‘Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics and Contemporary Japanese Culture’, ibid., p. 139.

34   Ibid., pp. 35–6.

35   Ibid.

36   Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, pp. 120, 124. See also Shamoon, Passionate Friendship, p. 99.

37   Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, p. 125.

38   Ibid., p. 124.

39   Prough, Straight from the Heart, p. 38.

40   Ito, ‘Manga in Japanese History’, p. 41.

41   Deborah Shamoon, ‘Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo Manga’, Mechademia Second Arc 2, 1 (January 2007) p. 3.

42   Takahashi, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, p. 129.

43   Ibid., p. 132.

44   Orbaugh, ‘Busty Battlin’ Babes’, p. 213.

45   Patrick W. Galbraith, ‘Seeking an alternative: “male” shōjo fans since the 1970s’, in Shōjo Across Media: Exploring ‘Girl’ Practices in Contemporary Japan, ed. Jaqueline Bernt, Kazumi Nagaike and Fusami Ogi (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 357–9.

46   Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), p. 48.

47   Tomoko Yamada, ‘Profile and Interview with Tomoko Yamada’, Interview by Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga, p. 140.

48   The original Sailor Moon manga runs to eighteen volumes. The first anime ran for five seasons; a reboot, Sailor Moon Crystal, ran for three. There have been numerous animated films, musical theatrical productions and television shows based on the series. Kathryn Hemmann, ‘Short Skirts and Superpowers: The Evolution of the Beautiful Fighting Girl’, U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 47 (2014), pp. 53–4.

49   Yukari Fujimoto, ‘Sailor Moon! The Treasure Box All the Girls Want’, in Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga, p. 33.

50   Moto Hagio, ‘Profile and Interview with Hagio Moto’, Interview by Masami Toku, in Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga, p. 210.

51   Press Conference, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (12 March 2009), www.mofa.go.jp/announce/press/2009/3/0312.html.

OceanofPDF.com

9

ARE WE A SELF-DOMESTICATED SPECIES?

The American cute aesthetic dominated the twentieth century, but the twenty-first may well belong to kawaii. The spread of girls’ manga in particular shows that it’s not only the visual aspects of kawaii that are finding a receptive global audience, but also its associated values and behaviours, such as empathy and an appreciation of cooperation. Could the fact that we evolved to feel cuteness have been important in developing these qualities that are part of kawaii?

Posing this question puts us on treacherous ground. A century-old stereotype held that Japan was a ‘nation of children’, and the spread of kawaii could easily revive this view. My fellow Cute Studies scholar Erica Kanesaka has noted that kawaii is already perceived in the US as a particularly childlike form of cuteness, which fuels the false stereotype that Asian American women are subservient by nature.[1]

Although Stephen Jay Gould wrote that neoteny made adult Homo sapiens into permanent children, he was careful to note that our attachment to cute features is as likely to be as much learned as it is biologically programmed.[2] Without his caution, we might reach the inaccurate conclusion that the Japanese evolved to be cuter than other ethnic groups.

Konrad Lorenz, the father of cute studies, is a good example of this erroneous way of thinking. While he didn’t write about the Japanese in particular, he did believe that some people are more domesticated than others. However, if we evolved to be tame as the human self-domestication hypothesis suggests, then I believe this change happened long ago and applies to our entire species. We’ll take a closer look at Lorenz’s ideas later on.

Did cuteness make us human?

The human self-domestication hypothesis has recently attracted much interest, but there is huge debate about how it may have happened; unlike wolves, no one adopted or fed us to set us on the path to tameness. In addition we’re still capable of inflicting horrific violence; were we even more violent earlier in our evolution? If so, how did we get rid of those highly aggressive individuals so that the friendlier ones could pass on their genes to subsequent generations?

The Siberian-fox experiment suggests that tameness, expressed by friendliness towards other species, is the most important factor in domestication. Looking into dog domestication, we found that when wolves became dogs they seemed to have gained the ability to view people as family, and vice versa. Unlike the foxes in the experiment, dogs may have been active partners in their own domestication.

Neoteny is closely related to domestication. Dogs are like wolves that never grew up[3] – in fact they seem to be stuck in a juvenile phase. Dogs can also make friends with each other in adulthood, a quality lacking in wolves.[4] Though many animals lack such flexible sociality, Homo sapiens has it in abundance. Perhaps humans found a way to make tameness into a survival advantage.

As Gould explained, humans show ‘growth in reverse’ by remaining youthful as they mature. Gould argued that aspects of this neoteny emerged because people find it cute,[5] and many prominent evolutionary biologists now consider it to be the most important feature within the concept of self-domestication.[6] Qualities associated with youth, such as the ability to learn new things, are a crucial part of what makes us human, and our propensity to play throughout our lives allows for their expression.

If humans are a domesticated species, then our penchant for neotenic cuteness may be due to changes in our behaviour and appearance that began at least 100,000 years ago. Cuteness, in other words, may be more than just a preference; it could have been part of the reason we became Homo sapiens in the first place. But now we’re back to the chicken-versus-egg problem. Cuteness may have influenced our evolution, but are we cute because we’re tame, or tame because we’re cute?

Konrad Lorenz and the Nazis

Lorenz once remarked that Neanderthals died out because they found Homo sapiens to be ‘cuter’ and preferred us over their own kind.[7] This idea was not taken seriously while it was assumed that humans had either outcompeted or violently exterminated Neanderthals to replace them, but it took on a different resonance with the discovery by scientists at the Max Planck Institute that the genome of modern humans includes Neanderthal DNA.[8] Neanderthals are not our direct ancestor – just as dogs descended from a type of wolf that is now extinct. Yet Homo sapiens was able to interbreed with Homo neanderthalensis, exactly as dogs can with modern wolves.

Are we cuter than Neanderthals? They had heavy eyebrow ridges, sloping foreheads and protruding jaws. Our heads are smaller and rounder, and our faces are shorter and flatter.[9] We have smaller teeth, jaws and noses – the same suite of traits that distinguishes dogs from their wild wolf forebears.[10] Perhaps Lorenz was right and Neanderthals did prefer us to their own kind, but when he applied his knowledge of cuteness to modern humans he entered much more dangerous ground.

The child schema that Konrad Lorenz created in 1943 lists the neotenous characteristics that most people find cute. It has guided decades of research into the nature of cuteness, and I knew from the beginning that it would be key to the field of Cute Studies. However, when I began to delve more deeply into his work and life, I was horrified to discover that this eminent scientist had been a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. He was also a member of its Office of Race Policy and actively supported its ‘race science’ that led directly to mass murder.[11]

Like many other intellectuals who had become involved with Nazism, Lorenz repented after the war and his reputation survived intact. He shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 with colleagues who had opposed the Nazis, and who believed that Lorenz sincerely regretted his former support.[12]

Today most Cute Studies scholars assume that Lorenz’s child schema is unconnected with his Nazi past – if they know about it at all.[13] But is this really true? Human self-domestication was a key concept in his writings about human biology, and his ideas about cuteness (including his child schema) were tightly connected to his thinking on this subject. Doing more research, I discovered that Lorenz never abandoned the basic tenets that informed his ideas about cuteness – ideas that he propounded during the war and that were consistent with Nazi ideology. As far as I was concerned, this jeopardised the whole field of Cute Studies. I decided to take a closer look, to see if the racism that originally informed his ideas could be excised so easily.

The theory that humans resemble domesticated animals more than wild ones – that we tamed ourselves – has a long history. There are two main points of contention: first, did domestication occur in only some human populations or does it apply to everybody? Second, is it good or bad?

The argument over whether domestication applied to all humans goes back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle considered only settled farmers, village and city-dwellers to be domesticated, while other philosophers disagreed. Theophrastus believed not only that domestication was a human universal, but also that humans were the most domesticated species.[14]

Both these ancient Greek philosophers considered human domestication to be a positive development, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was seen in a negative light – and this is where Lorenz enters the picture. Although many German intellectuals at the time believed that ‘Aryan’ people were racially superior, Lorenz and others believed that their supposed aesthetic and moral virtues came about because they were the least-domesticated racial type.[15]

Throughout his life Lorenz continued to believe that instincts drove human behaviour, but he thought domestication had altered these instincts and the behaviours they triggered, especially relating to ‘family cohesion, parental care and defense of offspring’. In other words, he believed that our propensity to regard anything other than our own babies as cute represented a weakening of our parental instincts.[16]

Lorenz believed that as an instinct becomes weaker, it is more easily triggered, leading to what he called ‘misplaced responses’. For example, he wrote that when small dogs are ‘taken over by childless women as substitute objects for their parental care’, the love they lavish on their pets represents a misfiring of crucial parental instincts. Lorenz goes on to assert that cute dogs, dolls and other ‘dummies’ that trigger our feelings have resulted in a ‘coarsening of social behaviour’.[17]

Lorenz’s ideas were challenged after the Second World War by many scientists,[18] but he never relinquished the view that instinct drives our emotions and value judgements.[19] For this reason, he believed that the profligacy of our cuteness response – the fact that we often feel animals and objects are cute, as well as babies – was a bad thing. His child schema was meant to illustrate this idea.[20]

According to Lorenz, if an instinct misfires due to the effects of domestication, then we make an ‘improper’ aesthetic judgement. But who decides which is a proper response? Why, none other than Lorenz himself – and this is where the danger of his ideas lies. Cuteness may be a biological response to certain stimuli that is part of our DNA, but we should be careful in applying insights concerning our biology to cultural aesthetic judgement. Doing so places us on a slippery slope that too often leads to ethnic stereotyping and discrimination against those deemed to be less evolved or ‘fit’ to survive.

Current research holds that cuteness attracts our attention before conscious thought is possible, priming our brain to be ready for social, affiliative behaviour. However, this is followed by a ‘cognitive appraisal’ period in which we think about what we’ve seen. Our individual upbringing and cultural background play a part in what we subsequently feel and do. Our biological response to something cute does not dictate our behaviour towards it.

I think the fact that we can find dolls and puppies cute is a positive feature of our evolutionary toolkit, not a flaw, as Lorenz thought. A preference for the adorable may have shaped human evolution through adaptation and selection, contributing to or even causing us to become domesticated. On the other hand, we don’t always act tame and lovable. If there really were undomesticated bullies running around 100,000 years ago, how did the calmer individuals among them get rid of these tyrants and pass on their genes?

The myth of the alpha male

The ongoing debate over human self-domestication hinges on exactly how we could have managed to rid society of enough highly aggressive individuals to favour the evolution of more friendly, cooperative members. No one knows for sure, and studies of ancient human DNA don’t reveal much about the motivations of people who lived 100,000 or 200,000 years ago.

Chimps are our closest living relatives, but the levels of violence in their societies are at least several hundred times higher than those of any human community.[21] If we were initially highly aggressive, like apes, then how did we get rid of the human ‘alpha males’, those tyrants who viciously fought to maintain their position at the top of the heap? If such an alpha male was killing his sexual rivals to ensure his genes were passed on, how did the less aggressive individuals defeat him?

Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, proposes that coordinated executions were a solution to this problem. In his view, the human development of language helped get rid of alpha males. Once we could talk, groups of lower-status males could get together and plan in secret, before killing a threatening tyrant for the common good. These more tolerant, cooperative men then had the chance to pass on their genes. In Wrangham’s view, executions kick-started self-domestication. Eventually, through the systematic elimination of highly aggressive males, we became the relatively calm and cooperative species of today.[22]

Wrangham’s theory proposes that males with more self-control unleashed lethal violence on aggressive bullies who were making life miserable for everyone else. There’s no cuteness in his dog-eat-dog world. On the opposite side are scientists who take a more positive view of the human condition. ‘I can’t believe that we are still bowing to Freud and Lorenz,’ the primatologist Frans de Waal writes. ‘The idea that we can achieve optimal sociality only by subduing human biology is antiquated.’[23]

Unlike Wrangham, de Waal does not believe that aggression is a defining trait of the human condition. Throughout his career he became personally acquainted with many chimpanzee alpha males – and he says that most were the exact opposite of a tyrannical bully. This is because chimpanzee males rise with assistance from others in the troop. ‘The smallest male may become alpha if he has the right supporters,’ writes de Waal.[24] This is a far cry from Wrangham’s assertion that the physically strongest and most aggressive male will always win out.

Although the execution of tyrants by groups of subordinate males may have been a factor in human self-domestication, it’s unlikely to have been the only one. Wrangham’s account is centred on men and assumes that prehistoric human communities were all patriarchal and authoritarian.[25] He dismisses any role for women in human self-domestication, on the basis that they are less physically strong.[26] After all, in primate communities the alpha female is lower in status than the alpha male. How could females in this situation have exercised any degree of authority?

In 2016 an alpha chimpanzee named Mama attained posthumous Internet fame when a video of her saying an affectionate deathbed goodbye to her longtime caretaker, Jan van Hooff, at a zoo in the Netherlands went viral. Mama lived to be fifty-nine, and during her long life she figured out how females could wield power in male-dominated primate societies. Frans de Waal knew Mama, too. He writes: ‘Mama was an active player in male power struggles. She would rally female support for one male or another, who would be in her debt if he managed to get to the top. This male would do well to stay on her good side, however, because if Mama turned against him, his career might be over.’[27]

While de Waal admits that females have not been observed to do this in the wild, the fact that this behaviour exists in captivity shows that the capacity for it is there.

Sapolsky’s baboons

In captivity, aspects of animals’ nature that are suppressed in the wild have a chance to find expression. Yet under the right conditions, even communities of wild primates can embrace the gentler side of their nature.

In 1978 the primatologist Robert Sapolsky studied social and psychological stress in baboons in the Serengeti savanna. The troop he chose had every opportunity for a relaxed lifestyle. Food was plentiful and predators scarce, yet aggressive interactions between troop members abounded. ‘Basically,’ writes Sapolsky, ‘baboons have about a half dozen solid hours of sunlight to devote to being rotten to each other.’[28]

Then, in the early 1980s, disaster struck. The baboons had been sleeping about half a mile from a tourist lodge that began dumping its rubbish in an open pit. Food was even more plentiful there than in the forest, but another troop had already discovered this bounty, so only the most aggressive males from Sapolsky’s troop went there to forage. In 1983, however, an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis from infected meat killed all the baboons that went to the dump for food; 46 per cent of the males in Sapolsky’s troop died, leaving only the less aggressive ones.[29]

By 1986 troop behaviour had changed markedly. There was more mutual grooming and affiliation with females, and the dominance hierarchy was considerably relaxed, with fewer violent interactions. As tolerance increased in higher-ranking males, subordinate males showed lower stress levels, and less aggression was directed at females.[30] Furthermore, when new adolescent males joined the troop, they adopted this mellower social style. Sapolsky’s research concludes that this occurred because the females of the troop showed the new males the same affiliative manner as they showed the resident males.[31]

De Waal’s alpha female, Mama, and Sapolsky’s tolerant baboons demonstrate that females can play a role in reducing male aggression, but these examples are of single troops of animals – extending the self-domestication paradigm to an entire species would require a predator-free habitat, an environment in which tolerance has a chance to thrive, and millennia for it to come to fruition. Apart from zoo enclosures or disease outbreaks that kill off all the aggressive males, how could these conditions be met?

Self-domestication

When animals live on an island without predators they gradually change. Birds might lose their wings. Large animals become smaller. One prehistoric elephant species ended up only three feet tall. Other changes in island populations include a delay in sexual maturity and fewer differences between males and females.

This new environment also affects behaviour. Animals on islands become less aggressive towards each other. Like the flightless birds of New Zealand, they may lose their fear of strangers and appear almost tame. This suite of changes, so prevalent that biologists have dubbed it the Island Rule, is part of the domestication syndrome. Could populations of animals that moved to isolated islands have tamed themselves? Testing this hypothesis requires us to compare an island population to a mainland one. Sadly, the miniature elephants died out long ago,[32] but a chimpanzee-like species called bonobos may provide an answer.

One or two million years ago the bonobo’s chimp-like ancestor became isolated south of the Congo River. Unlike the population on the other side of the river, these primates had a tremendous advantage: a lack of gorillas, for the two species compete for the herbs that form their diet when fruit is not available.[33] Could the Island Rule apply here?

Like chimpanzees, bonobos share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans, making these two ape species our closest living relatives. However, due to their remote habitat, little was known about bonobos until recently – and it turns out that they are quite different from chimpanzees, with smaller heads, a higher forehead, pink de-pigmented lips, smaller heads and canines and a flatter, more open face.[34] The white patch on their tails that chimpanzees lose after becoming adults persists in bonobos throughout their lives.[35]

But the domestication syndrome manifests in more than simply their appearance. According to the evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, ‘Like bonobos, juvenile chimps are very tolerant, peaceful. When they go through puberty, they change. So what happens to adolescent bonobos? Nothing! They don’t change. Their levels of play, their levels of sharing and sex, it all keeps going. They are Peter Pans.’[36]

Compared to chimpanzees, aggression is relatively rare in bonobo society.[37] Unlike male-dominated chimpanzee society, females rule in groups of bonobos, with the alpha female at the top. Since females are not as physically strong as males, they dominate by working together to punish overly aggressive males.

Though wild male bonobos are much less aggressive than chimpanzees, female bonobos are more aggressive than their chimpanzee counterparts. The ability to control male behaviour by working together gives them the freedom to choose their mates – and they tend to choose the gentler and more peaceful males, a preference that over time may have created a friendlier society.[38]

All in all, bonobos seem to be a prime example of a self-domesticated species. The more I read about them, the more I wanted to see this matriarchal ape society for myself. Since the Congo is rather far away, I settled for a trip to the zoo.

San Diego Zoo has had a troop of bonobos since 1960. Considering the rarity of these animals, you’d think they’d be on prominent display, but their enclosure feels hidden away. Once you have passed the gorillas and made your way down an unmarked staircase you have a choice between entering the aviary or following a path marked with a sign bearing the outline of an unidentified primate. Walk down this trail and the bonobos appear before you.

