When it comes to softening a stern public image, the Japanese have a special trick: just introduce a cute-looking cartoon mascot. High security prisons have them, as do the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the Japanese Sewage Association. Such mascots have their origins in kawaii visual culture, otherwise translated as “cuteness” or “adorableness”; and in Japan, cuteness is very big indeed.
Perhaps the Catholic Church should give it a try. What better way for the Vatican to shake off its harsh and forbidding reputation among the faithless young than by designing a winsome kawaii mascot for the Church’s forthcoming Jubilee Year?
Such was the apparent thinking of the high-ups who this week unveiled Luce, a character designed to put the adorable into religious adoration. Along with a raft of identically proportioned sidekicks, Luce is an unfeasibly large-headed, big-eyed, short-limbed cartoon child whose proportions are dictated by the chibi tradition in Japanese anime — also known as the “super-deformed” style. Blue-haired and snub-nosed, her enormous eyes brim with saintly sweetness as she guides young pilgrims towards the faith.
The Vatican masterminds are surely right that kawaii culture is popular with youth across the globe. Starting in the Seventies, with the massive success of Hello Kitty, it has since been fuelled by international crazes for manga, Studio Ghibli films, and Pokémon characters. Vaguely sinister soft toys with neotenous features, pointless pastel-coloured plastic tat, and decorated notepaper too small to actually write anything on are like crack for pre-teen girls worldwide.
According to one theory, Japan’s national obsession with cuteness has roots in Sixties Japan, as representations of the ageing Emperor Hirohito started to depict him as endearingly enfeebled. This was arguably a cultural coping mechanism, as the Japanese faced post-war realisations about the limits of their military and economic power. Other commentators have made connections with the classical tradition of Japanese aesthetics, according to which sadness is an appropriate response to beauty: cute things are often thought of as enjoyably “pitiable” in kawaii discourse. The Shinto religion is also thought by some to be a relevant background factor, with its emphasis on innocence and play. And feminists have pointed out that traditional models of Japanese femininity construe women as small, powerless, and vulnerable — all features heavily present in the kawaii tradition.
Somewhere in all that, perhaps, is Japan’s excuse for its obsession with anything endearingly small, innocent, and childishly appealing. But what’s ours? For cuteness is increasingly not just an obsession of Generations Z and Alpha. The same nauseatingly sugary aesthetic is creeping — or rather, perhaps, playfully skipping as fast as wobbly oversized heads will allow — into Anglophone adult worlds. In this, it is no doubt encouraged by local conditions, in which “adultescence” can yawn into one’s thirties and distinct cultural boundaries between generations barely exist.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAn infantilized citizenry is an easily controlled citizenry.
A bit like an over-intellectualised elite.
Bang on the money. And of course anyone who behaves like an adult and displays any semblance of agency or intelligence is automatically a ‘ultra right wing fascist.’
I’ve always thought there was something very wrong when film and tv started showing young adult women’s beds piled high with teddies and stuffed animals (toys that my generation shoved into the back of the cupboard in our early teens). That was over 25 years ago. Either it represented a real phenomenon of infantilised women or it helped create it.
I remember a few girls of 16 and 17 in my year at school, mid 1970s, building up collections of soft toys which were piled on their beds, they did tend not to have boyfriends, so perhaps as I have suggested further down it’s a feminine adolescent phase, maternal, but pre-sexual otherwise.
Worth remembering that for thousands of years adolescent girls would have helped care for baby and toddler siblings and cousins, until they paired off to reproduce themselves.
At 16-17 they’re still not adults. The age I’m referring to in film and tv representation is approx 20-30. That’s an age when I had Mary Quant designs in our bedroom.
I suppose not, perhaps there was a ritual throwing out of cuddly toys on their 21st birthdays, somehow I doubt it.
I wonder if there is any correlation between losing one’s virginity, as it used to be called, and giving up on cute.
Add on:
I seem to have gone through a process of thinking about this issue as the day has gone on.
