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Kawaii does not, therefore, translate easily or literally into a Western
understanding of the word, “cute”. Donald Richie adds:
Cute (kawaii) is variously defined. Webster’s says it means “attractive by reason of
daintiness or picturesqueness in manners of appearance, as a child or small animal”,
and the Oxford English Reference Dictionary offers “affectedly attractive”. Certainly,
kawaii means all this. But in Japan it means more. 106
Hence Kawaii as a paradigm, although understood outside Japan, is also
intrinsically Japanese and stems from the pre-Meiji past. Hiroshi Aoyagi
emphasises this, stating that it is “by no means a recent… invention but has
clear historical roots”. 107 “The Japanese word for cute, ‘kawaii’”, he says,
“can be traced back to its classical form, ‘kawayushi’, which appears in poetry
and stories from the pre-Modern era”. 108 Kawaisa however, although not
exclusively, is inextricably bound to the little-girl image and notions of the
young female adult or the Woman-child:
The “cuteness” observed today [in young girl identities]… closely resembles “sweet
little girls” (otome), or “cute Japanese women” (yumato nadeshiko), [popular] images
from the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In fact, “cuteness” was
[traditionally] considered to be the main feature of shōjo, the term coined… to
signify the “not-quite-adult” femaleness of unmarried girls. 109
In that there is this connection between cuteness and the Woman-child
image, kawaisa is a strong underlying subtext to the Lolita subculture.
Cuteness is also a reason why many young women are motivated toward the
movement and often the very reason why many choose the Gothloli
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