Even though it’s off the beaten track, it’s rare to find oneself alone at the bonobo enclosure; the San Diego Zoo bonobos have a number of hardcore fans.[39] Some of them only reveal their knowledge of the animals if you strike up a conversation, while others talk to all who will listen. When I first arrived at the enclosure, I saw that some of the bonobos had come up to the thick Plexiglas that separates them from the viewing area. A few seemed particularly playful, so I asked one of the more talkative fans to take a video of me interacting with them. ‘Sure!’ she said. ‘Go over and get down next to them. Is your camera on?’

To my astonishment, as soon as the camera was in her hands, she began to make some sort of ape noises. There was no way the bonobos could hear her hooting and grunting behind that thick glass wall – I could only conclude that she was training me to play with them by encouraging me towards more overt and demonstrable behaviour. And it worked. My gestures became broader and I grinned at the bonobos, and they gestured right back at me.

The bonobos are one of the crown jewel exhibits of the San Diego Zoo, so why are they so difficult to find? I wondered whether it was anything to do with American puritanism, because bonobos have a lot of sex.

Most mammals are only interested in sex during the period when conception is possible. Bonobos, however, use sexual contact for other, non-reproductive purposes.[40] Humans do this too, of course – though we are much more discriminating about our partners. Bonobo sex is different. Any situation that attracts the interest of two or more bonobos tends to be dealt with in a way that relieves possible tension, and sex is one way to accomplish this – both within and between the sexes and in a variety of positions.[41] On the infrequent occasions when aggression between bonobos does occur, they may use sexual contact as a form of reconciliation, or bystanders will offer sex to console the loser.[42]

I witnessed only one sexual interaction at the San Diego Zoo, which was greeted enthusiastically by the bonobo fans and with a degree of mild hysteria by the families who happened upon the scene by chance. As the day grew hotter, the bonobos became tired of the humans on the other side of the glass and sought shelter from the sun in a small cave at the far end of their enclosure. The cave was barely visible to visitors, but it looked like the bonobos were cuddling, touching and even kissing.

Language as a domesticating force

Did prehistoric humans once greet each other with sex instead of a handshake? Did alpha females rule over males through the power of coalitions? There is no firm evidence either way, and there are possible alternatives to the problem of managing male aggression. After all, humans have language – an advantage that apes lack.

Charles Darwin was famously worried about the peacock’s tail because he couldn’t see how natural selection could have resulted in such an extravagant feature without there being a survival advantage. He eventually decided that males must have evolved such tails because female peacocks preferred them. His second book, The Descent of Man, proposed the theory of sexual selection, which posits that aesthetic qualities are important to mate choice. In other words, if female peacocks preferred tail feathers with more eyespots, then it could have led to male birds developing more and more ostentatious tails.

According to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, women may have influenced human self-domestication by mating with men they preferred. The development of language may have assisted this process because it enables new ways to evaluate potential mates.[43]

Less aggressive males would have been even more attractive if they were willing to help care for children. Konrad Lorenz disapproved of our tendency to find dolls and animals cute, because he thought that our original instinct had been to care only for our own children. But what if caring for other people’s children became an evolutionary advantage? Perhaps the cuteness response is triggered so easily because the advantages of caring for children outweighed the disadvantages – and even if it spilled over to encompass animals and objects, it was worth the extra energy expended.

We cannot compare childcare in early Homo sapiens with that of our extinct ancestors, but we can look to other primates to see how they care for their young. Most primate babies are born looking different from adults. Following Lorenz’s child schema, some have additional attractive traits, such as bright-pink skin around their ears, feet and rump that helps them stand out from the landscape. The more neonatal a young ape is, the cuter it appears – to human eyes at least. But do apes feel the same?[44]

In fact, most primates are fascinated by babies – and the younger, the better. The social biologist Sarah Hrdy feels that the neural underpinnings of the child schema are in place in apes; in other words, they may feel cuteness, too.[45]

Still, whether or not they are felt to be cute, there is a big difference in how babies are cared for in primate societies. Ape mothers are notoriously possessive and won’t allow others to hold their babies,[46] and chimpanzee mothers stay in constant contact with their babies for the first few years of their lives. Lorenz would consider this to be a pure biological cuteness response; in his view, the cute appearance and behaviour of a baby chimpanzee causes such strong caregiving impulses in its mother that she is incapable of allowing anyone else to help her.

Human mothers, on the other hand, are willing to share the care of their infants with others, an ability that likely started at an early stage in our evolution. Sarah Hrdy and other biologists argue that the cooperative raising of children, in which fathers, grandparents, siblings and other caregivers all play a role, was necessary to the development of the enhanced cooperative and collaborative skills that mark the difference between humans and other primates.[47]

Why would our ancestral mothers have deviated from ape behaviour and allowed others to help take care of their precious babies? As hominids became smarter and began to use tools, their young took longer to mature and required more energy for their larger brains. Working together to find higher-calorie foods could have increased trust among close-knit groups and enabled the beginning of cooperative childcare[48] – and choosing less aggressive males as mates may have accelerated the process.

Are newborn babies cute?

Unlike ape babies, human infants tend not to be as cute when they are born as they become six months later.[49] However, chemical changes in mothers’ brains – such as increased oxytocin, the ‘hug hormone’, and prolactin, which is associated with milk production – cause them to feel fierce attachment towards their newborn children.[50] This begs a question: what about fathers, siblings and grandparents? The theory of cooperative childcare requires them to form attachments, too – even before the newborns reach peak cuteness.

It turns out that fathers and others in close proximity to newborns also show elevated levels of oxytocin and even prolactin, though to a lesser degree than mothers.[51] In addition, when new fathers are put into an MRI scanner, their brains show changes in areas that are linked to the rewarding experiences of attachment, empathy and caretaking.[52]

In this way, newborn babies receive the care they need from both mothers and other relatives even before they attain peak cuteness. Despite this, they have two significant cute characteristics that appear on Lorenz’s child schema: big round heads and pleasingly plump bodies.

No other primate babies are as plump as humans when they are born, making it likely that this trait evolved after our last shared ancestor with apes.[53] A ‘bonny babe’, in its original meaning, meant plump and healthy-looking,[54] while P. T. Barnum’s baby shows had a category for the ‘fattest’ baby; even today, birth announcements often include the newborn’s weight. Extra fat helps to feed a greedy brain immediately after birth, but it also increases the baby’s resilience when faced with a childhood illness. Once parents noticed this, it’s likely they started to prefer chubbier babies.

Being pleasingly plump is one of the few cute ways in which newborns can appeal to adults. Others include their round heads, as well as the fleeting ‘fairy smiles’ that flash over newborns’ faces before they begin directing ‘social smiles’ at around four or five weeks of age.[55]

The real power of cuteness, however, doesn’t kick in until later. When it does, cute babies prompt not only caretaking behaviour, but a wide range of social engagement. For example, from around four months, infant laughter prompts the release of oxytocin – even in non-parents.[56] Studies have found that five to six months is the period of peak cuteness (although high levels persist for several years); at this age babies start to babble spontaneously, which along with other cute attributes, such as laughter, attracts positive attention and prompts adults to start treating them as independent psychological agents.[57]

A positive reinforcement loop may have operated here. As highly aggressive adults were gradually weeded out of the gene pool and domestication began, cuter babies would have received more care, accelerating the process. If babies actively solicited their own socialisation, it would have contributed to this feedback loop. But are they able to identify someone who wants to help them?

How babies deploy their own cuteness

The Infant Cognition Center at Yale University has conducted what must be one of the cutest experiments ever designed, in order to investigate how much babies understand about their relations with others. They showed six- and ten-month-old babies two simple dramas. In the first, a red wooden circular block with googly eyes attempts to climb a green hill. When it fails, a yellow googly-eyed triangular block appears to help it over the crest.[58] The second drama offers a dramatic twist: as the red block struggles up the hill, a blue square block suddenly appears at the top and pushes it back down the hill.

After watching these two scenarios, the babies were presented with a tray holding the same yellow triangle and blue square. Virtually all the infants immediately reached for the friendly yellow triangle,[59] demonstrating that even babies are equipped with the skills to evaluate the actions of others and make decisions about who is likely to help them.[60]

In a second part of the experiment, the Yale team showed the red circle approaching either the yellow triangle that helped it or the blue square that hindered its progress. When the circle approached the square, the ten-month-old babies evinced surprise, while the six-month-olds did not. The older group could understand that other people are intentional agents: a change that happens to babies in a cascade of related new abilities termed ‘the nine-month revolution’.[61] At around this age babies begin to understand that others have goals and plans that may include them, and they start to care whether or not these are realised. They go out of their way to be helpful, and soon demonstrate pride when their actions are met with approval, and embarrassment when they fail.[62]

It’s no accident that these abilities develop when children are at peak levels of cuteness. ‘Human infants have been selected to be activists and salesmen, agents negotiating their own survival,’ writes Sarah Hrdy.[63] She is convinced that this was due to our ancestors having a preference for cute baby behaviour as well as appearance.[64] As they evolved to take advantage of multiple caretakers, babies who were better at figuring out who was likely to help them were more likely to survive into adulthood and reproduce.[65] However, according to Hrdy’s theory cuteness influenced our evolution over millions of years and included all of the genus Homo, including Neanderthals. Could we have tamed ourselves without becoming a domesticated species?

The egg came first

Evidence is mounting for the human self-domestication hypothesis, but it remains unproven. Some scientists argue against the very existence of the domestication syndrome because it operates inconsistently across species.[66] Others question the operation of the neural crest in making species tame,[67] or propose that control of aggression and the advent of social emotions derived from another source, such as communal music-making.[68]

There are two paths by which cuteness may have made us human: through a female preference for calmer, more tolerant mates or through a proclivity shared by many child caretakers for cuter, more social babies. Both paths take cute, affiliative behaviour into account as well as appearance. The linguist Stephen Levinson proposes that these two processes may well have operated in tandem, a dual operation that he calls ‘cuteness selection’.[69]

The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that we started to become tame as we evolved into Homo sapiens. Levinson, however, believes that our neotenous appearance and empathic nature may have developed through cuteness selection even without domestication, although over a much longer timescale. He proposes that a preference for the adorable, for the friendly and cooperative, made us ‘mind-readers’ who could reflexively grasp others’ intentions, and that this is what made language possible down the road.[70]

Earlier, I posed a chicken-versus-egg conundrum by asking if we are cute because we’re tame, or tame because we’re cute? Even if we are not domesticated like the chicken, I think we’ve solved the puzzle. Whether it took the form of a long, slow arc or a relatively quick cascade, whether by adaptation or selection, I believe we consistently chose to be around the more open, curious, social individuals among us – traits increasingly signalled by a youthful, neotenous appearance. In this way, our evolution was guided by a preference for cuteness and its associated qualities. The egg came first.

Notes

1   Erica Kanesaka, ‘Kawaii Globalization & Asian America: An Intimate History’, in Kawaii: The Emergence and Evolution of Cuteness in Japanese Girls’ Culture (New York: The Japan Foundation, July 2022), www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8s_ZvM1om0.

2   Gould, ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, p. 101.

3   Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 57.

4   Ibid., p. 76.

5   Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 350.

6   Šimić et al., ‘Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication’, p. 13, dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom11010002.

7   Barbara Schweder, response to Doug Jones et al., ‘Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-Cultural Evidence and Implications’, Current Anthropology 36, 5 (December 1995), p. 741.

8   M. Kuhlwilm et al., ‘Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals’, Nature 530 (2016), pp. 429–33, doi.org/10.1038/nature16544.

9   Matteo Zanella et al., ‘Dosage analysis of the 7q11.23 Williams region identifies BAZ1B as a major human gene patterning the modern human face and underlying self-domestication’, Science Advances 5, 12 (4 December 2019), p. 7, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw7908.

10   Constantina Theofanopoulou et al., ‘Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from comparative genomics’, PLoS ONE 12, 10, e0185306 (2017), p. 3, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185306.

11   Boria Sax, ‘What is a “Jewish Dog”? Konrad Lorenz and the Cult of Wildness’, Society and Animals 5, 1 (1997), p. 18. Peter Klopfer writes that Lorenz’s ‘association of the proud and the beautiful with Aryan ideals and the inferior with urban Jews and gypsies and other decadent products of domestication are repeatedly voiced in manuscripts or letters’ during the war. Peter Klopfer, ‘Konrad Lorenz and the National Socialists: On the Politics of Ethology’, International Journal of Comparative Psychology 7, 4 (1994), p. 205. Though Lorenz’s obsession with degeneration and eugenics may have pre-dated the Nazis, harnessing these ideas to the National Socialist platform of ‘racial hygiene’ gave Lorenz higher prestige and a bigger stage. Theodora J. Kalikow, ‘Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943’, Journal of the History of Biology 16, 1 (Spring 1983), p. 56.

12   Klopfer, ‘Konrad Lorenz and the National Socialists’, p. 204.

13   When I first began to work with other scholars to study cuteness, my European colleagues were quick to note Lorenz’s connection with the Nazis. They were referring to two articles he published in German during the war. But the English translations of Lorenz’s work that appeared after the war are scrubbed clean, which explains why only my German-speaking colleagues had known about his racist ideas.

14   Helen M. Leach, ‘Selection and the Unforeseen Consequences of Domestication’, in Rebecca Cassidy and Molly H. Mullin, eds, Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 93–4.

15   Kalikow, ‘Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943’, pp. 47–8. See also Sax, ‘What is a “Jewish Dog”?’, p. 15.

16   Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Vol. 2, pp. 164–5.

17   Ibid., pp. 154, 166.

18   Daniel S. Lehrman, ‘Semantic and Conceptual Issues in the Nature–Nurture Problem’, Development and Evolution of Behavior, ed. Lester R. Aronson et al. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1970), pp. 17–52. See also R. A. Hinde, Animal Behavior: A synthesis of ethology and comparative psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); and R. A. Hinde, Ethology: Its nature and relations with other sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

19   Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Vol. 2, p. 341 n.38.

20   Ibid., p. 154.

21   Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox, p. 19.

22   Ibid., pp. 128–41.

23   Frans de Waal, ‘What animals can teach us about politics’, Guardian (12 March 2019).

24   Ibid.

25   Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox, p. 215.

26   Ibid., p. 139.

27   Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), p. 14.

28   Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir: Love, Death and Baboons in East Africa (London: Random House, 2002), p. 15.

29   Robert M. Sapolsky and Lisa J. Share, ‘A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission’, PLoS Biology 2, 4 (April 2004), p. 0534.

30   Ibid., pp. 0535–7.

31   Ibid.

32   Did modern elephants domesticate themselves? They have floppy ears, which Darwin found to appear in at least some individuals of every domesticated species. Charles Darwin, Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1868), p. 301. Individual Asian elephants are easily tamed, and some have pale mottling on their skin that may be a result of reduced neural-crest cell migration. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox, p. 298 n.5. However, to answer this question we would need to compare the behaviour of modern elephants with their direct ancestor to see if they are less aggressive. Unfortunately these ancestors are extinct.

33   Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 106.

34   Frans de Waal, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’, Scientific American (1 June 2006), www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/ (accessed 25 October 2022).

35   Brian Hare et al., ‘The Self-Domestication Hypothesis: Evolution of Bonobo Psychology is Due to Selection Against Aggression’, Animal Behaviour 83, 3 (March 2012), p. 577.

36   Brian Hare in Claudia Dreifus, ‘Why bonobos don’t kill each other: A conversation with Brian Hare’, The New York Times (6 July 2010).

37   Hare et al., ‘The Self-Domestication Hypothesis’, pp. 576–7.

38   Hare and Woods, Survival of the Friendliest, p. 47. See also M. Surbeck et al., ‘Mate competition, testosterone and intersexual relationships in bonobos, Pan paniscus’, Animal Behaviour (2012), doi:10.1016/j. anbehav.2011.12.010.

39   Jeannette DeWyze, ‘San Diego Zoo’s Rare Bonobos, and the Superfans Devoted to the Zoo’s Once Forgotten Apes’, San Diego Reader (7 June 2017).

40   Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us (New York: Anchor Books, 2017), pp. 231–2.

41   de Waal, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’.

42   Zanna Clay and Frans de Waal, ‘Sex and strife: Post-conflict sexual contacts in bonobos’, Behaviour 152, 3–4 (10 February 2015), p. 16.

43   Prum, The Evolution of Beauty, pp. 242–3.

44   Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 222. See also Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape The Human Species (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), pp. 446, 449.

45   Hrdy, Mothers and Others, pp. 229, 233–4.

46   Ibid., pp. 233–5.

47   Melvin Konner, Women after all: Sex, evolution and the end of male supremacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015), p. 132.

48   Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Judith M. Burkart, ‘The emergence of emotionally modern humans: Implications for language and learning’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375, 20190499 (2020), pp. 1–2, dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0499.

49   Sherman and Haidt, ‘Cuteness and Disgust’, p. 4.

50   Hrdy, Mothers and Others, pp. 168–9.

51   Ibid., p. 169.

52   Pilyoung Kim et al., ‘Neural Plasticity in Fathers of Human Infants’, Society for Neuroscience 9, 5 (October 2014), doi:10.1080/17470919.201 4.933713.

53   Hrdy, Mother Nature, p. 477.

54   Ibid., p. 481.

55   Ibid., pp. 470, 483.

56   Eloise Stark et al., ‘Neurobiology of Human Parenting’, Handbook of Parenting, Vol. 2, Biology and Ecology of Parenting, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 251, 263. See also M. L. Kringelbach et al., ‘On Cuteness: Unlocking the Parental Brain and Beyond’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, 7 (July 2016), doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.05.003.

57   Sherman and Haidt, ‘Cuteness and Disgust’. See also Hrdy and Burkart, ‘The emergence of emotionally modern humans’.

58   These social judging skills vanished when the googly eyes were removed. ‘Study: Infants can judge naughty from nice’, CBS News (21 November 2007), www.cbsnews.com/news/study-infants-can-judge-naughty-from-nice/ (accessed 27 October 2022).