I think, maybe, the whole cute thing is displacement behaviour for otherwise unexpressed and disallowed maternal instincts. We marry or pair off later and later, must get that career going, but female instincts do not necessarily fit in with the modern ‘liberated’ way, some females are more instinctive than others, and cute is possibly one avenue for expression.
I find the whole sneering attitude towards the girls and women who display this tendency quite unpleasant. However, the exploitation of it by the market is another matter, the excesses it encourages are sickly and overdone, but not the girls and women.
No criticism implied, but Mary Quant is associated in my mind with se xiness, the Pill and Women’s Liberation, not maternal feelings.
Interesting analysis, though I would say that infantilism is pretty general in out culture – it’s not just childless women. There’s even a book out about it.
The word “cute” is an American word that only recently got exported to the UK along with Halloween, and then adults dressing up for Halloween, all just another commercial racket.
“Our bedroom” did you share one?
The other odd thing about this was that while grown men were portrayed as infantile for playing video games etc the cuddly toy thing was seen as perfectly normal for a grown adult female.
Exactly!
In line with what I have said above, I’d say both behaviours are “normal” in that they are artificial substitutes for the real thing; video games replacing fighting and combat for men, cuddly toys and anime replacing motherhood for women.
There’s plenty of the real thing going on over in Israel and Ukraine, it would be interesting to know how popular anime and video games are over there, not much I would think.
I have a 61-year-old stuffed animal—a dog named Dirty Guy—sitting on my dresser. He survived a typhoon and was once lost for months. I was beside myself with grief. He was a Christmas gift from my sister and a late brother. I was three and carried him everywhere. I come from a sentimental family, and I’m not embarrassed that I still treasure him. (However, if I had stuffed animals on my bed now, it would creepy.)
I couldn’t agree more. The one much-loved stuffed animal that we hang on to (it was probably what psychoanalysts call the ‘transitional object’) is different.
When I was in my 20s, I went to raves, sucked on binkis and carried around teletubbies. (This was the late 90s, aka 25 years ago) Lol.
I always enjoy reading Kathleen Stock’s articles. They’re well written and flow beautifully without some of the clever excess vocabulary of some other contributors. I would probably enjoy anything she wrote even if the subject was tea bags or garden gnomes. This one interests me as cuteness ties in with the whole sickly ‘Be Nice’ and ‘Be Kind’ message and the ‘twee’ aspect of British culture that seems to be on the rise.
Good connection with the Be Kind demands. These are often made by young women trans activists, as they “protect” tall young men dressed as little girls. Which in itself is an outright rejection of adulthood. These confused young men often use “smol bean” type language to describe themselves.
What’s ironic is that the Be Kind trans activists are absolutely vicious toward anyone who dares to believe there are two sexes, and they can’t be changed.
After reading this article I went onto Amazon to search for a book I thought was called “infantilism”. Hey presto: lots of books about women wanting to be treated as adult babies by billionaire “daddies”. No idea who the readership is but FFS!
Live, love, laugh
I agree, and in a way it’s unfortunate this article – ostensibly about “cuteness” – has landed on the same day as heavyweight articles about state control and election fraud.
Kathleen is a heavyweight (intellectually and culturally) and there’s a serious point behind this article.
Cuteness is out, eg, nothing cute about Donald Trump. If cuteness is in, he will lose the election and unlikely to ever be cute. No one says about Trump- there he goes again, he is so cute. And prison for him will be quite acute.
I think you might be missing the point that the huge level of support for Trump is in large part a visceral reaction against the fetishisation of cuteness and vulnerability. Trump is the ‘anticute’
Actually, I think there is a need for an article covering the liking of garden gnomes! Always seemed a bit suspect to me.
I loved reading this very funny and perceptive article, but have to wonder if Prof Stock is simply ignoring why cuteness exists in the first place, or hasn’t made the connection?
