In Western culture, we’ve come to think of kawaii as a synonym for cute. In Japan, where the kawaii aesthetic has been its own pop culture phenomenon for decades, the word is a bit more complex.

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 ...

Kawaii is inescapable in Japan, where I have lived since the 1990s, so the global rise of adorable content online has not surprised me. As of the time of writing, 676 million posts are tagged # ...