59   J. Kiley Hamlin et al., ‘Social evaluation by preverbal infants’, Nature 450, 22 (November 2007), p. 557.

60   The googly eyes, with large white areas, were used to indicate that a social interaction was taking place, even though the characters in the mini-drama were not anthropomorphic.

61   Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 61.

62   Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 117. See also Hrdy and Burkart, ‘The emergence of emotionally modern humans’, p. 4.

63   Hrdy, Mother Nature, p. 484.

64   Ibid.

65   Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 117.

66   Kathryn A. Lord et al., ‘The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2019), doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011.

67   Martin Johnsson et al., ‘The neural crest cell hypothesis: no unified explanation for domestication’, Genetics 26, 219, 1, iyab097 (Aug 2021), doi:10.1093/genetics/iyab097.

68   Dor Shilton et al., ‘Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control?’, in Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Vera Kempe and Zanna Clay, eds, Self-Domestication and Human Evolution (Lausanne: Fronteris Media SA, 2020), doi:10.3389/978-2-88966-093-3.

69   Stephen C. Levinson, ‘The interaction engine: Cuteness selection and the evolution of the interactional base for language’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377, 20210108 (2022), doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0108.

70   Ibid., pp. 3–6.

OceanofPDF.com

10

THE FUTURE OF CUTENESS

Now that we’ve seen the importance of cuteness in making us who we are as a species, let’s turn from the distant past to the near future and examine how it might influence the potential of new technologies and communities. Is cuteness just a passing trend or will it have a lasting influence?

As we have learned, the evolution of Mickey Mouse to become cuter and more youthful over time mirrors the path that humans took as we evolved from our primate ancestors. However, it’s not only Mickey who became younger. Following Stephen Jay Gould’s method of measuring craniofacial ratios, researchers have shown that between 1932 and 2016 some 230 North American cartoon characters underwent the same process of juvenilisation, matching Lorenz’s child schema.[1]

Children became a target demographic for profit-seeking corporations during this period, and over time companies learned what designs appealed to this new audience. Then the nostalgia market boomed as these children grew up and didn’t want to let go of their favourite childhood characters.[2] Jewel-encrusted Hello Kitty figures and Mickey Mouse Rolex watches weren’t made for children. Fan conventions around the world allow adults to celebrate their continuing love of superheroes, video games and animation, once considered childish pastimes.

The power of cute

A steady job, marriage and children are some of the traditional markers of adulthood, but for many people this is changing. Jobs are precarious in this era of globalisation, while getting married and starting a family are often postponed or deferred as more and more adults seek to prolong their youth. These desires are reflected in the surrounding culture as the boundaries between children and adults become blurred. It has become fashionable not only to look youthful but to act that way, as adults fighting against middle-aged stagnation embrace mental flexibility and energetic playfulness.[3] College students wear pyjamas to class, and senior citizens plan group trips to Disney World. ‘How to make fast friends while traveling?’ The New York Times asks, before advising, ‘Try playing pickleball’ – a game that I remember from school.[4]

Cuteness seems to be showing up in the adult world in other ways, too. On a recent trip to Seattle, my home town, I was surprised to find that inanimate objects seemed to have come to life while I was away. In my hotel a velvet bag below the sink was labelled: ‘Shh! The hairdryer is sleeping.’ Outside, the sign for a share-car parking lot read, ‘Zipcars live here.’ A train pulling into a station stated, ‘The doors will open on my right.’ This trend to treat objects as conscious agents deserving of empathy was familiar to me – it’s a long-standing tradition in Japan. Now it seemed to be spreading to the US.

Like cuteness, anthropomorphism is a cultural trend that wouldn’t have existed in the first place if we hadn’t had the ability to see objects, or other creatures, as capable of thinking and even inspiring empathy. All around the world, cuteness is associated with immaturity, but also with a kind of plasticity. Young children are cute: what they will become later in life is unclear. And the plasticity of immaturity has a kind of strength. Because humans take so much longer to mature, we retain the adaptability of youth and are able to learn new things throughout our lives.

Since cuteness is associated with these youthful qualities, it seems as if it could be an effective way for adults to signal that they still have what it takes to succeed in a precarious economy. However, cute objects tend to be small, unthreatening, neotenous and vulnerable. When adults embrace cuteness, they risk being accused of regressing to an infantile state.[5]

‘That’s so baby!’

Fan conventions often include people who dress up as their favourite fictional characters, so much so that the word ‘cosplay’ – a portmanteau of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, first employed in Japan – is now used worldwide. The young people who call themselves ‘furries’, however, dress up in head-to-toe animal costumes that are not connected to any particular character. Rather than being associated with a media franchise, these costumes are uniquely individual – and very cute.

Furries get a bad rap in the media, where they are nearly always portrayed as either childish or as weird sexual fetishists with a kink for fur. I always took these latter reports with a pinch of salt, however, because my cousin Sarah has been a furry since she was thirteen years old. It was her love of animals and art, rather than a sexual kink, that led her to the fandom.

When my cousin decided to make and design the full-body animal costumes called ‘fursuits’, she moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati with seven fellow furry artists. I decided to visit them just before they headed to Pittsburgh for a major furry convention called Anthrocon.

I arrived at Sarah’s house to find furry art on the walls and a cardboard cutout of an anime character in the living room. There were fish tanks and guinea-pig cages everywhere. In the basement workroom, racks of different-coloured fur lined the walls, and workstations with sewing machines alternated with desks covered in drawing and crafting supplies. Fursuits in various stages of construction hung from the ceiling.

I spent a few afternoons chatting with my cousin and her friends about their cutified world. Since I was talking to artists, it wasn’t surprising that their engagement had originated with artwork. They first encountered the fandom on social media, where they looked at anthropomorphic art and began following the artists who produced it. Online everyone takes another name – my cousin is known as Milky – and creates a ‘fursona’, an anthropomorphic animal representation of the self.

A fursona could be almost any animal, such as a dog, a fox or a hybrid of the two. Nearly all furries have one or more, and most hire an artist to produce a 2D drawing of their fursona, which they can use as an online profile picture or as a badge to wear at conventions.[6] When Sarah and her friends began to meet in person at conventions, they recognised each other by the images on their badges and called each other by their fursona names.

I was curious about how fursonas were chosen, so I asked Sarah and her friends about them. It turns out that most furries don’t base their fursonas on an established character, a famous animal or even a pet. They tend to come from inside, an act of individual creation. And although most furries acknowledge that they share characteristics with their fursona, they generally do not feel like an animal trapped in a human body.[7]

Whether furries make or buy their costumes, most of their content is created by furries themselves rather than by media conglomerates. Twenty-five per cent of furries identify as artists or writers, which means that a wide variety of designers are available to bring fursonas to life.[8] Many fursuits, which must be custom-made, cost as much as a few thousand dollars[9] – which leads to a phenomenon that the economic analyst Takurō Morinaga calls a ‘block economy’.

In the Tokyo neighbourhood of Akihabara many small shops and entertainment establishments cater to the diehard fans of manga and anime called ‘otaku’. These small-scale suppliers are often run by these very same fans, who produce a constant stream of new products while using the profits to fuel their own related obsessions. According to Morinaga, ‘The money circulates around from place to place within a narrow, closed market, and no one actually makes a profit.’ He continues, ‘Why would anyone produce things if they aren’t making money? The answer is love. The producers are otaku and they want to produce for other otaku who appreciate their work. They are pursuing what they love.’[10]

As I was speaking to Sarah and her friends, they were working frantically to finish fursuits and artworks in time for the Anthrocon furry convention in Pittsburgh, one of the largest in the world. On arrival, they headed straight for the Artists’ Alley, an immense hall filled with furry artists, which functioned as a block economy similar to the one in Japan. Sarah and her friends all bought works from artists they admired. And when the artists aren’t selling their work to customers and fans, they’re taking breaks to browse the other booths. As Morinaga says, they are pursuing not money, but what they love. And what they love is cute.

They even have their own slang word for it. When I showed Sarah’s furry crew a video of my meeting with the Russian domesticated foxes, they said, ‘That’s so baby!’ It’s a phrase that raises an interesting point. The association of cuteness with the childlike is baked into our genes, yet adults are increasingly indulging in cuteness, as the examples in this chapter show. I had to try it myself, and what better place than at Anthrocon, with 9,000 furries in attendance?

A hall full of cuteness

The David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh is a vast space that easily accommodates a group of a few thousand. The tiny figure standing far away on the upper balcony slowly gave precise instructions to make sure we all understood: ‘Make sure you’re standing on a yellow line.’ As everyone looked down at their feet, the voice boomed out again: ‘That was so cute!’ You see, this was not a gathering of humans. All 2,132 of us were dressed in furry animal costumes – including me. I’d borrowed a fursuit from one of my cousin’s friends, so there I was dressed as a lovable dog, with a light-blue nose and paws. I had transformed into one of the costumed animals that the other 7,000 furries at the convention had come to see.

The crowd was full of dogs and dragons, foxes and unicorns, but everyone had the same problem: fursuits are hard to see out of and move around in. Finding our place on the line involved a great deal of head-bowing and paw-shuffling. These exaggerated movements may have looked cute from the outside, but inside it was a different story – being wrapped in thick fur is hot and sweaty. Most fursuits have a small fan built into the snout that blows air towards the wearer’s face, but that doesn’t stop the sweat.

We were lining up to take a giant group photo before heading into the sweltering July sunshine to parade around the streets of the city. Thousands of Pittsburghers were waiting to watch the parade of fuzzy animal cuteness. People in the city may not fully understand furries, but they’ve learned to enjoy and even celebrate their presence.

Fig. 10.1: The author wearing a fursuit at Anthrocon.

During Anthrocon, animal costumes are everywhere – on the streets and in bars and restaurants (although no one eats with their head on). Fursuit heads are left next to hotel windows to mark rooms that are occupied by furries. If you look up near the convention hotel, a menagerie stares silently back at you.

Milling around in the convention hall with 2,000 other costumed furries, there’s no way to tell what people look like inside all that fur. You can’t even tell how tall someone is. Is a six-foot-tall person looking out of that giraffe’s eyes, or might a five-foot-tall person be looking out from hidden holes in its neck? And why does it matter? Fursuits grant an anonymity in real life that is otherwise only found online. Self-presentation is a choice expressed in fur, and the costumes’ design, colour and pattern are all decisions that make a unique statement. We lined up for the group photo and struck a pose in silence – furries don’t talk when suited up. The start of the parade was announced and we all began moving towards the door.

When I tried on the fursuit and looked into the mirror of my hotel room, a cute border collie with pointed ears and a blue nose looked back at me. Somehow I had thought that wearing the suit would be enough to instantly transform my whole being. I was confident that I would feel no hesitation in marching out of my hotel room and being surrounded by thousands of people – it wouldn’t be me that was walking.

But that’s not what happened. Even covered in fur, I felt exposed as I marched in front of the huge crowd. I walked normally and waved, as many other furries were doing, but I could sense immediately that this was not the best way to do it. Behind me I could hear laughter and applause as particularly popular furries gambolled, pranced and romped around, keen to please the audience. It made me realise that simply donning a fursuit is not enough; in order to realise the full potential of becoming a furry, a fursuit must be performed.

Having understood that simply donning a fursuit didn’t put me inside a furry’s head, I was left wondering what makes people want to join this fan community in the first place. Luckily I found the answer to this question in the registration hall, where a group of researchers in lab coats were distributing surveys. Officially known as the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, Furscience is a group of social scientists who have compiled data on tens of thousands of furries, which provides a fascinating window into the motivations and demographics of this unique fandom.

From the Furscience project data, we know the vast majority of furries feel more confident while wearing a suit; they find it easier to interact with people they don’t know, and feel that they can display another side of themselves, while being accepted by others.[11] It seems clear that fursuits help their wearers to become more sociable and enable them to better engage with others.

As we have already seen, cuteness is a mechanism that encourages social engagement. The fact that fursuits represent cute animals would seem to be a key factor in understanding why people want to wear them, but the Furscience collective has not yet considered the importance of cuteness to the furry fandom[12] – a strange omission, given that it is the dominant aesthetic. I was riding the lift at Anthrocon with several suited furries when the door opened for a few non-suited convention-goers. ‘An elevator full of cuteness!’ one remarked as he entered. Furries anthropomorphise animals with cuteness in mind, but the data from Furscience is no help here.

At Anthrocon, everyone wears large badges that prominently display an image of their fursona. Although these portraits can be self-made, many people commission a furry artist to make a custom image that can be used both as a badge and as an online avatar. When people recognise friends and greet each other, they look at their fursona badge or fursuit rather than their human face. For me, however, much of the fun was in watching the fursuits, which I can’t help but think of as the pinnacle of furry art.

I spent a lot of time in the convention centre, and just watching the fursuited figures walk around was calming, like bathing in a river of cuteness. The quality of the suits was very high, and I marvelled at the intricacy and detail of designs aimed at creating the cutest possible appearance.

Anthrocon had the usual convention fare of panels and workshops where people discussed various aspects of the fandom and their participation in it. The delight was palpable as people openly shared the source and nature of their fascination with anthropomorphic animals, but furry conventions differ significantly from other fan meet-ups because so much of the media they admire is produced by the furries themselves. Furry fandom is decentralised and independent; its content is almost wholly user-generated.[13] That’s why artists are central to the community.

As I talked with Sarah and her artist friends, I realised that things had been changing in their world. Older fursuits tended to look like Disney characters with a twist, like a wolf with a comical snarl. Recent fursuits, however, have the large eyes and open expressions of Japanese anime characters. The American cute and Japanese kawaii aesthetics come together in the furry world, and it was clear at Anthrocon that furries have a highly developed sense of both.

Through this combination, furries have developed a style of communication that pivots around cuteness. By concealing a wearer’s gender, ethnicity, body shape and other markers of difference, fursuits level the field and help to make interactions among both furries and their fans playful, rather than a struggle for dominance or position in a hierarchy. Concealing their human forms enables furries to express and celebrate their humanity.

Although there is a small but thriving furry scene in Japan, the newest forms of cuteness there are more high-tech. In a country with limited space for pets and a falling birthrate, the future of both animal and child-like kawaii may well belong to robots that offer companionship and entertainment on demand.

Sony’s robot dog

When industrial robots arrived in Japan in the 1970s, Nissan had a problem. It wasn’t with disgruntled workers – Japan’s economy was expanding so rapidly that no jobs were lost due to automation. The difficulty was that the robots all looked the same. When one of the huge machines broke down, the mechanics rushing to repair it found themselves wasting precious time trying to figure out which one needed their help. To solve the problem, workers attached photos of an actress or female entertainer to each machine and referred to it by her name. ‘Number three is down’ might leave a mechanic confused, but ‘Keiko is broken!’ would send him straight to the affected robot. ‘Having given the robots endearing nicknames,’ says economist Hiroshi Takeuchi, ‘the workers seemed to work together with them as though they were human co-workers.’[14]

The Japanese have long had a favourable attitude towards all things mechanical. In the Edo era, clockwork automata dolls (karakuri ningyō) performed tricks such as serving cups of tea. When a cup of tea was placed in the saucer held in the doll’s outstretched hands, it rolled forward to the guest at the end of the table, its head nodding politely.

The idea that robots could be helpful spread when the cuteness quotient increased in anime programmes like Astro Boy, which began in 1951. This boy robot, with his human friends and robot family, played a key role in promoting the idea that humans and robots can live together in harmony.[15] Astro Boy paved the way for innumerable cute, friendly robots in manga and anime; their popularity helps explain why, unlike in the West, Japan does not fear the robot apocalypse.[16] But Japan also leads the way in real robots – and nowadays they do more than just serve tea.

Sony introduced its robot dog AIBO in 1999. The name stands for Artificial Intelligence Robot, but the word ‘aibo’ is Japanese for ‘partner’. Sony’s AIBO is not simply a digital assistant that can turn the lights on or tell you the weather – it’s intended to be loved like a pet. However, as anyone with a real dog or cat knows, these animals have individual personalities and are not always obedient. Sony tried to build such traits into the AIBO, reasoning that occasional pushback would make for a more interesting companion. For example, the robot dog signalled ‘delight’ with a blue light and would hold out a paw to shake hands, but sometimes its light would turn red and it would refuse to shake. The robot dog was engineered, designed and marketed to appeal to customers as a high-tech gadget that was intelligent enough to communicate with its owners, rather than as a cute toy.[17]

The first 3,000 AIBOs sold out within twenty-five minutes, and 45,000 were sold in the first six months – despite a cost of 250,000 yen (US $2,100 at the time).[18] During its seven-year run, 150,000 AIBOs were sold worldwide.[19] However, contrary to Sony’s expectations, the technology was not its main appeal. Instead people liked the robot dog because it was cute, a selling point that caused unexpected problems. New owners loved to watch their AIBO ‘dance’ from side to side, which put added strain on motors that were not designed for so much use. Dressing their robot dogs in cute outfits also became popular, although the clothes tended to jam the moving parts and cause them to malfunction.[20]

Many owners treated their AIBO as a member of the family. It became more than simply a machine – they saw their robot dog as occupying an enigmatic place somewhere between mechanical object and living thing. The AIBO’s cute behaviour tipped the balance from admiration for its high-tech cleverness towards something else. For example, during one AIBO fan meet-up, a robot dog wandered over to the paper panel door that is common in Japanese homes and poked its head through it. It was such a cute sight that everyone laughed, even though ruining a shōji panel at someone else’s home is a significant social faux pas.[21] The assembled AIBO owners smiled because the robot’s action struck them as something a puppy would do, but it had actually been caused by a mechanical failure – the AIBO’s sensors hadn’t registered the door.

