To accompany this essay, three Japanese artists created (and named) seven mascots exclusively for T, all inspired by or representing The New York Times in some way.
HELLO KITTY STANDS on the balcony like Eva Perón, framed by two great stone pillars and a blue-green dome. At least theoretically she is standing: Save for the round, claw-free paws on the balustrade, she is all giant head, white as a lit-up lamp with sun ray whiskers and the slash of a red ribbon at her left ear, mouthless, her eyes wholly pupils. This little girl — she is not a cat, although not not a cat either (more on this in a bit) — presides over an exhibition at the Hyokeikan, part of the Tokyo National Museum complex in the city’s Ueno Park, celebrating her 50 years of existence and global domination.
Two bronze lions flank the entrance, lushly bearded in the European style but with one’s mouth agape while the other’s is shut, recalling the komainu (lion-dogs) that for centuries have kept vigil over Shinto shrines, silently forming the sounds “a” and “un”: alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. There are chains set up to corral crowds into a long, winding queue, but it’s an hour before closing and no one is waiting. The scene is eerily calm, in contrast to opening day the week before — Nov. 1, Hello Kitty’s official birthday (cute but Scorpio!) — when videos went viral on social media showing delirious fans (or resellers greedy for limited-edition merch) stampeding up the steps under their icon’s blandly munificent gaze.
TORAJIMA-CHAN
The Tokyo-based character designer Hiroshi Yoshii, 62, knew he wanted to use an animal as the basis for one of his mascots and initially considered the owl for its associations with wisdom. Ultimately, though, he chose a tiger to symbolize “a sharp, unyielding stance against power and a relentless pursuit of truth — qualities that lie at the very heart of journalism,” he says. Tigers, he points out, can be portrayed as either fierce or endearing, making them ideal mascots. And the tiger stripes (torajima in Japanese) — black lines on white fur — reminded him of newsprint. He added extra ears — “to express its ability to gather vast amounts of information” — which form a Statue of Liberty-style crown in homage to New York City. “I replaced the torch with a pencil,” he says, “representing the power of words to illuminate truth.”
Docility above, frenzy below. Such are the contradictions of cuteness, of which Hello Kitty is just an avatar, albeit perhaps the most recognizable and clichéd. Yet her ascendancy was not a foregone conclusion. She was created by the entertainment company Sanrio in 1974 and introduced without fanfare on a tiny see-through vinyl coin purse as an alternative to popular American characters like Snoopy, whose reproduction came with licensing costs. Hello Kitty was both a savvy business decision and a shot in the dark, an attempt to capitalize on a relatively new market for frivolous goods — wages and standards of living had dramatically increased in the 1960s with Japan’s economy rebounding from wartime devastation — and a budding interest in figures with curved edges, simple shapes, minimal features and an aura of vulnerability: a distinctly Japanese aesthetic that would soon become a national and international obsession, transforming the way the world defines cute. In the decades since, even as the boom times of 1980s Japan gave way to slump and stagnation, Hello Kitty has earned an estimated $80 billion for her maker, part of a vast outpouring of cuteness that’s helped turn the nation into a cultural superpower.
Unlike earlier counterparts such as Mickey Mouse, who flirted his way into the American imagination in the films of Walt Disney in the 1920s — and who was something of a rogue before being redrawn and tamed into the relentlessly chipper figure we know today — and Miffy, the pert-eared picture-book bunny heroine dreamed up by the Dutch writer and illustrator Dick Bruna in 1955, Hello Kitty was a commodity from the start, created expressly to move goods off shelves. She had no story. Although she was belatedly outfitted with a biography, as if it were an accessory akin to that coin purse, surely none but the most fanatical of her admirers think of her as 8-year-old Kitty White, living on the outskirts of London with her twin sister and her more thoroughly feline pet cat.
ONITAN
Growing up in Iwate, a prefecture on the northeastern coast of Honshu that’s rich in folklore, the Tokyo-based illustrator Kimiaki Yaegashi, 52, was immersed in traditional tales, which, he says, shape his creative process. He feels a particular connection with oni, ogre-like creatures classically depicted with bare upper bodies, tiger-striped shorts and horns. Often portrayed as villains, they also possess “a touch of humanity that makes them intriguing,” he says. “They’re fearsome but unexpectedly kind, representing layered identities.” Yaegashi’s oni holds an iPad because, the artist says, “he’s reading T online.”
