On 14 April 2016, a 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, toppling buildings and sending residents rushing into the streets. Hundreds of aftershocks – one an even stronger 7.0 quake – continued for days, killing 49 people, injuring 1,500 and forcing tens of thousands from their homes.

News spread immediately around the globe on social media.

“Earthquake just happened,” Margie Tam posted from Hong Kong. “R u ok kumamon?”

“Are Kumamon and his friends safe?” wondered Eric Tang, a college student.

“Pray for Kumamoto & Kumamon,” wrote Ming Jang Lee from Thailand, a phrase that would be repeated thousands of times.

On 12 March 2016, one month before the earthquake. Kumamon had bounded on to an outdoor stage at the opening event of his birthday party in Kumamoto, a city of 700,000 in a largely agricultural province of the same name in the centre of Kyushu. About 150 guests – mostly women – cheered, clapped and whistled. Kumamon waved and bowed. He is just under 5ft tall, with black glossy fur, circular red cheeks and wide, staring eyes, and he was wearing, for the occasion, a white satin dinner jacket trimmed in silver and a red bow tie.

One woman in the crowd held a Kumamon doll swaddled in a baby blanket. Another had dressed her doll in a grey outfit matching her own. It had taken her a month to make. A number of fans had pasted red paper circles on their cheeks to mimic his. Those in the first row had arrived at 3am to snag prime spots to greet the object of their affection.

“Actually, I have no idea why I love him so much,” said Milkinikio Mew, who had flown from Hong Kong with her friends Lina Tong and Alsace Choi to attend the three-day-long festival – even though Hong Kong was holding its own birthday party for Kumamon. She had overslept, and only arrived at 6am for the 10am kick-off, so she had to settle for a seat in the back row.

Kumamon is not exactly a cartoon character, though he does appear in a daily newspaper comic strip. He’s not a brand icon either, like Hello Kitty, though like her, his image certainly sells merchandise. He’s not sexy, but when the Empress Michiko met Kumamon – at her request – during the imperial couple’s visit to Kumamoto in 2013, she asked him: “Are you single?”

A birthday cake was rolled out, and the crowd sang Happy Birthday. Then presents. A representative from Honda, which has a motorbike factory nearby, gave him its Kumamon-themed scooter. An Italian bicycle maker unveiled a custom Kumamon racing bike. There was also a new exercise DVD, on which Kumamon leads the workout.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kumamoto prefecture’s official mascot Kumamon rides the Kumamon-themed scooter made by Honda. Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

The Italian bicycle was not for sale, at that time. But the other two items were, joining more than 100,000 products that feature Kumamon’s image – from stickers and notebooks to cars and aeroplanes (one budget Japanese airline flies a Kumamon 737). When the toy manufacturer Steiff offered 1,500 special edition Kumamon plush toys at $300 each, they claimed the bears sold out online in five seconds. Last year Leica created a $3,300 Kumamon camera, a bargain compared with the solid gold statue of Kumamon crafted by a Tokyo jeweller, which retails for $1m.

Kumamon is a yuru-kyara, or “loose character”, one of the cuddly creatures in Japan that represent everything from towns and cities to airports and prisons. The word is sometimes translated as “mascot”, but yuru-kyara are significantly different from mascots in the west, such as those associated with professional sports teams, which tend to be benign, prankish one-dimensional court jesters that operate in the narrow realm of the sidelines during game time.

Kumamon has a far wider field of operation as the yuru-kyara for Kumamoto Prefecture. He has become more than a symbol for that region, more than merely a strategy to push its tourism and farm products. He is almost regarded as a living entity, a kind of fun ursine household god (it is perhaps significant that the very first licensed Kumamon product was a Buddhist shrine emblazoned with his face). He hovers in a realm of fantasy like a character from children’s literature, a cross between the Cat in the Hat and a teddy bear.

Kumamon hovers in a realm of fantasy, a cross between the Cat in the Hat and a teddy bear

After the April earthquake, Kumamon’s Twitter feed, which has half a million followers, stopped issuing communications. With a thousand buildings damaged, water to the city cut, a hospital jarred off its foundations, and 44,000 people out of their homes, the prefectural government, which handles Kumamon’s business dealings and appearances, had more important things to do than stage-manage its fictional bear.