Sony stopped selling the AIBO in 2006 and ended its production of replacement parts in 2014. As AIBOs aged and began to break down, their owners mourned the deaths of their robotic dogs. But consolation was available. In 2015 nineteen AIBOs were given a formal funeral at a Buddhist temple; by 2018 the temple had performed 800 such ceremonies.[22]

In Japan there’s a long tradition of depositing worn-out household items at Buddhist temples to thank them for their long service. Dolls have their own monuments, so that people can pray for them in ‘death’.[23] ‘All things have a bit of soul,’ said one of the temple’s priests who officiated at the funerals of AIBOs.[24] This ancient animist belief informs the power of Japan’s ‘emotional tech’, which is specifically designed to forge a connection between machines and humans.[25]

In 2018 Sony released an updated robot dog, rebranded as the ‘aibo’. The new models have a wireless connection to the cloud, which allows them to learn from each other. The earlier models were supposed to ‘learn’ and develop a unique personality over time, but owners of the original AIBO didn’t notice many changes in their robot dogs. However, this time Sony has added an AI neural network. Every day an aibo’s experiences are uploaded to the cloud, processed through deep learning and downloaded back to the aibo while it recharges – or ‘sleeps’, in Sony’s parlance.[26] The new aibo employs this ‘emotional tech’ to register the feelings of its owner and elicit an emotional response. Will it be successful?

I’m not sure if I could love a robot dog. My friends who owned an AIBO said they grew tired of it after a while, which made me think about the difference between robot pets, however engaging, and real ones. I have a cat, Toby, but he decides when we play, and he often demands attention when I’m trying to work. When I force myself to take a break and play with Toby, I inevitably feel calm and refreshed. Having a living pet is rewarding because it’s annoying. Caring for an animal and attending to its needs, even when this involves cleaning up vomit or dealing with scratched furniture, is part of what makes the playful times so rewarding.

In order for an aibo to behave more like a living dog – to know when its belly is being rubbed, for example – Sony has loaded it with technology. The new models have two cameras, four microphones and eighteen sensors. Not only are they better able to communicate with their owner, but they also map your house, can recognise up to ten faces and take photographs with their front camera. An aibo’s microphones are always recording. In ‘patrol mode’, this robot dog can be dispatched to find, photograph and record anybody in its registry.

Toby knows my flat better than an aibo ever could, but his lack of Wi-Fi means he’s not continuously streaming data to the cloud. Sony has created a machine with unmatched surveillance skills. If the aibo’s clever cuteness enables it to slip past our defences like a Trojan horse, the consequences may be out of our hands. And the aibo is only one of the new generation of robots designed to appeal through their cuteness.

‘A new home robot that stirs your instinct to love’[27]

The furry robot rolled over, blinked its luminous eyes and held out its small, flipper-like arms. I picked it up and it retracted its wheels and blinked sleepily. It felt warm and soft in my arms. When I touched its nose, it cooed.

The LOVOT – the name is a combination of ‘love’ and ‘robot’ – is seventeen inches tall and weighs nine pounds, about the same as a baby. This design spec is deliberately intended, as the website puts it, ‘to bring you the cuteness’.[28] But unlike Sony’s robot dogs, LOVOTs can’t dance or do tricks – their appeal lies solely in their adorability.

For this reason, the engineering group that designed the LOVOT included a ‘kawaii development team’ that specialised in creating a cute look and behaviour.[29] The LOVOT’s eyes are OLED screens like the aibo’s, but they are larger and more complex – six layers of graphics are projected onto them to create eyes that follow movement, as well as simulating blinking eyelids and dilating pupils. These robots have more than fifty sensors all over their bodies, including touch receptors. A LOVOT coos when it is cuddled and laughs when it is tickled: these sounds simulate vocal cords and resonate inside an internal cavity, just like the echo of a real mouth. It may not do tricks like an aibo, but the LOVOT can be personalised by dressing it in various outfits and accessories. And like Sony’s robot dogs, the LOVOT is intended by its manufacturer to feel like a member of your family.

Like the aibo, LOVOTs can scan an entire room and locate their owner. But they also have a ‘diary’ function that records their sleeping and cuddling time. A video on the website suggests that if you receive a phone notification indicating that your elderly father hasn’t recently hugged his robot, you might want to give him a call to check that he’s okay. However, this sense of security comes at a cost – a LOVOT is priced at 500,000 yen with a monthly fee of 10,000 yen for connection to the cloud (US $3,900 and $78).

As the anthropologist Daniel White points out, the cloud connectivity in aibos and LOVOTs means that their ‘souls’ reside outside their bodies. In other words, if one suffers irreparable damage, its personality can be downloaded into another body.[30] Thus there will be no further need for funeral services – these cute robots can now live for ever. At a symposium where White shared this idea, a Japanese professor said that she found it comforting, because if she had a LOVOT she would worry about what would happen to it if she could no longer care for it. Our response to such an attitude depends on how we think about ‘life’. LOVOTs and aibos are not alive, but neither are they merely mechanical collections of parts.

The difference is not to do with the machine – it’s within us. Psychologists assert that cuteness encourages our tendency to treat an object as if it has an intentional mind of its own.[31] By granting the clever aibo the ability to think, we make it a better playmate. LOVOTs, on the other hand, beg us to ‘emotionalise’ them. Their expressive eyes and sounds, not to mention their warm, fuzzy bodies, are designed to tug at our heartstrings.

The aibo is designed to be both clever and cute, which reminds me that the American cute aesthetic originally derived from ‘acute’, or cunning. The LOVOT, on the other hand, seems more kawaii in its direct appeal to the emotion of cuteness. Robots aside, technology is also advancing the ways in which people can make themselves cute. And with a human behind the controls of a virtual being, cuteness has achieved a new form of self-expression.

VTubers and cute anime avatars

The Japanese men who read girls’ manga in the 1970s were able to identify with cute girl characters or even to become them in their imagination.[32] But in the 1990s and 2000s the popularity of cute girl characters spread to manga, anime and video games aimed at a general audience – and their appearance became even cuter.[33]

Cute boy characters also grew in popularity, and the twenty-first century saw the rapid growth of cosplay, in which fans began to dress as their favourite characters to attend conventions and photoshoots. Although the cosplay world strives to be inclusive, the two-dimensional world of manga and anime is hard to emulate with three-dimensional bodies. People whose body type or skin colour didn’t match the 2D anime characters sometimes faced discrimination in the fan community.

The fandom has made some strides towards addressing these issues, and the fundamental problem of incarnating a 2D character with a 3D body has led to various workarounds. One of these came in the late 2010s with the advent of digital avatars.

Virtual streamers, or VTubers, are online video creators who animate digital avatars with the help of computer graphics. The first VTuber, Kizuna AI, arrived on YouTube in 2016. She looked just like a cute anime character, except that she was fully rendered in 3D and could interact with people in real time. After she attracted millions of followers, Kizuna AI was featured in promotional campaigns by the Japan National Tourist Organization in 2018.[34]

Kizuna AI was created by a team of professionals who remain anonymous in order to aid the suspension of disbelief and make the character seem more ‘real’.[35] They use Hollywood-quality motion-capture equipment and the voiceover talents of a professional actress. However, since her debut Kizuna AI has been joined by thousands of other VTubers, both amateur and professional, who livestream content on platforms like YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. Many create a 2D virtual avatar by using special software that captures their facial movements from a smartphone or webcam. Video-game controllers can add pre-programmed movements to their avatar with the touch of a button. An avatar’s long hair might sway back and forth to match the operator’s movements. Their mouth might open and close for realistic speech imitation, while other buttons might allow for facial expressions.[36]

VTuber avatars can look like anything, including anthropomorphised animals or objects, but many of them are based on cute anime characters. They offer livestreaming events in which they play video games, sing and chat with fans.[37] As the VTuber phenomenon exploded in Japan, talent agencies formed to manage and promote them; they then began to create avatar designs themselves before holding auditions to find people to voice and animate them. One survey found 1,000 VTubers on YouTube at the beginning of 2018; three years later this number had grown sixteen-fold.[38]

At first the language barrier hindered their popularity outside Japan, but VTuber fans soon began to add subtitles to the highlight reels they posted online. When Japanese VTubers started streaming with real-time Chinese subtitles, China became an important market,[39] and when the VTuber talent-management agency Hololive Productions added five English-speaking VTubers in 2020 the phenomenon went worldwide. Other agencies soon followed, and cute anime VTubers now have millions of followers. In 2021 major corporations became involved when Netflix introduced a VTuber mascot for its anime division.[40]

Such avatars mostly appeal to fans of Japanese manga, anime and video games in which cute characters are already standard.[41] They want live interaction with the same type of characters they are used to seeing in stories, and VTubers were the first to make that happen. According to one fan: ‘VTubers are just anime’s newest genre … You know it’s fake, but the cuteness overwhelms you.’[42]

Most VTubers share the same gender as their cute girl or boy anime avatar, but among amateur VTubers in particular some females use boy avatars, and vice versa. The phenomenon of males choosing to animate cute girl avatars is particularly strong in Japan. Like many of the men who began reading girls’ manga in the 1970s, these digital cross-dressers often say that incarnating a cute girl avatar allows them a playful release from the social pressure of being an adult male in Japanese society. These men don’t generally have a transgender identity; they want to embody a character that looks and acts cute, but they connect this desire with the fictional world of anime, not with the real world.[43]

Male VTubers with cute girl avatars have to figure out how to move and speak in a way that enables their audience to play along. Their head movements, facial expressions and voice inflection and tone are all carefully honed to look good as a virtual avatar. It’s a performance of cuteness.[44]

Do they fool their audience? Many don’t really try, and jokingly signal their male body during their performance. They occasionally use masculine Japanese pronouns and elect to use their natural voice instead of an electronic voice-changer. They are rather like the puppet masters in traditional Japanese theatre who appear onstage wearing black robes and hoods; the audience is able to disregard their presence and enjoy the puppets as if they are alive, without caring about who the puppeteers really are.[45]

Soon the issue of who is controlling a virtual avatar may become more complicated. Generative AI – the technology behind chatbots that can carry on a conversation and answer questions, as well as generate original images – enables the ‘birth’ of AI VTubers. Cute avatars, whether human or animal, could offer both entertainment and companionship as AI interactive personalities available twenty-four hours a day. Of course they could also look like a zombie, or a toaster. This begs the question of what advantages a cute avatar might have in the race to grab our attention in a media-saturated world.

Cuteness as a Trojan horse

The neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach studies what happens in our brains when we perceive cute objects. He believes that cuteness engages all our senses and sparks rapid brain activity that focuses our attention so quickly that we don’t have time to recognise what we’re encountering. Anything that possesses characteristics from the child schema jumps to the front of the brain’s queue, activating regions such as the orbitofrontal complex that is linked to pleasure and reward.[46]

Once they have grabbed our attention, cute entities activate brain networks associated with empathy and compassion, as well as more complex social behaviours like caregiving and playful engagement. In this way, cuteness works through our senses to humanise other people and objects alike.[47] According to Kringelbach, it acts as a Trojan horse, opening doors in our brains that would otherwise remain shut.[48]

The Trojan-horse metaphor might seem like a positive one when applied to cuteness in this way, but we must remember that for the inhabitants of Troy it was a disaster. Now that technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are increasingly incorporating the power of cuteness, will we end up being the Greeks or the Trojans in our pursuit of the cute?

Furries, aibos, LOVOTs and VTubers all seek to reach out and relate to others through the medium of cuteness. Building upon the neurological process that prepares our brain for social, playful, empathic behaviours when we encounter a cute entity, the experiences they offer are like laboratory experiments that challenge the theory of the survival of the fittest by allowing the friendly to thrive.

Like all experiments, these take place in isolated environments and represent a possible way forward rather than a fully actualised new world. Plus, they are far from perfect. The furry community has its share of gossip and backstabbing; female VTuber streamers can face online misogyny or exploitation by their management agencies;[49] and early attempts at creating AI VTuber avatars have failed when biases absorbed from the Internet caused them to generate sexist and racist responses.[50]

The dark side of cuteness also appears when it is used to stereotype people. Asian American women, for example, can feel infantilised by being stereotyped as cute.[51] Japanese feminists have criticised kawaii as a double-edged sword; it gains women approval while simultaneously placing them in a subordinate position in a male-dominated society.[52]

Despite not all societies being as patriarchal as Japan’s, it’s generally true that much of the adult world is hierarchal. Although the social expectation to be cute can limit women’s empowerment, the philosopher Simon May believes that cuteness can also have the opposite effect by operating as a ‘miniature Trojan horse in the citadel of power’.[53] Cuteness offers another way of relating to the entities around us; its power is egalitarian, based on emotion rather than logic and on being friendly instead of authoritarian.[54] It appeals to men as well as women, which helps to explain the tremendous reach of kawaii in Japan, as well as its spread to other countries.[55]

The rise of kawaii in Japan shows that cuteness can be a bonding force, because it reaches out across gender boundaries and the child–adult divide. Because cuteness evolved as a prompt to care for and socialise children, choosing it as a form of self-expression conveys values based on mutual dependence rather than selfish individualism.[56] We could say that kawaii expresses a strength that is commensurate with the group-oriented values of Japanese society.

On the other hand, it’s possible that cuteness became infused with cleverness in the US because self-reliance and individualism were seen in a more positive light in that society compared to Japan. Americans were more comfortable with a cute aesthetic that included a note of nonconformity or a hint of cunning rebellion, which reflected a broad consensus about their national character. This may also represent a power that goes beyond the infantile traits usually associated with the cute.

What’s the future of cuteness? Hiroshi Nittono, the psychologist whose work made me realise the importance of science in understanding cuteness, once remarked to me that he thought Japanese people are becoming overstimulated by kawaii. If he’s right, then the era of peak cuteness in Japan, which dates from the arrival of Hello Kitty in the 1970s and has continued well into the twenty-first century, may have passed.

Even if Hiroshi is correct, however, I think the rise of cuteness is only beginning in the rest of the world. The American cute and Japanese kawaii aesthetics make for a powerful combination, one that triggers an emotion that helped make us human. And although it can have negative effects, cuteness breaks down barriers and gives us an opportunity to experience another sort of existence – one in which we guard ourselves a little less and invite others in a little more. In a world that feels increasingly polarised, is this such a bad thing?

Notes

1   Michael P. Masters, ‘Beyond Mickey Mouse: Perpetuating Cartoon Paedomorphosis’, Poster, American Association of Physical Anthropologists Annual Meeting, Los Angeles (2020), doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30941.15841.

2   Thomas Lamarre, ‘Speciesism, Part III’, p. 123.

3   Joshua Paul Dale et al., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 10, 11.

4   laine Glusac, ‘How to Make Fast Friends While Traveling? Try Playing Pickleball’, The New York Times (16 January 2023).

5   Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic; see also Wyman, ‘Beware of Cupcake Fascism’.

6   Courtney N. Plante et al., FurScience! A Summary of Five Years of Research from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (Waterloo, ON: Fur Science, 2016), p. 51.

7   Ibid., pp. 63–4, 66.

8   Ibid., p. 103.

9   On the other hand, for the intrepid furry willing to go it alone, materials can be procured for a few hundred dollars, and there are dozens of YouTube videos that explain what to do next.

10   Takurō Morinaga, ‘For Love or Money: A Lesson in Moé Economics’, in The Moé Manifesto: An Insider’s look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming, ed. Patrick W. Galbraith (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2014), pp. 127–8.

11   ‘Research Findings 2.8: Fursuits’, Furscience, furscience.com/research-findings/fandom-participation/2-8-fursuits/ (accessed 2 November 2022).

12   The research team did find that 50 per cent of furries believe that the fandom brings a ‘sense of beauty and aesthetic to their lives’. If the question had addressed cuteness in particular, the results might have been different. Ibid., 2.10.

13   Plante et al., FurScience!, p. 107.

14   Lee, Smaller is Better, p. 162.

15   Ibid., pp. 1–2, 129.

16   Jennifer Robertson, Robo sapiens japanicus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), p. 5.

17   Akinori Kubo, ‘Technology as Mediation: On the Process of Engineering and Living with the AIBO Robot’, Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 11 (2010), pp. 110–13.

18   Ibid., pp. 113, 115.

19   Robertson, Robo sapiens japanicus, p. 30.

20   Kubo, ‘Technology as Mediation’, p. 115.

21   Ibid., pp. 116–19.

22   Justin McCurry, ‘Japan: Robot Dogs get Solemn Buddhist Send-off at Funerals’, Guardian (3 May 2018), www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/03/japan-robot-dogs-get-solemn-buddhist-send-off-at-funerals (accessed 31 October 2022).

23   Maiko Eiraku, ‘A funeral for dead robot dogs’, NHK World Japan (17 January 2019), www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/346/ (accessed 31 October 2022).

24   McCurry, ‘Japan: Robot Dogs get Solemn Buddhist Send-off at Funerals’.

25   Daniel White and Patrick W. Galbraith, ‘Japan’s Emerging Emotional Tech’, Anthropology News (25 January 2019), www.anthropology-news.org/articles/japans-emerging-emotional-tech/ (accessed 31 October 2022), doi:10.1111/AN.1070.

26   ‘Corporate Info – aibo’, Sony, www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/sony_ai/aibo.html (accessed 27 October 2022).

27   This slogan appears on the LOVOT website: groove-x.com/en/ (accessed 31 October 2022).

28   ‘Full Body’, LOVOT, lovot.life/en/technology/ (accessed 31 October 2022).

29   groove-x.com/team/.

30   Daniel White, ‘The Future of LOVOT: Between Models of Emotion and Experiments in Affect in Japan’, Platypus: The Castac Blog (23 July 2019), blog.castac.org/2019/07/the-future-of-lovot-between-models-of-emotion-and-experiments-in-affect-in-japan/ (accessed 31 October 2022).

31   Sherman and Haidt, ‘Cuteness and Disgust’, p. 2.

32   Galbraith, ‘Seeking an alternative, p. 373.

33   Patrick W. Galbraith, Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 17.

34   ‘JNTO to Launch “Come to Japan” Campaign With Kizuna AI, the World’s First Virtual YouTuber’, Japan National Tourism Organization New York (2018), www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jnto-to-launchcome-to-japan-campaign-with-kizuna-ai-the-worlds-first-virtual-youtuber-300608037.html (accessed 30 October 2022).

