The Cool Kawaii

At the turn of the millennium, international youth culture is dominated by mainly two types of aesthetics: the African American cool, which, propelled by Hip-Hop music, has become the world's favorite youth culture; and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute, that is distributed internationally by Japan's powerful anime industry. The USA and Japan are cultural superpowers and global trendsetters because they make use of two particular concepts that hide complex structures under their simple surfaces and are difficult to define, but continue to fascinate the world: cool and kawaii. The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, analyzes these attitudes and explains the intrinsic powers that are leading to a fusion of both aesthetics. Cool and kawaii are expressions set against the oppressive homogenizations that occur within official modern cultures, but they are also catalysts of modernity. Cool and kawaii do not refer us back to a pre-modern ethnic past. Just like the cool African American man has almost no relationship with traditional African ideas about masculinity, the kawaii shTjo is not the personification of the traditional Japanese ideal of the feminine, but signifies an ideological institution of women based on Japanese modernity in the Meiji period, that is, a feminine image based on westernization. At the same time, cool and kawaii do not transport us into a futuristic, impersonal world of hypermodernity based on assumptions of constant modernization. Cool and kawaii stand for another type of modernity, which is not technocratic, but rather 'Dandyist' and closely related to the search for human dignity and liberation.

Live a bright, fun, rainbow-filled life with Kawaii! The Japanese word Kawaii means lovable or adorable. Welcoming a little kawaii into your life is like opening the window and letting a sparkling sunbeam in. Whenever you feel a little low turn to this squishy, padded-covered book. Find fun ideas to: make a cosy kawaii home; playful, confidence boosting styling and beauty tips; and recipes that will make your smile. This book includes 10 easy how-to projects to bring kawaii into your life. Here, you'll also find a host of very special kawaii mascots that will always be ready to give you a hug when you need one: The Octonauts, Smiling Bear, Hello Kitty, Gudetama, Molang, Ricemonsters, Miffy the Rabbit, the Moomins, Donutella, Unicorno, Moofia and Pusheen. Escape into the magical world of kawaii...

Showcasing Japan's astonishingly varied culture of cute, this volume takes the reader on a dazzling and adorable visual journey through all things kawaii. Although some trace the phenomenon of kawaii as far back as Japan's Taisho era, it emerged most visibly in the 1970s when schoolgirls began writing in big, bubbly letters complete with tiny hearts and stars. From cute handwriting came manga, Hello Kitty, and Harajuku, and the kawaii aesthetic now affects every aspect of Japanese life. As colorful as its subject matter, this book contains numerous interviews with illustrators, artists, fashion designers, and scholars. It traces the roots of the movement from sociological and anthropological perspectives and looks at kawaii's darker side as it morphs into gothic and gloomy iterations. Best of all, it includes hundreds of colorful photographs that capture kawaii's ubiquity: on the streets and inside homes, on lunchboxes and airplanes, in haute couture and street fashion, in cafés, museums, and hotels.

This super-cute sticker book is the perfect gift for fans of all things kawaii! This massively appealing sticker book is filled to the brim with adorable stickers of food with faces to add to a whole host of everyday scenes full of kawaii-style details. Includes surfing pineapples, a sushi fashion show, a disco in the grocery aisle, a fun-filled day at the fair and more! Use your silly, super-cute stickers to bring each scene to life, or use them to decorate all your stuff. A must-buy for all kawaii-loving fans of all things cute!

This collection begins with an engaging historical overview of Japanese aesthetics and offers contemporary multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives on the artistic and aesthetic traditions of Japan and the central themes in Japanese art and aesthetics.

Cool is a word of American English that has been integrated into the vocabulary of numerous languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term “cool?" When has coolness come to be associated with certain modes of contemporary self-fashioning? On what grounds do certain nations claim a privilege to be recognized as “cool?" These are some of the questions that served as a starting-point for a comparative cultural inquiry which brought together specialists from American Studies and Japanese Studies, but also from Classics, Philosophy and Sociology. The conceptual grid of the volume can be described as follows: (1) Coolness is a metaphorical term for affect-control. It is tied in with cultural discourses on the emotions and the norms of their public display, and with gendered cultural practices of subjectivity. (2) In the course of the cultural transformations of modernity, the term acquired new importance as a concept referring to practices of individual, ethnic, and national difference. (3) Depending on cultural context, coolness is defined in terms of aesthetic detachment and self-irony, of withdrawal, dissidence and even latent rebellion. (4) Coolness often carries undertones of ambivalence. The situational adequacy of cool behavior becomes an issue for contending ethical and aesthetic discourses since an ethical ideal of self-control and a strategy of performing self-control are inextricably intertwined. (5) In literature and film, coolness as a character trait is portrayed as a personal strength, as a lack of emotion, as an effect of trauma, as a mask for suffering or rage, as precious behavior, or as savvyness. This wide spectrum is significant: artistic productions offer valid insights into contradictions of cultural discourses on affect-control. (6) American and Japanese cultural productions show that twentieth-century notions of coolness hybridize different cultural traditions of affect-control.

Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty offers a wide range of topics on concepts of Beauty from scholars, academics and researchers around the world.

In the last few decades, Japanese popular culture productions have been consolidated as one of the most influential and profitable global industries. As a creative industry, Japanese Media-Mixes generate multimillion-dollar revenues, being a product of international synergies and the natural appeal of the characters and stories. The transnationalization of investment capital, diversification of themes and (sub)genres, underlying threat in the proliferation of illegal audiences, development of internet streaming technologies, and other new transformations in media-mix-based production models make the study of these products even more relevant today. In this way, manga (Japanese comics), anime (Japanese animation), and video games are not necessarily products designed for the national market. More than ever, it is necessary to reconcile national and transnational positions for the study of this cultural production. The present volume includes contributions aligned to the analysis of Japanese popular culture flow from many perspectives (cultural studies, film, comic studies, sociology, etc.), although we have emphasized the relationships between manga, anime, and international audiences. The selected works include the following topics: • Studies on audiences—national and transnational case studies; • Fandom production and Otaku culture; • Cross-media and transmedia perspectives; • Theoretical perspectives on manga, anime, and media-mixes.