In this section, three studies discussing Japanese kawaii from different perspectives are reviewed. McVeigh (1996) explores the concept of cuteness in Japan and explains why cuteness is ambiguous in meaning, Yomota (2006) examines the features of kawaii, and Asano-Cavanagh (2014) explicates the semantics of kawaii in
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Japanese.
2.1.1 McVeigh (1996)
McVeigh (1996) analyzes the phenomenon of cuteness in the Japanese society from an anthropological perspective. According to him, “cuteness” is a unique and important cultural element in the Japanese daily life; from brightly colored advertisements, everyday small objects, to the baby-faced mascot of governmental authorities, cute things are seen everywhere in Japan and they are used as communicative strategies to notify, advise, and shape opinions. McVeigh (1996: 291) suggests that the reason why cuteness can provide communicative potency is because cuteness is more than a feeling or a way of description; instead, it is a sentiment that has been “objectified, commodified and commercialized” within Japanese everyday lives, and from the objects’ materials, shapes, to their sizes, all of these characteristics embed and encode this sentiment and none of them are immune to this aesthetics.
As McVeigh (1996) suggests, cuteness is a ubiquitous concept and since it can be used to describe almost everything, including people, animals, small things and even people’s behavior and their facial expression, the meaning of cuteness may be hard to define. In his attempt to capture the meaning of cuteness, McVeigh takes cuteness as a key symbol in the Japanese society and employs Turner’s (1967) four
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properties of symbols to explain why symbols are effective for communicating people’s conceptions about the social world.2 According to Turner, the first property of a symbol is multivocality or polysemy, showing that a symbol can represent different things with diverse meanings; the second property is condensation, which means that one symbol unifies many diverse meanings and different meanings of a symbol are associated with and interact with other meanings; the third property is ambiguity, meaning that a symbol has more than one meaning and people can use the same symbol in different ways; the fourth property is the two-sided aspect of a symbol: one is conceptual or ideological side and the other one is perceptual or sensory side, which mutually define and reinforce each other. By employing Turner’s symbolic analysis, McVeigh explains why cuteness can have such a broad descriptive range and be able to describe all varied objects. Moreover, taking “cuteness” as a key symbol in the Japanese society, McVeigh (1996: 293) argues that it is the symbol’s four properties that “do justice to the multifaceted, ambiguous nature of cuteness”.
With this view, we suggest that if the notion of cuteness is so semantically rich, the terms for cuteness, such as kěài in Mandarin, which is the focus of this study, also have diverse meanings accordingly.
The aspect of McVeigh’s findings related to this study is that he investigates the
2 According to sociology, the social world refers to a social construct. People construct the social world, and even reality is socially constructed.
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concept of cuteness and finds out cuteness is a versatile concept which can have a broad descriptive range to describe almost everything, including inanimate objects such as toys and small things, persons such as children and young women, and even people’s behavior and attitude. Although McVeigh has pointed out why the nature of cuteness is ambiguous and the various things that can be described as cute, he does not classify “the objects” and “the features of those objects” to be described as cute in a systematic way, since he mixes the external features, such as small and young, and behavioral properties and attitude, with the objects, such as children and toys. That is, the descriptive range of cuteness is not clearly defined and hence its usages are hard to capture. Viewed in this light, if we would like to have a better understanding of the descriptive range of a cuteness term in Mandarin, namely kěài in this study, the objects and the features of those objects to be described as kěài must be separately discussed and more systematically categorized.
2.1.2 Yomota (2006)
In his book “Kawaii ron”, Yomota (2006) rigorously investigates the phenomenon of kawaii and analyzes the features of kawaii. Using questionnaires with opening questions, Yomota examines people’s thoughts and attitudes toward the word kawaii from two main aspects: (a) the situations to be described as kawaii, and (b) the
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antonyms and the synonyms of kawaii. The questionnaires were completed by Japanese college students, including both males and females.
According to Yomota, regarding the first aspect of the questionnaire, the results show that the situations that both males and females considered kawaii were their childhood, the time when they changed their hair style/clothes or when they interacted with the other gender. Different from males’ experiences, kawaii was also used by females to describe the time when they were “petite” or when they consciously acted cute, i.e. burikko, in Yomota’s survey. Moreover, regardless of gender, Yomota found that people were also described as kawaii in a specific situation, namely, “unexpected failure situation”. For example, a girl expressed that she was once described as kawaii for she unconsciously spoke with a “broad accent”. According to Yomota, the reason is that girls who make fool of themselves by accident are more kawaii than those perfect girls who never make mistakes and if the girl who makes mistakes is described as kawaii by other people, this just means that she has safely passed the crisis. Viewed in this light, Yomota suggests kawaii has the function of controlling the distress of the situation and protecting the person involved.