35   Pavel Alpeyev and Yuki Furukawa, ‘How virtual streamers like Kizuna Ai became Japan’s biggest YouTube attraction’, The Japan Times (22 September 2019).

36   ‘Nehorin Pohorin Virtual Cute Girls: An amazing virtual world is here’, NHK (8 January 2020), www2.nhk.or.jp/hensei/program/p.cgi?area=001&date=2020-01-08&ch=31&eid=08210&f=3587.

37   Zhicong Lu et al., ‘More Kawaii than a Real-Person Live Streamer: Understanding How the Otaku Community Engages with and Perceives Virtual YouTubers’, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), (Yokohama, Japan, 8–13 May 2021), doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445660.

38   ‘Virtual YouTubers Surpass Sixteen Thousand Today’ (‘Bācharu YouTuber, honjitsu 1 man 3 sen-ri o toppa’), UserLocal (19 October 2021), www.userlocal.jp/press/20211019vs/ (accessed 30 October 2022).

39   Lu et al., ‘More Kawaii than a Real-Person Live Streamer’.

40   W. A. Adlan, ‘Netflix Introduces Vtuber Mascot for its Anime Division’, Gamer Braves (2021), www.gamerbraves.com/netflix-introduces-vtuber-mascot-for-its-anime-division/ (accessed 30 October 2022).

41   Anna Birna Turner, Streaming as a Virtual Being: The Complex Relationship Between VTubers and Identity, Master’s thesis (Malmö University, 5 June 5 2022), p. 29.

42   Gigguk, ‘I Got Addicted to VTubers and Regret Everything’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ9mH4YC6MY (accessed 30 October 2022).

43   Liudmila Bredikhina and Agnès Giard, ‘Becoming a Virtual Cutie: Digital Cross-Dressing in Japan’, Convergence (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 2022), doi:10.1177/13548565221074812.

44   Liudmila Bredikhina, ‘Babiniku: What Lies Behind the Virtual Performance’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 22, 2 (17 August 2022).

45   Ibid.

46   Morten L. Kringelbach et al., ‘How cute things hijack our brains and drive behaviour’, The Conversation (4 July 2016), theconversation.com/how-cute-things-hijack-our-brains-and-drive-behaviour-61942 (accessed 31 October 2022).

47   Ibid.

48   Kringelbach et al., ‘On cuteness’, p. 9.

49   Tyler Colp and Nico Deyo, ‘The Vtuber Industry: Corporatization, Labor, and Kawaii’, Vice (23 December 2020), www.vice.com/en/article/akdj3z/the-vtuber-industry-corporatization-labor-and-kawaii. See also Lu et al., ‘More Kawaii than a Real-Person Live Streamer’.

50   Ethan Gach, ‘AI-Controlled VTuber Streams Games On Twitch, Denies Holocaust: Neuro-sama likes to play Minecraft and go off-script’, Kotaku (6 January 2023), kotaku.com/vtuber-twitch-holocaust-denial-minecraft-ai-chatgpt-1849960527 (accessed 23 January 2023).

51   R. O. Kwon, ‘Stop Calling Asian Women Adorable’, The New York Times (23 March 2019), www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/calling-asian-women-adorable.html.

52   Noriko Murai, ‘The Genealogy of Kawaii’, in Noriko Murai et al., eds, Japan in the Heisei Era (1989–2019), (London: Routledge, 2022), p. 249.

53   Simon May, The Power of Cute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 127.

54   Leila Madge, ‘Capitalizing on “Cuteness”: The Aesthetics of Social Relations in a New Postwar Japanese Order’, Japanstudien 9, 1 (1998), p. 167.

55   Ibid., p. 164.

56   Slade, ‘Cute men in contemporary Japan’, p. 79.

OceanofPDF.com

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adlan, W. A., ‘Netflix Introduces Vtuber Mascot for its Anime Division’, Gamer Braves (2021), www.gamerbraves.com/netflix-introduces-vtuber-mascot-for-its-anime-division/ (accessed 30 October 2022).

Albert, Frank W. et al., ‘Genetic Architecture of Tameness in a Rat Model of Animal Domestication’, Genetics 182 (June 2009).

Allison, Anne, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).

Alpeyev, Pavel and Furukawa, Yuki, ‘How Virtual Streamers Like Kizuna Ai Became Japan’s Biggest YouTube Attraction’, The Japan Times (22 September 2019).

Alt, Matt, Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World (New York: Random House, 2020).

Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).

Armitage, Shelley, Kewpies and Beyond: The World of Rose O’Neill (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).

Azzaroli, A., ‘Quaternary Mammals and the “End-Villafranchian” Dispersal Event – A Turning Point in the History of Eurasia’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 44 (1983), doi:10.1016/0031-0182(83)90008-1.

Barnum, P. T., Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum (Buffalo, NY: Warren, Johnson & Co., 1872).

‘Barnum’s Booby Show’, New York Tribune (6 June 1855), lostmuseum. cuny.edu/archive/barnums-booby-show-new-york-tribune-june-6 (accessed 5 October 2022).

Barrier, Michael, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Barrier, Michael, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

Bateson, Melissa et al., ‘Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting’, Biology Letters 2 (2006), doi:10.1098/rsbl.2006.0509.

Belyaev, Dmitri, ‘Domestication of Animals’, Science Journal 5, 1 (1969).

Belyaev, Dmitri, ‘Destabilizing Selection as a Factor in Domestication’, Journal of Heredity 70, 5 (1979).

Benítez-Burraco, A. et al., ‘Language Impairments in ASD Resulting from a Failed Domestication of the Human Brain’, Frontiers in Neuroscience 10, 373 (29 August 2016), doi:10.3389/fnins.2016.00373.

Berns, Gregory S. et al., ‘Scent of the familiar: An fMRI Study of Canine Brain Responses to Familiar and Unfamiliar Human and Dog Odors’, Behavioural Processes 110 (2015), doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2014.02.011.

Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

Bidau, Claudio J., ‘Domestication through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes’, Gayana 73 (Supplimento) (2009).

Black, Shirley Temple, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988).

Bradshaw, John, Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

Bredikhina, Liudmila and Giard, Agnès, ‘Becoming a Virtual Cutie: Digital Cross-Dressing in Japan’, Convergence (SAGE Publications, 2022), doi:10.1177/13548565221074812.

Bredikhina, Liudmila, ‘Babiniku: What Lies Behind the Virtual Performance’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 22, 2 (17 August 2022).

Bryce, Mio, ‘Visuality of Writing in our Modern World of Multimedia and Mass Communication: Focusing on the Written Japanese’, Proceedings of the Marking Our Difference Conference (Melbourne: School of Languages, University of Melbourne, 2003).

Bryce, Mio, ‘Cuteness Needed: The New Language/Communication Device in a Global Society’, International Journal of the Humanities 2, 3 (2006).

Canby, Margaret T., ‘Birdie’s Birthday Party’, Our Young Folks: An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls, ed. J. T. Trowbridge and Lucy Larcom, Vol. VIII (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1872).

Chersini, Nadine et al., ‘Dog Pups’ Attractiveness to Humans Peaks at Weaning Age’, Anthrozoös 31, 3 (2018), doi:10.1080/08927936.2018.14 55454.

Clay, Zanna and de Waal, Frans, ‘Sex and strife: post-conflict sexual contacts in bonobos’, Behaviour 152, 3–4 (10 February 2015).

Colp, Tyler and Deyo, Nico, ‘The Vtuber Industry: Corporatization, Labor, and Kawaii’, Vice (23 December 2020), www.vice.com/en/article/akdj3z/the-vtuber-industry-corporatization-labor-and-kawaii.

Coppinger, Raymond and Coppinger, Lorna, Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution (New York: Scribner, 2001).

Cross, Gary, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Dale, Joshua Paul et al., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (London: Routledge, 2017).

Daliot-Bul, Michal, License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).

Darwin, Charles, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. 2 (London: Murray, 1868).

de Waal, Frans, ‘Bonobo Sex and Society’, Scientific American (1 June 2006), www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/ (accessed 25 October 2022).

de Waal, Frans, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013).

de Waal, Frans, ‘What animals can teach us about politics’, Guardian (12 March 2019).

DeWyze, Jeannette, ‘San Diego Zoo’s Rare Bonobos, and the Superfans Devoted to the Zoo’s Once Forgotten Apes’, San Diego Reader (7 June 2017).

Diamond, Jared, ‘Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication’, Nature 418 (8 August 2002), doi.org/10.1038/nature01019.

Dictionary of the Japanese Language, 2nd edition, Vol. 2 (日本国語大辞典 第二版 第二巻), (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1972).

Dreifus, Claudia, ‘Why bonobos don’t kill each other: a conversation with Brian Hare’, The New York Times (6 July 2010).

Dugatkin, Lee Alan, ‘The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment’, Evolution: Education and Outreach 11, 16 (2018).

Dugatkin, Lee Alan, and Trut, Lyudmila, How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Eade, Jane, ‘Portraiture’, in A. French (ed.), Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020).

Eiraku, Maiko, ‘A funeral for dead robot dogs’, NHK World Japan (17 January 2019), www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/346/ (accessed 31 October 2022).

Esposito, G. et al., ‘Baby, You Light-Up My Face: Culture-General Physiological Responses to Infants and Culture-Specific Cognitive Judgements of Adults’, PLoS ONE 9, 10:e106705 (2014), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106705.

Fitzgerald, Toni, ‘The Kewpie Craze’, Doll Reader 36, 8 (2008).

Fogg, Brandy R. et al., ‘Relationships Between Indigenous American Peoples and Wolves, 1: Wolves as Teachers and Guides’, Journal of Ethnobiology 35, 2 (2015), doi:10.2993/etbi-35-02-262-285.1.

Formanek-Brunell, Miriam, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commericialization of American Girlhood 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Frederick, Sarah, ‘Girls’ Magazines and the Creation of Shōjo Identities’, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media, ed. Fabienne Darling-Wolf (London: Routledge, 2018).

French, Anna, Innocence, in Anna French, ed., Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2020).

Fretz, Eric, ‘P. T. Barnum’s Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Exhibition’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Fujimoto, Yukari, ‘Sailor Moon! The Treasure Box All the Girls Want’, in Masami Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture (London: Routledge Press, 2018).

Gach, Ethan, ‘AI-Controlled VTuber Streams Games On Twitch, Denies Holocaust’, Kotaku (6 January 2023), kotaku.com/vtuber-twitch-holocaust-denial-minecraft-ai-chatgpt-1849960527 (accessed 23 January 2023).

Galbraith, Patrick W., ‘Seeking an alternative: “male” shōjo fans since the 1970s’, Shōjo Across Media: Exploring ‘Girl’ Practices in Contemporary Japan, ed. Jaqueline Bernt, Kazumi Nagaike and Fusami Ogi (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Galbraith, Patrick W., Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

Galton, Francis, ‘The First Steps towards the Domestication of Animals’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 3 (1865).

Genosko, Gary, ‘Natures and Cultures of Cuteness’, Invisble Culture – An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 9 (2005).

Gigguk, ‘I Got Addicted to VTubers and Regret Everything’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ9mH4YC6MY (accessed 30 October 2022).

Glusac, Elaine, ‘How to Make Fast Friends While Traveling? Try Playing Pickleball’, The New York Times (16 January 2023).

Gould, Stephen Jay, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

Gould, Stephen Jay, ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980).

Gubar, Marah, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Gubar, Marah, ‘Entertaining Children of All Ages: Nineteenth-Century Popular Theater as Children’s Theater’, American Quarterly 66, 1 (March 2014).

Gubar, Marah, ‘The Cult of the Child Revisited: Making Fun of Fauntleroy’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus et al.,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Hagio, Moto, ‘Profile and Interview with Hagio Moto’, Interview by Masami Toku in Masami Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture (London: Routledge Press, 2018).

Hamada, Noboyoshi, Manga: The Prehistory of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: PIE International, 2013).

Hare, Brian, ‘Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality’, Annual Review of Psychology 68, 1 (2017), doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044201.

Hare, Brian et al., ‘The Self-Domestication Hypothesis: Evolution of Bonobo Psychology is Due to Selection Against Aggression’, Animal Behaviour 83, 3 (March 2012).

Hare, Brian and Woods, Vanessa, The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs are Smarter Than You Think (New York: Penguin, 2013).

Hare, Brian and Woods, Vanessa, Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity (New York: Random House, 2020).

Harris, Daniel, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York: Basic, 2000).

Hartley, David, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, Vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson, 1801).

Hasegawa, Yuko, ‘Post-identity Kawaii: Commerce, Gender and Contemporary Japanese Art’, in Fran Lloyd, ed., Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1991).

Hearne, Samuel, A Journey from Prince of Wale’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1911).

Hemmann, Kathryn, ‘Short Skirts and Superpowers: The Evolution of the Beautiful Fighting Girl’, US–Japan Women’s Journal 47 (2014).

Hepola, Sarah, ‘The Internet is made of kittens’, Salon (10 February 2009), www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/ (accessed 13 October 2022).

Heywood, Colin, A History of Childhood (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).

Higonnet, Anne, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

Hinde, R. A., Animal behavior: A synthesis of ethology and comparative psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

Hinde, R. A., Ethology: Its nature and relations with other sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Hinde, Robert A. and Barden, Les A., ‘The Evolution of the Teddy Bear’, Animal Behavior 33 (1985).

Honda, Masako, ‘Hirahira no keifu (The Genealogy of Hirahira)’, Ibunka to shite no kodomo (The Child as Another Culture), (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1992).

Hosono, Masanobu, Takehisa Yumeji (Yumeji Takehisa), (Tokyo: Hoikusha, 1972).

Howard-Smith, Stephanie, ‘Little Puggies: Consuming Cuteness and Deforming Motherhood in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, 3 (Spring 2022).

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer and Burkart, Judith M., ‘The Emergence of Emotionally Modern Humans: Implications for Language and Learning’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 375, 20190499 (2020), dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0499.

Huizinga, John, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).

Hur, Nam-lin, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Huron, David, ‘The Plural Pleasures of Music’, Proceedings of the 2004 Music and Music Science Conference, ed. Johan Sundberg and William Brunson (Stockholm: Kungliga Musikhögskolan & KTH, 2005).

Imbler, Sabrina, ‘The Beloved Japanese Novelist Who Became a Queer Manga Icon’, Atlas Obscura (4 April 2019), www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yoshiya-nobuko-queer-manga.

Inge, Thomas M., ‘Mickey Mouse’, in Dennis Hall and Susan G. Hall, American Icons (Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006).

Ito, Kinko, ‘Manga in Japanese History’, Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams (London: Routledge, 2008).

Ivanova, Gergana, Unbinding the Pillow Book: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

Ivanova, Gergana, ‘The many lives of The Pillow Book’, lecture delivered for The Japan Foundation (Toronto, 17 January 2020).

Jessen, Sarah and Grossman, Tobias, ‘Processing Eye Cues in the Infant Brain’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 11, 45 (November 2014), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1411333111.

Johnsson, Martin et al., ‘The Neural Crest Cell Hypothesis: No Unified Explanation for Domestication’, Genetics 26, 219, 1, iyab097 (August 2021), doi:10.1093/genetics/iyab097.

‘JNTO to Launch “Come to Japan” Campaign With Kizuna AI, the World’s First Virtual YouTuber’, Japan National Tourism Organization New York (2018), www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jnto-to-launchcome-to-japan-campaign-with-kizuna-ai-the-worlds-first-virtual-youtuber-300608037.html (accessed 30 October 2022).

Jung, Christoph and Pörtl, Daniela, ‘Scavenging Hypothesis: Lack of evidence for Dog Domestication on the Waste Dump’, Dog Behavior 2 (2018).

Kalikow, Theodora J., ‘Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943’, Journal of the History of Biology 16, 1 (Spring 1983).

Kalnay, Erica Kanesaka, ‘Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything: Asian Exclusion and the 1927 US–Japan Doll Exchange’, Journal of Asian American Studies 23, 1 (January 2020).

Kanesaka, Erica, ‘Kawaii Globalization & Asian America: An Intimate History’, in ‘Kawaii: The Emergence and Evolution of Cuteness in Japanese Girls’ Culture’ (New York: The Japan Foundation, July 2022), www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8s_ZvM1om0.

Kaplan, G. and Rogers, L. J., ‘Patterns of Gazing in Orangutans’, International Journal of Primatology 23 (2002) pp. 501–26, doi.org/10.1023/A:1014913532057.

Kasson, John F., The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014).

Katō, Norihiro, ‘Goodbye Godzilla, Hello Kitty: The Origins and Meaning of Japanese Cuteness’, The American Interest (September/ October 2006).

Kawasaki, Kenko, ‘Osaki Midori and the role of the girl in Shōwa Modernism’, trans. Lucy Fraser and Tomoko Aoyama, Asian Studies Review 32 (2008).

Keaton, Buster and Samuels, Charles, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York: Da Capo, 1960).

Keene, Donald, Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981).

Keene, Donald, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993).

Kellem, Betsy Golden, ‘At Tom Thumb Weddings, Children get Faux-Married to Each Other’, Atlas Obscura, 7 July 2017, www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tom-thumb-weddings (accessed 3 October 2022).

Kete, Mary Louise and Petrino, Elizabeth, eds, Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

Kiley, Hamlin, J. et al., ‘Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants’, Nature 450, 22 (November 2007).

Kim, Pilyoung et al., ‘Neural Plasticity in Fathers of Human Infants’, Society for Neuroscience 9, 5 (October 2014), doi:10.1080/17470919.20 14.933713.

Kinsella, Sharon, ‘Cuties in Japan’, Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, ed. L. Skove and B. Moeran (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995).

Kinsella, Sharon, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).

Klopfer, Peter, ‘Konrad Lorenz and the National Socialists: On the Politics of Ethology’, International Journal of Comparative Psychology 7, 4 (1994).