I’m assuming the former because the answer is reasonably clear: it’s an evolutionary adaptation that makes parents and other in-group adults love their offspring while those offspring require protection as they grow to adulthood. And because it predates humans by millions of years, it’s buried deep enough in the psyche/evolutionary past that cuteness in many other animals can trigger this response in humans: puppies and kittens are the obvious examples, but it even applies to animals that are lethal and/or repellent to humans once grown, such as lion cubs, bears and various lizards and amphibians. (It even works with cars. I have an AI-morphed picture on my desktop that’s a Ferrari 458 at a motor show that’s been shrunk while keeping the wheels the same size, and it’s adorable).
So, while modern adults adopting neotenous pretences and behaviours can indeed look rather silly, adults responding to cuteness itself is not: we are supposed to do this, and would be less human if we did not. That doesn’t mean I want to wear a little mermaid outfit to the pub and would be offended if anyone tells me I look as stupid as I undoubtedly would if I actually did it, but that’s only because I’m supposed to respond to cuteness but not expect to trigger it in others, just as the adult I am is expected to display a degree of protectiveness to children while not behaving like one myself.
Finally, neoteny. Part of what this article expertly lampoons are the sillier aspects of cultural neoteny which sees grown adults behaving like children, and I don’t dispute the absurdities that often result. But cultural neoteny is only a modern subset of a biological and sociological trend that is thousands of years old: you only have to look at reconstructions of female humans from pre-modern times to note the absence of the childlike pointed chin, big eyes and small nose to understand that modern adult women require such features to be considered attractive now. The same goes for other adaptations such as lactose metabolism: people who are not lactose intolerant now are beneficiaries of a neotenous effect, the ability used to be lost in childhood but now is not except for a minority of lactose-intolerant humans. Sociologically speaking, teenagers didn’t exist as a distinct phase of existence until society got wealthy enough to extend mass-education past adolescence, and we may well now be establishing the new tweeny category: people in their 20s who do not yet want to become what we typically think of as responsible adults.
So I’m not totally persuaded that an adult tendency to create demand for synthetic cuteness is necessarily driven by some sort of dark fetishised desire to get off on the vulnerability of the small and the weak, which is sort of what is implied by the article. The protective instincts that cuteness triggers in adults are pleasurable in themselves, which is why adults respond positively to them.
It reminds me of the troll craze in the 1970s (still going strong apparently) when I was about twelve I think.. There were tiny rubber trolls to stick on the end of your pencil, big ones, whole families of trolls, all with different brightly coloured shocks of hair. For me personally my troll phase lasted about a year at most and was not that strong, soon, real live trolls – boys – became more interesting to me (I’m having a laugh obviously, yet there is some truth in it I think).
On the basis of that experience, I am guessing, these 21st century fetish crazes might be a fairly harmless adolescent phase, made stronger and more prevalent due to the internet and globalisation.
There have always been a few people that fail to grow out of them, humans are infinitely various and strange.
Well said. Although perhaps only surprising if we assume the church actually cares about the spiritual lives of those who attend more than it cares about its coffers.
Nature knows about this already. It’s why the offspring of highly evolved species have the same big-eyed, outsized-head, short-limbed vulnerable aspect that anime characters use to spark in adults the urge to coo over and protect them.
My internal jury is still out on the question of how helpful a dewy-eyed cartoon is to the Catholic cause, but I am in awe of Ms. Stock’s facility with phrasing these faintly-sensed, difficult concepts. Great piece which, like all good art, relates the particular to the universal.
In my own field (music) it’s easy to decry the dumbing-down of peoples’ tastes. The greatest themes are just too complex, require too much focus and attention span, to be absorbed by generations (I include myself) steeped in Youtube and TikTok. But what’s the point of trying to teach Macbeth to a kindergarten class? Surely the medium has to be watered at least a little to meet the audience? But how little?
Interesting that post war Japan is credited as the progenitor of this need for people to identify as cute and vulnerable. The many, many reports and proofs of the utter sadism of Japanese soldiers towards its POWs is perhaps responsible for this gross cultural cleansing. It looks awfully like the dark arts of the public relations mavern brought in to save the career of a boy next door pop star caught snorting coke in a brothel.