In fact, it’s her very lack of context that helps to explain her appeal, according to the didactic panels that greet visitors inside the Hyokeikan, where young women pose for pictures amid a half-century’s worth of products in bright color-coded displays: plushies, backpacks, earmuffs, teacups, high heels, fuzzy boots, first-aid kits, rotary phones and, the apotheosis, a Cartier watch with a bezel of pink sapphires and Hello Kitty engraved on the case’s underside, so only the wearer would know she’s there. As a cipher, she relieves you of any responsibility to empathize with an experience beyond your own; instead, you can just absorb this malleable, expressionless figure into your life and aspirations, which is to say, consume her, every commodity’s destiny.
But of course this is itself a story of power and powerlessness — “what we love because it submits to us,” the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai writes in “Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting” (2012). I can find no mention in the English translations on the museum’s placards of a historical context for Hello Kitty’s triumph, but the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, 63, has drawn a direct line from the country’s embrace of all things cute to its humbling defeat (and, implicitly, the thwarting of its imperial ambitions) in the Second World War, its occupation by the United States and the dismantling of its armed forces, as codified in Article 9 of its Constitution. In an essay for an exhibition on postwar Japanese popular culture that he curated in 2005 at the Japan Society in New York titled “Little Boy” — both a nod to the American military’s nickname for the atomic bomb it dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and Murakami’s jab at Japan’s subordination to its conqueror — he calls himself and his fellow Japanese “self-medicated denizens of a castrated nation-state” and “pampered children … enthralled by our own cuteness.”
Nor is there any reference at the Tokyo exhibition to the social upheavals of the 1960s that prefaced and arguably paved the way for Hello Kitty: the sweeping student protests, strikes, sit-ins and riots that began as a critique of exploitation and corruption at universities and gained force (and grew violent) with resistance to the renewal of the U.S.-Japan security treaty, a tether to American militarism and what was seen as an unconscionable war in Vietnam. In the end, the students and their fervor were crushed by the police, and activist leadership fractured into fringe militant groups that were eventually undone by their own extremism and internal derangements. (One faction was captured after a televised siege and shootout in 1972; another established a base in the Middle East from which to pursue international revolution via hijackings and embassy stormings.) Despite public opposition, the Japanese government reaffirmed the security treaty in 1970. Nothing changed.
You could look at the population’s turn to cuteness — not only as an aesthetic but as a way of life — as a trauma response: sublimated rage, learned helplessness, a numbing of the mind. Cute is the opiate of the people. But is this simply a retreat from the fray? Or has this embodiment of powerlessness become itself a kind of power?
SHOGUN-CHAN
The wild success of “Shogun” — the American-made Japanese-language series that won a record number of Emmys in 2024 — inspired Yaegashi to create a mascot bearing the visual signifiers of the fierce military rulers (who reigned over Japan from the 12th through the 19th centuries), including armor, wooden sandals and a helmet, this one emblazoned with the New York Times logo. “I thought it would be interesting to contrast the powerful image of a shogun with the opposite concept of cuteness,” says the artist. His mustachioed man wears pink because, Yaegashi says, it’s “widely recognized in Japan as a symbol of cuteness,” as well as yellow, which recalls the shogun’s traditional golden armor. Rather than a sword, he relies on the power of knowledge, wielding a copy of the newspaper.
ONLY THE MOST devoted scholar would attempt a definitive archive of cuteness and all its manifestations in Japan. The cute is everywhere because life is everywhere; in the animism that underlies Shinto, the country’s indigenous religion, everything has a soul. And so the pantheon of cute unites figures as disparate as the sentient dust balls and boba of the Sumikkogurashi entourage, who were designed in 2012 to adorn merchandise, à la Hello Kitty; Kogepan, the antihero of a 2001 anime, a burned red bean bun doomed to inedibility after a fall in the oven and trailed by a curl of smoke, who nevertheless reads self-help books like “How to Become a Delicious Bread” to stave off despair; and the many yuru-kyara, or “wobbly characters,” a term coined in the early 2000s by the illustrator Jun Miura for the mascots that promote regions, businesses and government services, including the shamrock green E-ta-kun, who encourages people to use the national online tax payment system and was voted the 17th most popular yuru-kyara in a poll last fall, and Katakkuri-chan, a life-size plushie prison warden with a dogtooth violet for hair, who represents a facility on Hokkaido — the flower blooms in the nearby mountains in spring — that has been investigated by Human Rights Watch (one inmate was reportedly held in solitary confinement for 13 years). So pervasive is mascotification that even tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, was pictured as a pink-cheeked floating atom in a 2021 campaign to bolster public support for releasing treated wastewater into the sea from the defunct Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.