Kobayashi, H. and Kohshima, S., ‘Unique Morphology of the Human Eye and its Adaptive Meaning: Comparative Studies on External Morphology of the Primate Eye’, Journal of Human Evolution 40, 5 (May 2001), doi:10.1006/jhev.2001.0468.

Konner, Melvin, Women After All: Sex, Evolution and the End of Male Supremacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015).

Kotrschal, Kurt, ‘How Wolves Turned into Dogs and How Dogs Are Valuable in Meeting Human Social Needs’, People and Animals: The International Journal of Research and Practice 1, 1, Article 6 (2018), docs.lib.purdue.edu/paij/vol1/iss1/6.

Kringelbach, M. L. et al., ‘On Cuteness: Unlocking the Parental Brain and Beyond’, Trends in Cognitivs Sciences 20, 7 (July 2016), doi:10.1016/j. tics.2016.05.003.

Kringelbach, Morten L. et al., ‘How Cute Things Hijack Our Brains and Drive Behaviour’, The Conversation (4 July 2016), theconversation.com/how-cute-things-hijack-our-brains-and-drive-behaviour-61942 (accessed 31 October 2022).

Kristeva, Tzvetana, ‘The Pillow Hook: The Pillow Book as an “open book”’, Nichibunken Jpaan Review: Bulletin of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies 5 (1994).

Kubo, Akinori, ‘Technology as Mediation: On the Process of Engineering and Living with the AIBO Robot’, Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 11 (2010).

Kuhlwilm, M. et al., ‘Ancient Gene Flow From Early Modern Humans Into Eastern Neanderthals’, Nature 530 (2016), doi.org/10.1038/nature16544.

Kwon, R. O., ‘Stop Calling Asian Women Adorable’, The New York Times (23 March 2019).

LaFlamme, Martin, ‘Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the undisputed master of warrior prints’, review of Rossella Menegazzo, ed., ‘Kuniyoshi: Visionary of the Floating World’, Japan Times (12 January 2019), www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2019/01/12/books/utagawa-kuniyoshi-undisputed-master-warrior-prints/ (accessed 6 September 2022).

Lahtinen, Maria et al., ‘Excess Protein Enabled Dog Domestication During Severe Ice Age Einters’, Scientific Reports 11, 7 (2021).

Lamarre, Thomas, ‘Speciesism, Part III: Neoteny and the Politics of Life’, Mechademia 6 (2011).

Leach, Helen M., ‘Selection and the Unforeseen Consequences of Domestication’, in Rebecca Cassidy and Molly H. Mullin, eds, Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007).

Lee, O-Young, Smaller is Better: Japan’s Mastery of the Miniature, trans. Robert N. Huey (New York: Kodansha International, 1984).

Lehrman, Daniel S., ‘Semantic and Conceptual Issues in the Nature-Nurture Problem’, Development and Evolution of Behavior, ed. Lester R. Aronson et al. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1970).

Levinson, Stephen C., ‘The Interaction Engine: Cuteness Selection and the Evolution of the Interactional Base for Language’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 377, 20210108 (2022), doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0108.

Lieber-Milo, Shiri, ‘Pink purchasing: Interrogating the soft power of Japan’s kawaii consumption’, Journal of Consumer Culture 22, 3 (2022), doi:10.1177/14695405211013849.

Lord, Kathryn A. et al., ‘The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2019), doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011.

Lorenz, Konrad, ‘Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung (The innate forms of possible experience)’, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5 (1943).

Lorenz, Konrad, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Vol. 2, trans. Robert Martin (Harvard University Press, 1971).

Lorenz, Konrad, The Foundations of Ethology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981).

Lorenz, Konrad, Man Meets Dog, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2002).

Lott, Eric, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Lu, Zhicong et al., ‘More Kawaii than a Real-Person Live Streamer: Understanding How the Otaku Community Engages with and Perceives Virtual YouTubers’, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), (Yokohama, Japan, 8–13 May, 2021), doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445660.

McCurry, Justin, ‘Japan: Robot Dogs Get Solemn Buddhist Send-off at Funerals’, Guardian (3 May 2018).

Madge, Leila, ‘Capitalizing on “Cuteness”: The Aesthetics of Social Relations in a New Postwar Japanese Order’, Japanstudien 9, 1 (1998).

Maher, L.A. et al. ‘A Unique Human–Fox Burial from a Pre-Natufian Cemetery in the Levant (Jordan)’, PLoS ONE 6, 1 (2011), e15815, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015815.

‘Maruyama Okyo melded styles to pioneer a new path in art’, Japan Times, 15 November 2016, www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/11/15/arts/maruyama-okyo-melded-styles-pioneer-new-path-art/.

Masters, Michael P., ‘Beyond Mickey Mouse: Perpetuating Cartoon Paedomorphosis’, Poster, American Association of Physical Anthropologists Annual Meeting, Los Angeles (2020), doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30941.15841.

Masuda, Nozomi, ‘Shōjo Manga and its Acceptance: What is the Power of Shōjo Manga?’, in Masami Toku, ed., International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture (London: Routledge Press, 2018).

May, Simon, The Power of Cute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Meer, Sarah, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

Merish, Lori, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Monden, Masafumi, ‘The Beautiful Shōnen of the Deep and Moonless Night: The Boyish Aesthetic in Modern Japan’, ASIEN 147 (April 2018).

Morinaga, Takuro, ‘For Love or Money: A Lesson in Moé Economics’, in The Moé Manifesto: An Insider’s look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming, ed. Patrick W. Galbraith (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2014).

Morris, Ivan, ed., The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).

Murai, Noriko, ‘The Genealogy of Kawaii’, in Noriko Murai et al., eds, Japan in the Heisei Era (1989–2019), (London: Routledge, 2022).

Murakami, Takashi, Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2005).

Museum of Fuchu City, Very Cute Pictures of Old Edo, ‘Kawaii’ (Tokyo: KyuryuDo, 2013).

Najafi, Sina and Higonnet, Anne, ‘Picturing Innocence: An Interview with Anne Hgonnet’, Cabinet Magazine 9 (Winter 2002/03), cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/najafi.php (accessed 30 September 2022).

Nakamura, K., interview in M. Ozaki and G. Johnson, eds, Kawaii! Japan’s Culture of Cute (Munich: Prestel, 2013).

Naoi, Nozomi, ‘Beauties and Beyond: Situating Takehisa Yumeji and the Yumeji-shiki’, Andon 98 (December 2014).

Napier, Susan J., From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

‘Nehorin Pohorin Virtual Cute Girls: An amazing virtual world is here’, NHK (8 January 2020). www2.nhk.or.jp/hensei/program/p.cgi?area=001&date=2020-01-08&ch=31&eid=08210&f=3587.

Nenkov, G. Y. and Scott, M. L. ‘“So cute I could eat it up”: Priming effects of cute products on indulgent consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research 41, 2, doi.org/10.1086/676581.

Ngai, Natalie, ‘The temptation of performing cuteness: Shirley Temple’s birthday parties during the Great Depression, Feminist Media Studies, doi:10.1080/14680777.2022.2098800.

Ngai, Sianne, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Nittono, Hiroshi, ‘The Two-Layer Model of “Kawaii”: A Behavioural Science Framework for Understanding Kawaii and Cuteness’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 2, 1 (2016).

Nittono, Hiroshi et al., ‘English and Spanish Adjectives That Describe the Japanese Concept of Kawaii’, SAGE Open (January–March 2023), doi.10.1177/21582440231152415.

Nobuhisa, Kaneko, trans. Pamela Miki, Ukiyo-e Paper Book: Cats by Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Daifukushorin, 2015).

Noma, Seiroku, The Arts of Japan: Late Medieval to Modern (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978).

Nyong’o, Tavia, ‘Racial Kitsch and Black Performance’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, 2 (2002).

Oatman-Stanford, Hunter, ‘Naughty Nuns, Flatulent Monks, and Other Surprises of Sacred Medieval Manuscripts’, Collector’s Weekly (24 July 2014), www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/naughty-nuns-flatulent-monks-and-other-surprises-of-sacred-medieval-manuscripts/.

Occhi, Debra J., ‘Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message Comparing Japanese Kyara with their Anthropomorphic Forebears’, Asian Ethnology 71, 1 (2012).

Orbaugh, Sharalyn, ‘Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the Shōjo in 1990s Visual Culture’, in J. Mostow et al., eds, Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (Honolulu: 2003, University of Hawai’i Press).

Osterweil, Ara, ‘Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence’, Camera Obscura 72, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2009).

Ota Memorial Museum of Art, ‘Is it true that Ukiyo-e crossed the sea as wrapping paper for ceramics?’ (浮世絵が陶磁器の包み紙として海を渡ったのは本当？という話), (27 February 2021), otakinen-museum.note.jp/n/n01248684801c (accessed 5 September 2022).

Ōtsuka, Eiji, Girls’ United Red Army: Subculture and Postwar Democracy (Kanojo tachi no rengô sekigun: sabukaruchâ to sengo minshushugi), (Tokyo: Bungeishunjûsha, 1996).

Peak, Mayme, ‘Hollywood is Asking: How Long Will Shirley Temple Remain a Star?’, Boston Globe (14 May 1937).

Pearson, Susan J., ‘“Infantile Specimens”: Showing Babies in Nineteenth-century America’, Journal of Social History (Winter 2008).

Peters, J. and Schmidt, K., ‘Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey: A preliminary assessment’, Anthropozoologica 39, 1 (2004).

Plante, Courtney N. et al., FurScience! A Summary of Five Years of Research from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (Waterloo, ON: Fur Science, 2016).

Prough, Jennifer S., Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010).

Prum, Richard O., The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us (New York: Anchor Books, 2017).

Rachel and Jun, Fox Village in Zaō Japan! (1 July 2015), YouTube (accessed 21 May 2018).

Richarz, Allan, ‘On the hunt for Japan’s elaborate, colorful manhole covers’, Atlas Obscura (15 March 2019), www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-manhole-covers (accessed 5 October 2022).

Robertson, Jennifer, Robo sapiens japanicus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017).

Rodman, Tara, ‘A Modernist Audience: The Kawakami Troupe, Matsuki Bunkio, and Boston Japonisme’, Theatre Journal 65, 4 (December 2013).

Saikia, Alisha, ‘Kyara in Japanese Religious Spaces’, Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 13 (2021).

Salomon, Harald, ‘“A Paradise for Children”: Western Perception of Children in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Johns Hopkins University Press, 11, 3 (Fall 2018).

Sammond, Nicholas, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Sandell, Neil, ‘From Scavenger to Household Royalty: How Dogs Evolved From Wolves to Pampered Pets’, Ideas Podcast (CBC Radio, 1 March 2021), www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/from-scavenger-to-household-royalty-how-dogs-evolved-from-wolves-to-pampered-pets-1.5930345.

Sansom, G. B, Japan: A Short Cultural History (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1931).

Sapolsky, Robert M., A Primate’s Memoir: Love, Death and Baboons in East Africa (London: Random House, 2002).

Sapolsky, Robert M. and Share, Lisa J., ‘A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission’, PLoS Biology 2, 4 (April 2004).

Sato, Barbara, ‘Gender, Consumerism and Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan’, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media, ed. Fabienne Darling-Wolf (London: Routledge, 2018).

Sax, Boria, ‘What is a “Jewish Dog”? Konrad Lorenz and the Cult of Wildness’, Society and Animals 5, 1 (1997).

Schweder, Barbara, response to Doug Jones et al., ‘Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-Cultural Evidence and Implications’, Current Anthropology 36, 5 (December 1995).

Schweitzer, Marlis, ‘Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty’, in Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao, eds, The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2017).

Screech, Timon, The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2002).

Segal, Nancy L. et al., ‘Preferences for Visible White Sclera in Adults, Children and Autism Spectrum Disorder Children: Implications of the Cooperative Eye Hypothesis’, Evolution and Human Behavior 37, 1 (January 2016), doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.06.006.

Serpell, J. A., ‘Commensalism or Cross-Species Adoption? A Critical Review of Theories of Wolf Domestication’, Frontiers of Veterinary Science 8, 662370 (2021), doi:10.3389/fvets.2021.662370.

Shamoon, Deborah, ‘Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo Manga’, Mechademia Second Arc 2, 1 (January 2007).

Shamoon, Deborah, ‘Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics and Contemporary Japanese Culture’, Japanese visual culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams (London: Routledge Press, 2008).

Shamoon, Deborah, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).

Sherman, Gary D. and Haidt, Jonathan, ‘Cuteness and Disgust: The Humanizing and Dehumanizing Effects of Emotion’, Emotion Review 3, 3 (2011), doi:10.1177/1754073911402396.

Shilton, Dor et al., ‘Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control?’, in Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Vera Kempe and Zanna Clay, eds, Self-Domestication and Human Evolution (Lausanne: Fronteris Media SA, 2020), doi:10.3389/978-2-88966-093-3.

Shiokawa, Kanako, ‘Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics’, Themes and Issues in Asian Cartoning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, ed. John A. Lent (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999).

Shōnagon, Sei, The Pillow Book, trans. Meredith McKinney (London: Penguin Classics, 2007).

Šimić, Goran et al., ‘Molecules, Mechanisms, and Disorders of Self-Domestication: Keys for Understanding Emotional and Social Communication from an Evolutionary Perspective’, Biomolecules 11, 2 (22 December 2020), dx.doi.org/10.3390/biom11010002.

Simoons, Frederick J. and Baldwin, James A., ‘Breast-Feeding of Animals by Women: Its Socio-Cultural Context and Geographic Occurrence’, Anthropos, Bd 77, H. 3/4 (1982), www.jstor.org/stable/40460478.

Singh, Nandini et al., ‘Facial shape differences between rats selected for tame and aggressive behaviors’, PLoS ONE 12, 4 (3 April 2017), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0175043.

Sirois, Chad, ‘19th Century Toddlers and Tiaras’, Worchester Historical Museum, www.worcesterhistory.org/blog/baby-show/ (accessed 5 October 2022).

Skabelund, Aaron Herald, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

Slade, Toby, ‘Cute men in contemporary Japan’, ed. Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly, Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend (London: Intellect Books, 2019).

Smith, E. Oakes, ‘Barnum’s Baby Show – A Protest’, New York Herald (12 May 1855), The Lost Museum Archive, lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/barnums-baby-showa-protest-new-york-herald.

Smolderen, Thierry, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

Solomon, Deborah, ‘Old mistresses turn tables on old masters’, The New York Times (16 Dececember 2019), (accessed 28 September 2022).

Sorby, Angela, ‘“A Dimple in the Tomb”: Cuteness in Emily Dickinson’, ESQ 63, 2 (2018).

Sorby, Angela, ‘Baby to Baby: Sigourney and the Origins of Cuteness’, in Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural View, ed. Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

Stark, Eloise et al., ‘Neurobiology of Human Parenting’, Handbook of Parenting, Vol. 2: Biology and Ecology of Parenting, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2019).

Stearns, Peter N., Childhood in World History (London: Routledge, 2010).

Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

Stimpson, Blake, ‘Andy Warhol’s Red Beard’, The Art Bulletin 83, 3 (September 2001).

Struthers, Sally A., Donatello’s Putti: Their Genesis, Importance, and Influence on Quattrocento Sculpture and Painting (Vols I and II), Dissertation (Ohio State University, 1992).

‘Study: Infants can judge naughty from nice’, CBS News (21 November 2007), www.cbsnews.com/news/study-infants-can-judge-naughty-from-nice/ (accessed 27 October 2022).

Surbeck, M. et al., ‘Mate Competition, Testosterone and Intersexual Relationships in Bonobos, Pan paniscus’, Animal Behaviour (2012), doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.12.010.

Takahashi, Mizuki, ‘Opening the closed world of shōjo manga’, Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2013).

Takamatsu, Iwao, ‘Manga/Animation and Lifeworld Culture of Ordinary People in Edo’, Seminars on Academic Research of Manga and Anime Part 8 (13 December 2005).

Tamagawa, Kathleen, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear: A Japanese American Memoir (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

‘The Baby Show – Grand Infantile Display’, The New York Times (6 June 1855).

‘The Baby Show Exhibit’, Lost Museum Archive, lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/exhibit/baby/ (accessed 30 September 2022).

The Medieval Bestiary, bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery213.htm (accessed 29 July 2022).

Theofanopoulou, Constantina et al., ‘Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from Comparative Genomics’, PLoS ONE 12, 10, e0185306 (2017), doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185306.

Toll, Robert C., On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Tomasello, Michael, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Tomasello, Michael et al., ‘Reliance on Head Versus Eyes in the Gaze Following of Great Apes and Human Infants: The Cooperative Eye Hypothesis’, Journal of Human Evolution 52 (2007), doi:10.1016/j. jhevol.2006.10.001.

Trut, Lyudmila N., ‘Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment’, American Scientist 87 (1999).

Trut, Lyudmila N. et al., ‘Animal Evolution During Domestication: The Domesticated Fox as a Model’, Bioessays 31, 3 (2009).

Turner, Anna Birna, Streaming as a Virtual Being: The Complex Relationship Between VTubers and Identity, Master’s Thesis (Malmö University, 5 June 2022).

Tyler, Royall, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

Van Rij, Jan, Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2001).

Vice Japan, 100 Foxes – Fox Village (キツネ100 匹！ – Fox Village), (5 October 2013), YouTube (accessed 20 May 2018).

‘Virtual YouTubers Surpass Sixteen Thousand Today’ (‘Bācharu YouTuber, honjitsu 1 man 3 sen-ri o toppa’), UserLocal (19 Octoer 2021), www.userlocal.jp/press/20211019vs/ (accessed 30 October 2022).

Wakita, Haruko, Women in Medieval Japan: Motherhood, Household Management and Sexuality, trans. Alison Tokita (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2006).

White, Daniel, ‘The Future of LOVOT: Between Models of Emotion and Experiments in Affect in Japan’, Platypus: The caustic Blog (23 July 2019), blog.castac.org/2019/07/the-future-of-lovot-between-models-of-emotion-and-experiments-in-affect-in-japan/ (accessed 31 October 2022).

