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 ...

Tom and Jerry have gotten a pretty major rework in Japan, where animators have created a new kawaii (cute) version of the iconic cat and mouse. Cartoon Network Japan, owned by Tom and Jerry IP ...

So what makes a cartoon character cute ... Hello Kitty and Japan’s kawaii movement, Giga Pets, Furby, Elmo and Slimer. Often the most exciting, memorable cute characters are the ones who ...

"Gross" characters are proliferating in a country known for kawaii, and now even local governments' mascots are trying to out-weird one another. Long considered the global capital of cute ...

Kawaii is inescapable in Japan ... As of the time of writing, 676 million posts are tagged #cute on Instagram. The 66 million or so TikTok videos with the same hashtag have over 625 billion ...

Providing an in-depth overview of all things kawaii (cute), this book traces the cute aesthetic from its inception in the 1970s as a schoolgirl trend to its position as a leading cultural norm ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. In the late 1970s, British inventor James Dyson painstakingly refined his design for a new, improved vacuum cleaner.