But just as Hello Kitty is not exactly a cat — she looks like a cat but within her own world is a little girl, a crucial distinction — cuteness in Japan is not exactly cuteness as it was historically recognized in the West. “Cute” in English is an innocuous word for an innocuous state, as genial and squishy as what it describes. Indeed, the act of describing it as such is already an exercise of power. It’s a pat on the head, a dismissal and a diminishment, which is literally how the adjective came to be: Once it was “acute,” from the Latin acutus, “sharp” or “pointed,” and then the front vowel got lopped off. When “cute” first appeared in a dictionary, in 1731, it retained the sense of sharp, in intellect and wit, even shading pejoratively into slyness, but over time it lost much of its sting and drifted so far as to almost reverse in meaning, favoring naïveté over smarts.
TORCH-CHAN
“Many of the characters I create have abstract forms born out of the exploration of shape and color,” Yoshii says. In this case, he “pictured a wave of cuteness suddenly flooding the black-and-white pages of a newspaper, a character where cuteness takes shape.” Like his tiger mascot, this one incorporates the Statue of Liberty as a motif, with a reimagined version of her torch atop its head. Even the paper’s logo on its belly is given “a cute makeover,” he says, slightly thickened and rounded, with an added sparkle that matches Torch-chan’s eyes.
“Kawaii,” the closest Japanese equivalent to the contemporary English “cute,” goes further. Here the cute isn’t so much unthreatening as threatened. According to the Japanese cultural critic Inuhiko Yomota, “kawaii” entered the written record in 1603 as “cauaij” in a Jesuit Portuguese-Japanese dictionary, where it is translated as “something to be pitied” or “to have compassion for.” Its roots are believed to lie in an archaic compound word joining kao (“face”) and hayushi, defined in an 1896 English-Japanese dictionary as “rich in a particular quality” and “dazzling,” suggesting a face aglow: a blush, brought on by shame or guilt. As Hiroshi Nittono, a psychology professor at Osaka University, explains in the 2016 study “The Two-Layer Model of ‘Kawaii,’” the term gradually shifted in meaning to something you “could not bear to look at” because it was so pitiful, and then to the affection and urge to offer protection that pity can inspire.
LONG BEFORE “KAWAII” took hold in the language, however — and before any comparative notion of cuteness emerged in the West — a fascination with the dainty and the defenseless was present in Japanese culture. In “The Pillow Book,” written at the turn of the 11th century, Shonagon Sei, a lady of the Heian court, offered a list of utsukushiki mono, which has been translated as “adorable things” and is perhaps best understood as an early taxonomy of kawaii, as Joshua Paul Dale, an American professor of cute studies in Tokyo, argues in “Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World” (2023). Within this classification fall “a baby sparrow that comes hopping up when one imitates the squeak of a mouse” and children of various ages, one solemnly marching in ceremonial costume, another with hair “cut like a nun’s.” (Childhood in itself isn’t sufficient to qualify as adorable: In other lists, Sei finds “a child who is full of filial piety” moving rather than simply cute and, cruelly, classifies parents doting on an unattractive child as embarrassing.)
Smallness is a universal feature, but more telling are hints of the liminal and transitory; duck eggs and chicks that “look as if their clothes are too short for them” make the cut. A certain nascency persists in the kawaii commodities that have won hearts not only in Japan but across the world over the past few decades, like the Sonny Angel dolls (introduced in 2004) that are the descendants of Greco-Roman Cupids and Renaissance-era cherubim and putti, mostly naked, potbellied and saucer-eyed with dark winged lashes. There’s also waddling Pikachu (1996) in the Pokémon franchise, plausibly a member of the rodent family, with gaping grin and chubby ears askew, as well as creatures of more nebulous anatomy, like the eternally prostrate Tarepanda (1995), a merchandise character whose head is as big as his torso and whose limbs are mere stubs, as comically shrunken as a T. rex’s arms, and Gudetama (2013), a star of short cartoons and perhaps the most inchoate of all, an enervated egg yolk with a peach-cleft bottom.
But note that Sei’s list includes an item wholly outside the parameters of cute in the West: an urn containing the relics — that is, the ashes and bones — of a holy person. Is this not more properly a subject of solemnity and reverence? Where is the giggle? Or does this reveal something: that what makes things cute is ultimately not their childishness but their impermanence, which is also ours. For we, too, are powerless before time.
TEEDRA
“When I saw [The Times’s] logo, the image of a curled-up Japanese dragon immediately came to mind,” says Ryogo Toyoda, 39, a 3-D illustrator based in Saitama. Japanese dragons, he explains, are quite different from those found in Western fantasy. Often rooted in Shinto tradition, they’re sacred beings deeply connected to nature. Worshiped since ancient times as embodiments of Ryujin, a deity of the seas, they’re said to appear in the form of dragon-shaped clouds; when such a cloud appears, people often say, “Ryujin is watching.” Since dragons are hatched from eggs, Teedra, whose name combines “T” and “dragon,” cradles a newsprint-patterned one, which forms the central piece of the gothic letter. “The dragon, gazing down at society from above, reflects the mission of The Times,” he says, “a presence that observes the world and delivers the truth.”
IN THE 1970S, just as Hello Kitty came on the scene, teenagers and particularly adolescent girls across Japan started to abandon the precision of formal penmanship for a sketchy, balloony script with thin strokes and scattered hearts and stars, tracking laterally instead of vertically. Calligraphy, once vital to the training of samurai, had been made compulsory in primary and secondary school education in 1971 as part of a conservative political resurgence. In this context, the new vernacular handwriting was seen as so disruptive that some schools banned it. One social commentator went so far as to condemn it as “a pathological phenomenon” that threatened to wipe out Japanese as a written language, as cited by the American anthropologist and art historian Jennifer Robertson in “Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan” (1998).
Yet those soft edges and rounded shapes — which today constitute much of the visual language not only of kawaii in Japan but of social media worldwide, from emojis to the quivering dumplings, bunnies and puppies that ornament Instagram Stories to even the Snapchat filters that turn faces into frighteningly smooth ovals with sparkling freckles and magnified eyes — didn’t truly break with tradition. They were present in the influential work of the manga artist and animator Osamu Tezuka, who published his first long-form manga in 1947, when he was still a teenage student at medical school in Osaka. And kawaii style can be traced further back, the London-based Japanese animator Miki Kato argues in her 2002 essay, “Cute Culture,” to centuries-old Japanese aesthetic principles that prize the irregular and the unfinished as an echo of naturally occurring forms.
When Tezuka created the child robot Astro Boy, one of his most popular characters, in 1951, he gave him disproportionately big eyes, taking up nearly half his face, which are now the signature of cuteness everywhere. He was not the first to deploy such eyes — his work was inspired in part by the 1942 Disney film “Bambi,” which he reportedly watched more than 80 times, as recounted in a 1992 manga biography by his colleague Toshio Ban — but in his hands, and in the evolution of manga and anime, their exaggerated size is both a vehicle for greater expressiveness and a kind of flaw, signaling the otherworldliness of his hero, who is built to replace a scientist’s dead son and then sold to a circus when the grieving father can’t bear how far his handiwork falls short of reality.
PINKY
“This character grew out of my desire to explore the idea of turning traditional Japanese painting into 3-D form,” says Toyoda of his reimagining of the oni — recognizable by his fangs and horns — as an adorable eraser-hued sphere. “Oni is known as the god who watches over the world. So he’s like The Times, which is a witness to truth,” says Toyoda. Pinky’s helmet is inspired by the conical hats that became popular during the Edo period and, like his traditional paper lantern, is adorned with a golden “T” that matches his teeth and horns. “It’s said that if children misbehave, the oni will come to punish them; he’s rooted in everyday life as a figure of fear and discipline for kids,” he says. “I’ve reinterpreted that fearsome figure into a more charming character.”
What is cute is not merely childlike, then, but almost always imperfect, a little distorted — that is to say, individual. Kato notes that teenage girls attach goofy characters to their regulation school satchels as a way to assert personality, a near-rebellious gesture in a culture that rewards sameness. Kawaii can be a touch of ugliness, like the fangs that young Japanese women took to wearing a decade ago, not long or sharp enough to command fear but just enough to make them look snaggletoothed. There are entire subcultures of kawaii dedicated to the creepy and the grotesque. Even in mainstream kawaii, often a character’s most winning feature comes from a wound: Kogepan is burned; Doraemon, the time-traveling robot cat who first appeared in a manga in 1969, has an uncluttered orb for a head — roundness again — because his ears were chewed off by a robot mouse.
This is pathos, but not passivity. The school administrators who banned cute handwriting thought it was dangerous, and they were right. Again, can powerlessness be a power? Is the missing mouth of Hello Kitty a purposeful silence, even a refusal — testament to a cultural trait that the British writer Pico Iyer, who has lived in Japan for three decades, has described as “impassive aggressiveness”? In a rigid society that still keeps women mostly on the margins, the kawaii heroines of shoujo manga, a genre of comic books targeting a female audience (like the globally beloved “Sailor Moon,” serialized from 1991 to 1997) that were shaped by a wave of female artists in the 1970s, spurn or at least defer womanhood. The characters are typically portrayed as sexually underdeveloped, often in counterpoint to beautiful and more voluptuous rivals whose attractions are seen as unearned and a matter of chance, whereas being cute requires effort. In the 1999 essay “Cute but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics,” the Japanese folklore scholar Kanako Shiokawa writes, “This particular formula implicitly leaves a message that being ‘cute’ is a virtue and, in an oddly paradoxical way, strength.” (Although kawaii erotica exists, cuteness more often represents a rejection of sexualization; Tokyo’s so-called Lolita fashion, which gained popularity in the 1980s, is really about dressing for one’s own pleasure and has more allegiance to the frippery of the Rococo and Victorian periods than to the 1955 Vladimir Nabokov novel.)
There is something in cute that resists — that even contains an appetite for its own destruction. The popular yuru-kyara Mikyan, a hybrid of a mikan orange and a dog with leaves for ears and its own Instagram account, who promotes travel to Ehime Prefecture and purchase of its products (e.g., mikan oranges), would perhaps be nothing without its evil doppelgänger, Dark Mikyan, a mikan orange gone to rot because it was grown outside Ehime, with a Frankensteinian scar on its head. Zombear, a mascot from Otaru on Hokkaido, is a zombie bear with a lolling tongue who carries around his own intestines like a string of sausages. Pokémon are kaiju, giant beasts, only writ small; their name is short for “pocket monsters.” Lovable Pikachu has a violent side: If provoked or overwhelmed, he dispenses electric shocks.
KAPPY
Toyoda modeled this character on kappa, a menacing Japanese folklore character. “I aimed to simplify its features as much as possible and portray it as a nonevil being,” he says, “giving it a somewhat helpless yet endearing appearance, similar to a penguin.” — Momoko Ikeda
ACQUIESCENCE IS NOT obedience, as Iyer has written. We think of cute as something that exists only to please us, and of which we are the master. But it also is us. As the country’s economy has languished in the past few decades, the Japanese — along with people around the world who’ve lost faith in their governments and one another — have been ever more drawn to angst-ridden kawaii figures whose troubles reflect their own, like Retsuko of the anime series “Aggretsuko,” a 25-year-old red panda accountant who’s regularly belittled and hounded at the office. She’s not just cute, she’s furious. As a saleswoman repeats, “No pressure, take your time,” or when in the middle of a speed-dating session she realizes she can no longer take this “eternity of small talk and suffering,” she conjures visions of herself with inferno eyes and bear-trap teeth, screaming death metal at karaoke with enough rage to annihilate entire worlds. Gudetama, the yolk, a global sensation and one of Sanrio’s most popular characters alongside Hello Kitty, is an unrepentant nihilist. He clings to his eggshell, moaning, “All I see is darkness,” not out of fear of being eaten but in sheer lethargic defiance of existence as an active state of being: a latter-day Bartleby.
In Tokyo Character Street, a shopping arcade under the vast Tokyo Station, I find a shelf of tiny plushie Sumikkogurashi, including Penguin?, whose question mark betrays an identity crisis; Tokage, a dinosaur and the last of his kind, pretending to be a lizard to avoid capture; and Tonkatsu, a fatty scrap of battered and fried pork abandoned on the plate — an undesired leftover, like its friend Tapioca, the dregs left behind once a bubble tea is drunk. They are almost identical blobs with the subtlest of distinctions: a ruffle of spikes, an abbreviated beak. All have their backs turned to me, as they are shy. (Sumikkogurashi translates as “life in the corner.”) They shun me, their prospective buyer, which makes me want them all the more. Everything is cute, so cute is everything, the sour alongside the sweet.
Even the bitter: In another store I stumble on a plushie No-Face, the devouring ghoul from the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 film “Spirited Away.” His nonface is moon white with only slits for eyes, like a blank Noh mask. In the movie he is loneliness personified, swallowing the world with a raw hunger that terrifies. Yet he is not a villain, nor is he redeemed; in the end, he is simply calmed by the shoujo heroine as part of overcoming her own fears. Cute is “a watered-down version of pretty; which is a watered-down version of beautiful; which is a watered-down version of terrifying,” the Oakland, Calif.-based writer Frances Richard suggests in the 2001 essay “Fifteen Theses on the Cute.” In the fluorescent light, this toy No-Face is no longer a rippling shroud but a pudgy black egg with odd skinny limbs. Still he has menace, crouched like a spider. This, too, is cuteness, the dark thing you can’t name, that you don’t push away even though it can hurt you; that you look in the eye, learn to live with, hold in your arms all through the night.
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