White, Daniel and Galbraith, Patrick W., ‘Japan’s Emerging Emotional Tech’, Anthropology News (25 January 2019), doi:10.1111/AN.1070.

Wilkins, A. S. et al., ‘The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: a Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics’, Genetics 197, 3 (July 2014), doi:10.1534/genetics.114.165423.

Winston, Adam, ‘In the Beginning: Dogs and Wolves’, Dogs in Our World Podcast, Episode 1 (5 January 2017), podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-beginning-dogs-and-wolves/id1163100723?i=1000379664063.

Wolverton, Emily, ‘Rosie O’Neill and the Kewpie Collection’, The Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures 45 (5 February 2014).

Wrangham, Richard, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019).

Wyman, Tom, ‘Beware of Cupcake Fascism’, Guardian (8 April 2014), (accessed 28 October 2022).

Wynne, Clive D. L., Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019).

Yamada, Tomoko, ‘Profile and Interview with Tomoko Yamada’, Interview by Masami Toku, International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture, ed. Masami Toku (London: Routledge Press, 2018).

Yang, Chi-ming, ‘Culture in Miniature: Toy Dogs and Object Life’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, 1 (Fall 2012).

Yiengpruksawan, Mimi, ‘Monkey Magic: How the “Animals” Scroll Makes Mischief with Art Historians’, Orientations 31, 3 (March 2000).

Yoda, Tomiko, ‘Girlscape: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan’, Media Theory in Japan, ed. Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahiten (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Yomota, Inuhiko, Essay on ‘Kawaii’ (Kawaii Ron), (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2006).

Yoshihara, Mari, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Zanella, Matteo et al., ‘Dosage Analysis of the 7q11.23 Williams Region Identifies BAZ1B as a Major Human Gene Patterning the Modern Human Face and Underlying Self-domestication’, Science Advances 5, 12 (4 December 2019), p.7, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw7908.

Zelizer, Viviana A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

OceanofPDF.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Nick Humphrey and Ed Lake, both wonderful editors whose superb guidance was essential through the long writing process. I’d also like to thank Georgina Difford, managing editor, for shepherding the manuscript through to publication. Jon Petre was a tremendous help in gaining permission to reproduce the illustrations. Thanks also to Mandy Greenfield for her painstaking work copy-editing the manuscript.

I’d like to thank Yukiko Toda for creating the charming illustrations that grace each chapter and for sharing her expertise as a fashion designer and artist. Yukiho Suenaga’s assistance was invaluable in navigating Japanese art history. I am greatly indebted to Shelley Volsche, Simon May and Ellen Cone Maddrey for reading the manuscript and offering their intelligence and insight. Gary Cross, Angela Sorby, Mio Bryce, Erica Kanesaka, Kate Taylor-Jones, Dor Shilton, Julia Leyda and Stephanie Howard-Smith also provided valuable comments and suggestions on different chapters. Neil Steinberg kindly offered advice on the writing process. Hiroshi Nittono offered stimulating conversation and specialist knowledge.

Thanks to Amy and David Bassett of the JAB Canid Education and Conservation Center for being generous with their time and for allowing me to meet their Siberian foxes. Lucia Rinolfi and Michela Bonardi at the British Museum provided a wide-ranging virtual tour of the cute items in the museum’s collection. Sandra Kroupa, rare-book curator at the University of Washington Library, was also extremely generous with her time and expertise. Finally, I’d like to thank my cousin Sarah and her friends for kindly inviting me into the world of the furry fandom.

The research that supported this book was funded in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number JP20K00145. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Chuo University, JSPS or the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

OceanofPDF.com

INDEX

Page references in italics indicate images.

1. ‘acute’, etymology of cute and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

2. A Doll’s Banquet (girls’ magazine) 1

3. adrenal glands 1, 2

4. aeroplanes, Pikachu cartoons adorn 1

5. Aesop: ‘The Fox and the Crow’ 1

6. affectless expression 1

7. affiliation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

8. African Americans 1

9. aggression, domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

10. AIBO robot dog 1, 2

11. Aiken, George 1

12. Alcock, Sir Rutherford 1

13. alpha individuals 1, 2

14. amusement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

15. androgyny 1, 2

16. Anguissola, Sofonisba: The Chess Game 1

17. animals

1. anthropomorphism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

2. baby 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

3. cafés 1

4. cartoon 1, 2

5. cats see cats children, emergence of cuteness in and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

6. child schema and 1, 2, 3, 4

7. dogs see dogs domestication see domestication

8. fox see fox

9. ‘furries’ 1, 2

10. Japanese folk belief and 1

11. memes and 1

12. playful, Japanese and Western art and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

13. reduction and 1, 2

14. robot 1

15. small 1, 2, 3

16. social imprinting mechanism in 1

17. stuffed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

18. The Pillow Book and 1, 2, 3, 4

19. utsukushi, descriptions of animal families as 1

20. wild 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

21. wolf see wolf

18. anime 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

19. Anthrocon 1, 2

20. anthropomorphism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

21. Aoki, Misako 1

22. Aoyama Apartments, Tokyo 1

23. Aoyama cemetery, Tokyo 1

24. Aphrodite (goddess) 1

25. Apple 1, 2

26. Ariés, Philippe: Centuries of Childhood 1, 2

27. Aristotle 1

28. arms, small 1, 2, 3, 4

29. army, Japanese 1

30. Arthur, T. H. 1

31. artificial selection 1, 2, 3

32. ‘Aryan’ people 1

33. Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) 1, 2, 3

34. Astro Boy (anime programme) 1

35. avatars, digital 1, 2, 3

1. babies

1. animal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

2. baby schema. See child schema baby shows 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

3. baby talk 1

4. child schema and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

5. cupids 1, 2

6. evolution of cuteness in 1

7. eye movements and 1

8. mouths of 1

9. newborn 1

10. race and 1

11. rattles and 1

12. social imprinting and 1

13. ‘That’s so baby!’ 1

14. utsukushi and 1

15. Yoda 1

2. baboons 1

3. baby-boomers 1

4. baby schema. See child schema bank cards 1

5. Barden, L. A. 1, 2, 3

6. Barnum, P. T. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

7. Barnum’s American Museum 1, 2

8. Bassett, Amy 1, 2

9. Bassett, Dave 1, 2

10. Bates, Blanche 1

11. beauty 1, 2, 3, 4

12. beckoning cat figures 1, 2

13. Belyaev, Dmitri 1, 2, 3

14. Betty, William Henry West 1

15. biological illusion 1

16. ‘blank slate’, concept of child as (tabula rasa) 1

17. block economy 1

18. bonsai 1

19. Boston Globe 1

20. boys

1. avatars 1

2. boy bands 1, 2

3. innocent child, Romantic image of and 1, 2

4. manga and 1, 2, 3

5. rounded style of writing and 1

6. unruly wild side of 1

21. Bradshaw, John: Dog Sense 1

22. brain

1. capsule, predominance of 1

2. child schema and 1, 2

3. cooperative childcare and 1

4. cute objects, perception of and 1

5. domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4

6. neoteny and 1, 2, 3

7. neural crest and 1

8. newborn babies and 1

23. Bright Eyes (film) 1

24. Brownies 1

25. Bruegel, Pieter: Children’s Games 1

26. Buddhism 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

27. Bugs Bunny 1

28. bullet trains, Hello Kitty motifs decorate 1

29. Butt, Alfred 1

1. Cambridge & County Folk Museum 1

2. Campbell Soup kid 1

3. cartilage, development of 1

4. cartoons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

5. cats

1. beckoning cat figures, Gotokuji Temple, Tokyo 1, 2

2. cartoon 1

3. domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

4. eyes 1

5. Hello Kitty characters 1

6. neural crest 1

7. piebald coloration 1

8. robots and 1, 2

9. selective breeding and cuteness in 1

10. Sigourney and 1, 2

11. Utagawa Kuniyoshi and 1

6. cauaij, etymology of kawaii and 1

7. Central Research Laboratory on Fur-Breeding Animals, Siberia 1

8. characterisation 1

9. cheeks, bulging 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

10. cherry blossoms 1, 2

11. child/childhood

1. art, emergence of cute children in 1, 2, 3

2. babies see babies ‘blank slate’, concept of child as (tabula rasa) 1

3. cartoons and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

4. child schema, Lorenz’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

5. ‘children of all ages’ 1

6. concept of childhood, origins of 1

7. cooperative childcare 1, 2, 3, 4

8. ‘cult of the child’ 1

9. cupids and 1, 2

10. ‘cute’ word and 1, 2, 3, 4

11. dolls and see dolls eyes of 1

12. innocence, concept of childhood 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

13. Japan as paradise for/nation of children 1, 2

14. labour, child- 1, 2

15. manga and 1

16. mischief/naughtiness in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

17. mortality rates 1

18. neoteny and see neoteny nostalgia and 1, 2

19. primitive child, notion of 1

20. prodigies 1

21. racism and 1, 2

22. Romantic movement and 1

23. teddy bear and 1, 2

24. temporary nature of small 1

25. ‘the century of the child’ 1, 2

26. The Pillow Book and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

27. Tom Thumb weddings 1

12. child schema, Lorenz’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

13. chimpanzees 1, 2, 3, 4

14. China 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

15. Christianity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

16. Civil Rights movement, US 1

17. cleverness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

18. clockwork automata dolls (karakuri ningyō) 1

19. cognitive appraisal period 1

20. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1

21. colour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

1. fur and 1, 2, 3, 4

2. Japanese art and 1, 2, 3

3. The Pillow Book and 1

22. comic strips 1, 2, 3, 4

23. condoms, anthropomorphic 1

24. Congo River 1, 2

25. construction barriers, ‘cutified’ 1, 2

26. cooperative breeding 1

27. cooperative childcare 1, 2, 3, 4

28. cooperative eye hypothesis 1

29. Coppinger, Lorna 1, 2

30. Coppinger, Ray 1, 2

31. coquettishness 1, 2

32. cosplay 1, 2

33. counter-culture 1

34. Cox, Palmer 1

35. craniofacial ratios 1

36. cranium 1

37. Cross, Gary 1, 2

38. cunning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

39. Cupid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

40. curly

1. hair 1, 2

2. tails 1, 2, 3, 4

41. Curly Top (film) 1

42. cute

1. ‘acute’ and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

2. animals and see animals and

3. individual type of animal America and see United States characteristics, common 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

4. children and see children

5. cleverness and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

6. cunning and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

7. Cute Studies and cute science 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

8. domestication and see domestication etymology/word 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

9. evolution and see evolution future of 1

10. Japan and see Japan kawaii and see kawaii mischief/naughtiness and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

11. modern meaning of 1

12. neotony and see neotony social behaviour and see social

13. behaviour

14. unlocking 1

43. cuteness selection 1

44. Cutequake 1

45. Cute Studies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

46. Cute Studies (proposed journal) 1, 2

1. ‘Daddy’s girl’ 1, 2

2. Daliot-Bul, Michal 1

3. Darwin, Charles 1

1. The Descent of Man 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

2. unconscious selection and 1, 2

4. David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh 1

5. Degas, Edgar 1, 2

6. depression 1

7. Diamond, Jared 1

8. Disney 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

9. Disney, Walt 1, 2

10. DNA 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

11. dolls

1. baby shows and 1

2. Buddhist temples and 1

3. Children’s Games and 1

4. clockwork automata 1

5. cult of Japan and 1, 2, 3

6. Doll Festival, The (hina matsuri) 1, 2

7. Kewpie 1, 2

8. Nakahara and 1

9. Raggedy Ann 1

10. saucy sense of humour, American

11. manufacturers and 1

12. Shirley Temple 1

13. Sigourney and 1, 2

14. teddy bears and 1

15. The Pillow Book and 1

12. dogs

1. bond with humans 1

2. burials 1

3. domestication 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

4. eyes 1

5. fox and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

6. fur 1

7. Hachiko 1, 2, 3, 4

8. Japanese art and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

9. lapdogs 1, 2

10. marginalia and 1

11. neoteny 1

12. pet-adoption theory and 1, 2, 3

13. puppies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

14. robot 1, 2

15. rubbish-dump theory and 1, 2, 3, 4

16. selective breeding and cuteness in 1

13. domestication

1. alpha male, myth of 1

2. bonding and 1

3. dogs see dogs domestication syndrome 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

4. ears, floppy and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

5. eyes and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

6. fox and see fox friendliness gene and 1

7. fur and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

8. gazing, mutual and 1, 2, 3, 4

9. head shape and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

10. head size and 1, 2, 3, 4

11. instinctual releasing mechanism 1

12. Island Rule and 1

13. jaws, shortening of and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

14. language and 1

15. neotony and see neotony neural crest and 1, 2, 3

16. pet-adoption theory 1, 2, 3

17. rubbish-dump theory 1, 2, 3, 4

18. self-domestication hypothesis 1, 2, 3, 4

19. Siberian silver fox experiment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

20. social imprinting and 1, 2, 3

21. socialisation period 1, 2, 3, 4

22. teeth and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

23. unconscious selection 1, 2

24. wolves and 1

25. zebras and 1

14. Donatello 1

15. Dugatkin, Lee Alan: How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) 1

1. ears 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

2. floppy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

3. Edo, Japan 1

1. See also Tokyo Edo period 1, 2, 3, 4

4. Emerald City Comic Con 1

5. emoji 1, 2, 3

6. Enlightenment 1, 2, 3

7. Eros 1

8. Etruscan wolf (Canis etruscus) 1

9. Europe, development of cuteness in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

10. evolution

1. ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’ and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

2. alpha male, myth of 1

3. bonding and 1

4. Darwin and see Darwin, Charles dogs see dogs domestication and see domestication eyes and 1

5. imprinting and 1, 2, 3

6. language and 1

7. Lorenz and 1, 2, 3

8. March of Progress 1

9. Neanderthals and 1, 2, 3, 4

10. neoteny and see neoteny neural crest and see neural crest newborn babies and 1

11. pet-adoption theory 1, 2, 3

12. rubbish-dump theory 1, 2, 3, 4

13. self-domestication hypothesis and 1, 2, 3, 4

14. socialisation period 1, 2, 3, 4

15. specialists in non-specialisation 1

16. wolf see wolf

11. eyes

1. babies and 1

2. cooperative eye hypothesis 1

3. domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

4. elongated 1, 2

5. eyebrows 1, 2, 3, 4

6. eye contact/gazing, mutual 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

7. ‘Goo-goo’ 1

8. Lorenz’s child schema and 1, 2

9. manga and 1

10. Nakahara and 1

11. Pikachus 1, 2

12. position of 1, 2

13. robot 1, 2, 3

14. size 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

15. white sclera 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

16. Yumeji style and 1

1. faces

1. temperature of 1

2. widening of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

2. fan, folding 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

3. fan conventions 1, 2, 3, 4

4. fancy goods 1, 2

5. fashion

1. androgynous look and 1, 2

2. Cutequake and 1

3. Harajuku style 1, 2

4. Lolita 1, 2, 3, 4

5. schoolgirl 1, 2, 3

6. tribes 1

6. Felix the Cat 1

7. fight or flight response 1

8. Finnish Food Authority 1

9. First World War (1914–18) 1

10. flirtation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

11. Follen, Eliza Lee: ‘Three Little Kittens’

12. fox

1. affiliative behaviour/social bonds and 1, 2

2. burial, earliest fox-human 1

3. domestication syndrome and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

4. facial ‘expression’, cuteness of 1

5. people and, history of relationship 1, 2

6. Scroll of Frolicking Animals and 1, 2

7. Siberian silver fox experiment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

8. sly, cunning behaviour 1

9. Zaō Fox Village 1, 2

13. Freud, Sigmund 1

14. friendliness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

15. Fujioka, Shizuka 1

16. fur 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

1. piebald 1, 2, 3

17. furries 1, 2, 3

18. Furscience (International Anthropomorphic Research Project) 1

19. fursona 1, 2

20. fursuits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

1. Gainsborough, Thomas: Blue Boy 1, 2, 3, 4

2. Galton, Francis 1

3. gazing, mutual 1, 2, 3, 4

4. geese 1, 2

5. Generative AI 1

6. genetics, domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

1. See also domestication

7. Ginsburg, Benson 1

8. girls

1. avatars 1

2. ‘Daddy’s girl’ 1, 2

3. dolls and 1, 2, 3

4. emoji and 1

5. Japanese novels/illustrated magazines and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

6. kawaii and 1, 2, 3, 4

7. Lolita fashion subculture 1, 2, 3, 4

8. ‘magical girls’ 1

9. manga and 1, 2, 3

10. media focus on girls’ culture 1

11. mischievousness becomes associated with coquettishness 1, 2

12. portraits of 1, 2

13. schoolgirl image see schoolgirl Shirley Temple and image of 1

14. stereotypes of Japanese 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

15. Teddy Girl 1, 2

16. Uneeda Biscuit girl 1

9. Göbekli Tepe site, Turkey 1

10. golden jackal 1

11. Gold Dust Twins 1

12. Good Housekeeping 1

13. Google 1

14. Gotokuji Temple, Tokyo 1, 2

15. Gould, Stephen Jay: ‘A Biological

16. Homage to Mickey Mouse’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

17. Great Tokyo Earthquake (1924) 1

18. Gubar, Marah 1

1. Hagio, Moto 1, 2; They Were Eleven 3

2. haiku 1

3. halftone screenprinting 1

4. Harajuku, Tokyo 1, 2, 3, 4

5. Hare, Brian 1, 2

6. Harper’s Weekly 1, 2

7. Hartley, David 1

8. Harvard University 1

9. Having Fun Again Today! 1

10. head

1. piebald coloration on 1, 2

2. shape 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

3. size 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

11. Hearn, Lafcadio 1

12. Hearne, Samuel 1

13. Heian era 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

14. height 1, 2, 3

15. Hello Kitty 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

16. Henderson, Colonel Bob 1, 2

17. Henry, William 1

18. Higonnet, Anne 1

19. Hinde, Robert A. 1, 2, 3

20. hirahira style 1, 2

21. Hokusai 1

22. Holland glass 1

23. Hololive Productions 1

24. hominids 1, 2

25. Homo erectus 1

26. Hooff, Jan van 1

27. Howard-Smith, Stephanie 1

28. Hrdy, Sarah 1, 2

29. Hudson Bay 1

30. hugging 1, 2, 3, 4

31. Huizinga, Johan 1

32. hunter-gatherers 1, 2

33. Huron, David 1

1. Ideal Novelty and Toy Company 1

2. Ikeda, Riyoko: The Rose of Versailles 1

3. immaturity 1, 2, 3, 4

4. immigration 1, 2

5. Inari 1

6. Infant Cognition Center, Yale University 1

7. innocence, concept of childhood 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

8. Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Siberia 1

9. iPhone 1

10. Ishy (fox) 1

11. Island Rule 1

12. Izu Teddy Bear Museum, Japan 1

1. JAB Canid Education and Conservation Center, US 1, 2

2. Japan

1. ancient Japan, cuteness in 1

2. boys in see boys

3. contemporary Japan, cuteness in 1

4. emoji and see emoji

5. girls in see girls

6. group-oriented values within, cuteness and 1

7. isolationist foreign policy (sakoku) 1

8. Japonisme, cult of and 1, 2, 3

9. kawaii and see kawaii

10. manga and see manga

11. overstimulation of people, kawaii and 1

12. peak cuteness, era of 1

13. playfulness and see play

14. pre-twentieth-century history of cuteness in 1

15. stereotyped as land full of cute things and cute people 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

16. women in see women

17. See also individual area and place name

3. Japan Expo, Paris 1

4. Japan National Tourist Organization 1

5. jaws, shortening of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

6. Jonson, Ben 1

1. kana (phonetic Japanese alphabet) 1

2. Kanebo 1

3. Kanesaka, Erica 1, 2

4. kawahayushi (face turned red from excitement or embarrassment) 1

5. kawaii

1. American cute and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

2. animals and see animals bonding force 1

3. bottom-up aesthetic 1

4. boys and see boys contemporary Japan and 1

6. Cutequake and 1

1. domestication and see domestication

2. emoji and see emoji

3. girls and see girls

4. group-oriented values of Japanese society and 1

5. Hermit Kingdom and 1

6. history of 1

7. ‘Kawaii!’ cry 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

8. language/rounded script 1

9. manga and see manga origins/etymology of 1, 2, 3, 4

10. overstimulation by 1

11. peak cuteness, era of 1

12. popularity of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

13. pre-twentieth-century history of 1

14. women and see women

15. yuru and 1

7. Kawaii Edo Paintings exhibition, Tokyo 1

8. kawayui (sympathy towards weaker members of society) 1

9. Keaton, Buster 1

10. Keene, Donald 1, 2, 3

11. kenage (something small that is doing its best to overcome an obstacle) 1

12. Kewpie dolls 1, 2, 3, 4

13. Kewpie Mayonnaise 1, 2

14. kimono 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

15. Kimura, Takuya 1

16. Kimura, Yū 1

17. Kindchenschema. See child schema kin-recognition 1, 2

18. Kizuna AI 1

19. Klimt, Gustav 1

20. Knickerbocker 1

21. Kringelbach, Morten 1, 2

22. Kuniyoshi, Utagawa 1, 2;

1. Spring Moon, Cats in Heat 1

23. kyōgen dances 1

24. Kyoto, Japan 1, 2, 3

25. Kyoto International Manga Museum 1

1. Ladies’ Home Journal 1

2. Ladies’ Repository 1

3. Lahtinen, Maria 1

4. Lamarre, Thomas 1

5. Lamb, Charles 1

6. lapdogs 1, 2

7. Leech, John 1

8. Lee, O-Young 1, 2

9. legs, small 1, 2, 3, 4

10. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1

11. Levinson, Stephen 1

12. Lincoln, Abraham 1

13. Littlest Rebel, The (film) 1

14. Locke, John 1, 2, 3

15. Lolita fashion 1, 2, 3, 4

16. Lord, Kathryn 1, 2, 3, 4

17. Lorenz, Konrad

1. ‘child schema’ (Kindchenschema) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

2. Man Meets Dog 1

3. Nazi Party and 1, 2, 3

4. rubbish-dump theory of domestication and 1, 2

5. social imprinting and 1, 2, 3

18. Los Angeles Times 1

19. Loti, Pierre: Madame Chrysanthème 1

20. LOVOT robot 1, 2

1. magazines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

2. Maksa (fox) 1, 2

3. Mama (alpha chimpanzee) 1, 2

4. manga 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

5. manhole covers 1, 2

6. Mantacore (tiger) 1

7. March of Progress 1

8. marginalia 1

9. Marquette University, Milwaukee 1

10. mascots 1, 2, 3, 4

11. masculinity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

12. Matsuki, Bunkio

1. Catalogue of Japanese Artists’ Materials 1

2. White Rabbit shop, Boston 1, 2

13. Max Planck Institute 1

14. May, Simon 1

15. Me generation 1

16. melanin 1

17. memes 1

18. Mendel, Gregor 1

19. Mickey Mouse 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

20. Mikado, The: Gilbert and Sullivan 1

21. Mikhail (fox) 1

22. mikoshi (miniature shrines) 1

23. miniaturisation 1

24. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan 1

25. minstrel shows 1

26. mischief/naughtiness 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

27. misplaced responses 1

28. Monet, Claude 1, 2

29. monkey musical (sarugaku) 1

30. Montaigne, Michel de 1

31. Morinaga, Takurō 1

32. mouths 1, 2, 3, 4

33. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 1

34. Murakami, Takashi 1, 2

35. Murō, Sasei 1

36. music 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

37. Myōe 1

1. Naito, Rune 1, 2, 3

2. Nakahara, Junichi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

3. Native American 1, 2, 3

4. Nazi Party 1

5. Neanderthal 1, 2, 3, 4

6. neoteny (persistence of juvenile traits into adulthood) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

7. Netflix 1

8. neural crest 1, 2, 3

9. New Guinea singing dogs 1, 2

10. New Kid 1, 2, 3, 4

11. New York Times 1, 2, 3, 4

12. New York Tribune 1

13. New York World 1

14. newspapers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

15. Nissan 1

16. Nittono, Hiroshi 1, 2, 3, 4

17. Nobel Prize 1, 2

18. noh dances 1

19. North America 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

20. nostalgia 1, 2, 3, 4

1. Office of Race Policy 1

2. okashi 1

3. Ōkyo, Maruyama 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

4. Omotesando Hills, Tokyo 1

5. O’Neill, Rosie 1, 2

6. origami 1

1. pigeon fortunes 1, 2

7. original sin 1, 2, 3

8. otaku (shops and entertainment establishments) 1, 2

9. Ōtuska, Eiji 1, 2

10. Our Young Folks 1

11. Oxford English Dictionary 1

12. oxytocin 1, 2

1. pagers 1

2. pantomime 1, 2

3. Parco 1

4. peacock’s tail 1

5. Pears Soap children 1

6. Perry, Commodore Matthew 1

7. perspective view 1

8. pets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

9. piccaninny 1, 2, 3

10. piebald 1

11. Pigeon Forest shrine, Tokyo 1

12. Pikachu 1

1. Outbreak 1, 2, 3

13. plasticity 1, 2

14. play

1. adult playfulness 1, 2, 3, 4

2. American cute aesthetic and 1

3. animals and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

4. Children’s Games and 1

5. cosplay 1, 2, 3

6. domestication and 1, 2

7. Japanese culture and 1, 2, 3

8. medieval Europe and 1

9. mikoshi 1

10. pets and 1

11. playing with the gods (kami asobi) 1

12. religion and, historical connection between 1, 2, 3, 4

13. robots and 1, 2, 3

14. Rousseau and 1

15. Scroll of Frolicking Animals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

16. social engagement and 1

17. VTubers and 1, 2

18. whimsical cuteness and 1

15. plumpness 1, 2, 3

16. Pokémon 1, 2, 3, 4

17. Pokémon Go 1

18. Poor Little Rich Girl (film) 1

19. porcelain 1, 2, 3, 4

20. Porn Studies 1

21. prolactin 1

22. Puccini, Giacomo: Madame Butterfly 1

23. pugs 1, 2

24. Punch 1

25. puppies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

26. putti (cherubs) 1, 2

1. race

1. baby shows and 1

2. blackface minstrel shows and 1

3. cult of the child and 1, 2, 3, 4

4. Lorenz/Nazi Party and 1, 2

5. New Kid image and 1, 2

6. ‘piccaninny’ 1, 2, 3

7. race science 1, 2

8. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 1

2. Raggedy Ann dolls 1

3. railway safety posters, Japanese 1

4. Raphael: Sistine Madonna 1, 2

5. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (film) 1

6. Red Cross 1

7. religion and fun, historical connection between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

8. Renaissance 1, 2, 3

9. Reynolds, Sir Joshua 1, 2, 3

1. The Age of Innocence 1

2. Master Crewe as Henry VIII 1

10. robots 1, 2, 3, 4

11. rococo period 1, 2, 3

12. Roosevelt, Teddy 1

13. Rosetsu, Nagasawa 1, 2, 3

14. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 2, 3

15. Emile 1

16. Rune Panda 1, 2

17. ryakugashiki (technique of outlining characters using brief brushstrokes) 1, 2

18. Ryōanji Temple, Kyoto 1

1. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de: The Little Prince 1

2. samurai 1, 2, 3, 4

3. San Diego Zoo 1

4. San Francisco Examiner 1

5. Sanrio 1, 2, 3

6. Sapolsky, Robert 1

7. Sarah (furry cousin of author) 1, 2

8. schoolgirl

1. emoji and 1

2. ‘magical girls’ 1

3. romantic schoolgirl image, birth of 1

4. schoolgirl fashion 1, 2, 3

9. Scroll of Frolicking Animals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

10. Seattle, US 1, 2

11. Second World War (1939–45) 1, 2, 3, 4

12. serotonin 1, 2

13. Serpell, James 1

14. sexuality

1. bonobos and 1

2. children and 1, 2

3. heterosexuality 1

4. innocent 1, 2

5. prehistoric humans and 1

15. sexual selection 1

16. shasei (realistic Japanese painting) 1

17. Shimizu, Yuko 1

18. Shinto 1, 2, 3

19. shōjo culture 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

20. Shōjo’s Friend, The 1

21. Shōnagon, Sei: The Pillow Book 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

22. Siegfried and Roy 1

23. Sigourney, Lydia 1, 2

1. ‘Concerning Ye Catte’ 1, 2

2. Letters of Life 1, 2

3. Sayings of Little Ones 1

24. simplicity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

25. skull shape 1, 2

26. Slade, Toby 1

27. slapstick comedy 1, 2

28. smallness 1

1. arms and 1, 2, 3, 4

2. dolls and 1, 2

3. domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

4. Japonisme and 1, 2, 3

5. Kawaii culture and 1

6. kenage (something small that is doing its best to overcome an obstacle) 1

7. legs and 1, 2, 3, 4

8. Lorenz and 1, 2

9. Naito and 1

10. neural-crest and 1, 2

11. Ōkyo and 1

12. Pokémon 1, 2

13. Sigourney and 1, 2

14. The Pillow Book and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

29. smile 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

1. fairy smiles 1

2. fox and 1, 2, 3, 4

3. social smiles 1

30. snout 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

31. social engagement

1. babies/children and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

2. cuteness as releaser of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

3. dogs and 1, 2

4. domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

5. flexible sociality 1, 2

6. fox and 1, 2, 3

7. mutual gazing and 1, 2

8. neural-crest hypothesis and 1

9. play and 1

10. self-domestication hypothesis and 1

11. social cognition and 1

12. social imprinting and 1, 2, 3

13. social smiles 1

14. socialisation period 1, 2, 3, 4

32. social media 1

33. Society of Jesuits, Nagasaki 1

34. soft body surface 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

35. Sony 1

36. Sorby, Angela 1, 2, 3

37. sounds, high-pitched 1

38. S relationships (S-kankei) 1

39. stage plays, children’s 1

40. Star Wars (film) 1

41. Steamboat Willie (cartoon) 1

42. Steiff 1

43. St. Nicholas magazine 1, 2

44. Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1

45. stress 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

46. stuffed animals 1, 2

47. Suenaga, Yukiho 1, 2, 3

48. Suki (Japanese maid of Blanche Bates) 1

49. Sunflower (Himawari) 1

1. Takahashi, Macoto 1

2. Takehisa, Yumeji, 1, 2, 3, 4

3. Takeuchi, Hiroshi 1

4. Takeuchi, Naoko: Sailor Moon 1

5. Tale of Genji, The 1

6. Tamagawa, Kathleen 1

7. tameability 1

8. teddy bears 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

1. Izu Teddy Bear Museum, Japan 1

2. Teddy Girl 1, 2

9. teeth

1. blackened 1, 2

2. size 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

10. Teishi, Empress 1

11. Temple, Shirley 1, 2, 3, 4

12. Tezuka, Osamu 1, 2, 3

13. ‘That’s so baby!’ 1

14. ‘The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged’ (Keaton vaudeville debut) 1

15. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London 1

16. Theophrastus 1

17. Thumb, General Tom (Charles Stratton) 1

18. Time magazine 1

19. Tissot, James 1, 2

20. Toda, Yukiko 1, 2

21. Tokyo, Japan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

1. See also Edo Tom Thumb weddings 1

22. transience, appreciating 1, 2, 3

23. Trut, Lyudmila 1

24. How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) 1

25. Twentieth Century Fox 1

26. Twiggy 1

1. Ueno, Professor Hidesaburō 1, 2

2. unconscious selection 1, 2

3. Uneeda Biscuit girl 1

4. unhappiness 1

5. United States

1. acute/cunning, origins of American cute aesthetic and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

2. Asian American women 1, 2

3. Asian immigrants in 1, 2, 3

4. baby shows in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

5. cartoons and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

6. cute aesthetic dominates twentieth century in 1

7. ‘invades’ Japan (1854) 1, 2

8. Japanese kawaii and American cute, relationship between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

9. ‘the century of the child’ and/rise of cuteness in 1, 2

10. ‘yellow peril’ in 1

6. Universal Exhibition (1878) 1

7. US Navy 1

8. utsukushi 1, 2, 3, 4

1. Van Gogh, Vincent 1

1. Japonisme and 1, 2

2. Water Lilies 1

2. Victorian era 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

3. Vietnam War (1955–75) 1

4. Viktor (fox) 1, 2

5. Vogue 1

6. Vreeland, Diana 1

7. VTubers (virtual streamers) 1, 2

1. Waal, Frans de 1, 2

2. wabi-sabi (rustic simplicity and sparse elegance) 1

3. Warren, Lavinia 1

4. whimsical cuteness 1, 2, 3

5. White, Daniel 1

6. Williams, Linda 1

7. Williams, Vanessa 1

8. Wizard of Oz, The (film) 1

9. wobbly movements 1, 2, 3

10. wolf

1. domestication and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

2. Wolf Event 1

11. women

1. advertisers and 1

2. baby shows and 1, 2

3. education of 1

4. emoji and 1

5. gendering of cute and 1

6. hirahira style and 1, 2

7. innocent sexuality and 1, 2

8. Japanese feminists criticise kawaii 1

9. Japonisme and 1

10. kawaii language/rounded script and 1

11. kawaii masculinity and 1

12. Kewpies and 1, 2

13. lifestyle leaders, young women emerge as 1

14. manga and 1

15. Nakahara and 1

16. pagers and 1

17. pets breastfed by 1, 2

18. schoolgirl image and see schoolgirl self-domestication and 1, 2

19. shōjo 1

20. ‘S relationships’ (S-kankei) 1

21. stereotypes of Japanese 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

22. stoicism 1

23. subservience 1, 2, 3

24. suffrage 1, 2

25. The Pillow Book and 1, 2, 3, 4

26. Tom Thumb weddings and 1, 2

27. ‘woman’s hand’, writing in a (onna-de) 1

28. Yumeji style and 1

12. woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) 1

13. Wordsworth, William 1

14. Wrangham, Richard 1

15. Wynne, Clive 1

1. ‘yellow peril’ 1

2. Yokohama, Japan 1

3. Yomota, Inuhiko 1, 2, 3

4. Yoshiya, Nobuko 1, 2

1. Flower Tales 1

5. youth

1. cultural shift from mischievous cuteness towards sweet, youthful cuteness 1

2. Harajuku youth culture 1

3. manga and 1

4. Mickey Mouse and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

5. neoteny and 1, 2

6. New Kid and 1, 2

7. prolonging 1

8. universal education allows new youth cultures to emerge in US and Japan 1

9. youthful qualities 1

10. Youthquake 1

6. yukata (unlined cotton summer kimono) 1

7. yuru (wobbly/amateurish/imperfect) 1, 2, 3

8. yuru kyara (mascot character) 1, 2

1. Zanuck, Darryl 1

2. Zaō Fox Village 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

3. zebras 1

4. Zelizer, Viviana 1

5. Zen philosophy 1

OceanofPDF.com

COPYRIGHT

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.co.uk

Copyright © Joshua Paul Dale, 2023

Illustrations for chapter headings, copyright © Yukiko Toda, 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 238 8

TPB ISBN 978 1 80081 825 5

eISBN 978 1 78283 542 4

OceanofPDF.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

List of figures

Introduction: Hello Kitty Guards the Road

1: Ancient Japanese Cuteness

2: The Border between Wild and Tame

3: Cuteness in the West

4: Kawaii in the Hermit Kingdom

5: Growth in Reverse: Neoteny and the Neural Crest

6: Cute Attains its Modern Meaning

7: The Evolutionary Substrate of Cuteness

8: Kawaii in Contemporary Japan

9: Are We a Self-Domesticated Species?

10: The Future of Cuteness

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright