This year has been anything but cute. It’s been occasionally optimistic, but mostly unpredictable, tumultuous, and painful. But cute? Far from it. Enter the timeline cleanse. You may have seen them: ...

On social media feeds all over the world, puppies experience hiccups for the first time, hamsters eat tiny tacos and cats befriend monkeys. And they do it a lot. Kawaii is inescapable in Japan, where ...

“I don’t think it’s to appear to be healthy, it’s purely a style statement,” Tokyo-based French fashion designer Julien David said of activewear’s rise in the country. “The biggest shift in Kawaii is ...

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

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

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

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

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

Hiroshi Nittono receives funding from The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI No. 23330217. However, why cute things attract us and how they ...

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