Regarding the second aspect of the questionnaire—the antonyms and synonyms of kawaii, Yomota asserts that the meaning of kawaii is most obvious when it contrasts with utsukushii (美しい) ‘beautiful’. According to him, utsukushii means
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flawless and perfect and such features are opposite to imperfect and immature, which are the characteristics of kawaii. However, Yomota further asserts that those seemingly weak features may turn out to be strengths; in other words, being imperfect or immature can be seen as being ‘kind’, ‘reachable’, ‘touchable’ and ‘approachable’
from a different viewpoint. Thus, Yomota suggests that this may be the reason why the thing/person described as kawaii always arouses people’s desire to touch it and to protect it. Moreover, based on the questionnaire survey, Yomota found what is opposite to kawaii is ‘not touching’, ‘boring’, ‘unkind’, and ‘ordinary’; besides, there are ‘adult-like’, ‘complete’, and ‘calm’, and these antonyms are based on the concept of maturity. Other antonyms of kawaii found in Yomota’s survey include ‘flawless’,
‘keen’, and ‘brilliant’ based on the concept of knowledge. With this view, Yomota argues that kawaii excites and stimulates people’s interest and enthusiasm in their life;
with some immaturity always, kawaii makes peoples’ heart beats, encouraging and arousing their curiosity. He strongly suggests that since the Japanese word kawaii is associated with features such as immature and imperfect, it is different from the English word cute because the etymology of cute is actually the shortening of acute, which means clever. Thus, Yomota contends that after the personification of kawaii, a girly, childish, corky but gentle image appears instead of a beautiful and mature image.
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Finally, Yomota concludes that although it may seem difficult to define the meaning of kawaii since it has multiple features, such as small and immature, kawaii may not really refer to some specific items but refer to a kind of fictional state within relationships. In other words, Yomota believes what cuteness or kawaii actually means is not that important, it is when kawaii is used and in what kind of relation it is used that matters.
Since it is hard to capture the meaning of the semantically rich word kawaii, Yomota (2006) analyzes kawaii’s synonyms and antonyms instead of finding out what features may constitute kawaii. When Yomota contrasts utsukushii ‘beautiful’ with kawaii, the meaning of kawaii becomes more obvious because of the features that
utsukushii represents. According to Yomota, utsukushii incorporates features such as
flawless and perfect while the features of kawaii are imperfect and immature. In other words, the meaning of kawaii may be close to something incomplete and imperfect.
And such findings about the features of kawaii may help explain kawaii’s meanings when it is used in different kinds of situations, such as the situation when kawaii describes the external features of things or the behavior of people. Yomota’s findings about the features of kawaii in Japanese may give important implications in analyzing the semantics of kěài in Mandarin in this study.
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2.1.3 Asano-Cavanagh (2014)
According to Asano-Cavanagh (2014), kawaii seems to be a culturally specific word that reveals a fundamental aspect of the material and popular culture in the Japanese society. In order to capture the exact meaning of kawaii, Asano-Cavanagh adopts the framework of natural semantic metalanguage approach (NSM) to examine this term. The NSM approach, or deductive paraphrase, is proposed by Anna Wierzbicka (1991) to explicate complicated meanings of words in different languages by means of exact paraphrases composed of words simpler than the original ones. In other words, the NSM approach is based on the idea of clarity and simplicity (Goddard 2011) to help people understand the meaning of words by using the metalanguage derived from natural languages to paraphrase or explain words with semantic primes. Semantic primes refer to words that cannot be analyzed or further explained, such as I, you, know and because, and they are accessible in almost every language in the world. Thus, semantic primes are part of the universal grammar (Wierzbicka 1991).
Through rigorous semantic analysis by using the NSM, Asano-Cavanagh suggests that the complete meaning of kawaii can be portrayed as follows:
This something is kawaii:
(a) this something is something small of this kind
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(b) when people see this thing, they can’t not feel something very good, like people often can’t not feel something very good when they see a small child [m]3 (c) often when people see something like this, they think like this: ‘this is something
very good, I want it to be mine’
(d) at the same time, they can think like this: ‘if I touch this thing with my hands [m], I can feel something good – because of it, I want this; if I touch it with my hands [m] at many times, something bad can happen to it – because of this, I don’t want this’
(e) many other things of this kind are not like this.
(Asano-Cavanagh 2014:352)
Detailed explanations from (a) to (e) represent the characteristics of kawaii. In terms of the external features, Asano-Cavanagh points out that if one thing is considered kawaii, that thing must (a) be small in shape and (d) have the characteristics of being delicate and even fragile. Also, Asano-Cavanagh suggests that kawaii items can evoke a kind of strong positive feeling; namely, kawaii is closely
related to a favorable emotion. With this view, (c) expresses a person’s wish to possess the kawaii items. In addition, Asano-Cavanagh specifies that kawaii can also be used to describe something which is (e) special and unique, that is, features which are quite different from ordinary things. Most importantly, Asano-Cavanagh suggests that the core meaning of kawaii lies in (b): “when people see this thing, they can’t not
3[m] refers to semantic molecules, which are decomposable into semantic primes; semantic primes are basic meanings to fundamental human concepts (Goddard 2012).
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feel something very good, like people often can’t not feel something very good when they see a small child”. In other words, when people see the kawaii object, they experience a kind of uncontrollable affection towards it, and this is the same feeling when they see a small adorable child (Asano-Cavanagh 2014). Viewed in this light, for something to be described as kawaii, the thing must possess a property: “being like a small child”. Moreover, since kawaii is closely associated with the notion of children, it is “not something artificial, but it has a natural quality to be adored like an innocent child” (Asano-Cavanagh 2014: 349).
Asano-Cavanagh has paraphrased the meanings of kawaii in a clear and understandable way; however, most of her explanations of kawaii are about the external features of objects. In other words, there is no explanation about the meaning of kawaii in terms of people’s behavior or attitude, which has been mentioned in McVeigh (1996) and Yomota (2006). Thus, when the semantics of kěài in Mandarin is examined in this study, the meanings of kěài used in describing both external features and behavioral features of people and objects should be analyzed.