All this puts me in mind of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (published in 1985). It is described in its Amazon listing as “a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment.” It is a book awash with choice quotes. My favourite is this one: “Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/all-the-pretty-celebrities
Graham, just stop with your substack links, please. Don’t you realise how unutterably naff it comes across? Just argue your case on here – and you often have a good case – but as soon as i see a link in your comment i don’t read it.
I post a link when I quote from my own published essays
It’s promotion. Simple as that.
Another fine article by Kathleen Stock but I have to confess that, as I am neither a member nor admirer of the Roman Catholic Church, I am not too concerned about the potential negative effect of the pursuit of cuteness on it – though I do find it rather ironic.
The Peter Panization of society, wherein people make excuses for stretching childhood further and further out.
I saw this cartoon imagery seemingly everywhere and pasted on everything from stationary for children to food packaging for adults in far east / communist countries and always assumed it was propaganda to infantilise the masses
I enjoy Ms Stock’s articles, but I think she’s on slightly shaky theological grounds here. A symbol of Christianity that appears weak is entirely in keeping with the traditions of the religion, going back to the early Christian Martyrs and ultimately Christ himself. Faith, after all is much more powerful than physical strength.
As to the Anime mascot itself, I can’t tell yet whether it will help the church or not, but based on my social media feeds, it’s definitely getting the cut through that Mary Harrington describers in today’s piece on Trump and memes!
The cynic in me thinks that it’s a great way for the Catholic Church to attract naive young maidens back into the fold. Much more preferable than the Joan of Arc types who’d would rather burn at the stake than surrender their virtue.
I would have thought Joan of arc types would be equally welcome, if not more welcome than naive young people, to the catholic church. Surely the Catholic Church promotes strong faith and a commitment to principles that shouldn’t be easily surrendered, as demonstrated by Joan of arc.
Your comment makes no sense what so ever.
‘Christianity that appears weak is entirely in keeping with the traditions of the religion,’
I’m not sure about that. What about Christ appears weak to you? What has a comparison between faith and physical strength got to do with anything?
A blue-haired thing that the Church thinks will win people over. OK ….
Completely off topic and personal: can one assume that you enjoy Georgette Heyer, and particularly The Unknown Ajax (one of my personal favourites)?
Absolutely!
YES! (Can’t compete with your erudite writing but it’s spot on)
Creepy. Perhaps Luce will evolve into St Luce, patron saint of paedoed children…
Hollywood really needs a new version of Shirley Temple. Maybe singing and dancing are out but the new one could be, say, a magician – then you could have a number of films. We would have a non-binary child of course and preferably of Asian descent. Who knows – maybe a TV series as well.
Same fondness for the cute is, what I would suggest, leads the craze for owning pets in contemporary culture. As for where this craving comes from may lie in inadequacies of upbringing.
A thoughtful article from this writer, to be sure, but seemingly a lot of effort to cringe at something that doesn’t matter very much. The drawings and the church’s effort are, after all, quite harmless. Seeing the comments, I wonder why do people expect others’ feelings to mature at the same rate as their own? They probably won’t. Good luck to all in the meantime.
Well said! I was finding it hard to articulate why this weird character decision felt so off kilter and Kathleen has nailed it. There is just something quite pathetic and uninspiring by it
Yes. But, as Nietzsche oberved, Jesus has a lot to answer for, from crib-in-a-stable to nailed-on-the-cross. Christianity is a religion of passivity, suffering, and fixation upon the meek, weak, humble and abused of the world. Luce comes quite late to a well-established tears-of-the-Virgin tradition.
I’m surprised that you think Jesus is passive!
Ahh. Bless.
An interesting long winded take about very little.
Would I be correct in saying that you disagree with the decision of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church to use little Luce as a totem to attract a younger demographic to its beliefs and pews. This kawaii doll has quite triggered you Kathleen. Perhaps your parents took you to a Butlins as a child and a dwarf jumped out and frightened you. Get thee to an analyst. These mascots can indeed be the stuff of nightmares.
Sounds like you’re projecting onto Kathleen, there.
I once worked in Lancashire and they had then a great sense of humour. Or is it me? Or is it you? Possibly the former from the down ticks. I shall seek a kawaii analyst.