These crowd-pleasing embellishments are all in service of the exuberant, sleek mashup of pop, R&B, funk, rock, and hip ... Mana: In Japanese society, cute people are the ones that are popular ...

That word — meaning "cute," but in a kind of pitiable way — gets tossed around a lot in Japan and by people overseas, who use it to refer to almost anything Japanese. "The media defines it as ...