But Kumamon was missed.

“People are asking why Kumamon’s Twitter account has gone silent when the prefecture needs its mascot bear more than ever,” the Japan Times posted on its Facebook page on 19 April.

Into the vacuum came hundreds, then thousands of drawings, posted by children, adults and even professional manga artists, not only from Japan, but from Thailand, Hong Kong and China. They waged an impromptu campaign to drum up support for earthquake relief using the bear, which stood in for the city itself and its people. Kumamon was depicted leading the rescue efforts, his head bandaged, lifting stones to rebuild the tumbled walls of Kumamoto Castle, propping up tottering foundations, enfolding children in his arms.

“Ganbatte Kumamon!” many wrote, using a term that means something between “don’t give up” and “do your best”.

Kumamon is kawaii – the word is translated as “cute”, but the word has broad, multilayered meanings, encompassing a range of sweetly alluring images and behaviours.

People spend a lot on cute avatars – Kumamon earned $1 billion in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that. But what is cute? What is the basis of its appeal? Does appreciation for cuteness come naturally, or does it reveal something about our society? Is it broadly positive – or could cuteness harbour darker facets as well? These are some of the questions being addressed by a nascent academic field, cute studies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Empress Michiko (pictured with Emperor Akihoto and Kumamoto’s governor) asked whether Kumamon was single, in 2013. Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

About a week before Kumamon’s birthday, Soma Fugaki scanned the opening-night crowd at Blossom Blast, a feminist art show at the UltraSuperNew Gallery in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district. People were drinking and dancing. But Soma doesn’t dance, or even stand. He’s a baby. Just five months old, Soma squirmed in the arms of his father, Keigo, who gazed lovingly into his son’s face.

“Everything about him is a reflection of myself,” Keigo said, “a cartoon version … I stare at him all the time. He looks like me. It’s my features, but exaggerated: bigger cheeks, bigger eyes.”

Babies are our model for cuteness. Those last two details – big cheeks, big eyes – are straight out of Konrad Lorenz’s Kindchenschema, or baby schema, as defined in the Nobel prize-winning scientist’s 1943 paper on the “innate releasing mechanisms” that prompt affection and nurture in human beings: fat cheeks, large eyes set low on the face, a high forehead, a small nose and jaw, and stubby arms and legs that move in a clumsy fashion. Not just humans: puppies, baby ducks and other young animals are included in Lorenz’s theory.

Lorenz’s paper is the blueprint of cute studies, but it did not produce a positive reaction among the scientific community. He was a Nazi psychologist writing during wartime, exploring the party’s theories on selective breeding (he later apologised for joining the Nazi party and disowned its ideology).

For decades, scientists focused on what babies perceive, and how they think. But in the 21st century, attention turned to how babies themselves are perceived, as cuteness started becoming a cohesive realm of research. Experiments have apparently demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills, which are useful modifications for handling an infant. Experiments hooking up volunteers to magnetic resonance imaging scanners have shown how seeing cute creatures stimulates the brain to release dopamine. Society’s embrace of cuteness has led academics in gender studies to wonder whether cute culture trains women to be childlike, or whether it could be a means by which young women take control of their own sexuality.

More recent experiments have been carried out with the aim of identifying general aesthetic standards that can make an inanimate object cute. In a study at the University of Michigan in 2012, visual information expert Sookyung Cho asked subjects “to design a cute rectangle by adjusting the size, proportion, roundness, rotation, and colour of the figure”.

What she found supported the idea that “smallness, roundness, tiltedness, and lightness of colour can serve as determinants of perceived cuteness in artefact design”. It mattered, she found, whether the person designing the rectangle was in the US or South Korea. Cuteness is culturally specific, and that itself has become a rich focus of inquiry.

Cuteness is so associated with Japan that the actual country can come as something of a surprise. On the Tokyo subway, jammed with businessmen in dark suits, women in paper masks, kids in plain school uniforms, examples of cuteness can be hard to spot. Still, there are pockets of cuteness to be found: tiny yuru-kyara charms dangling off backpacks or peeking from posters or construction barriers in the form of baby ducks.

In Kumamoto, during Kumamon’s birthday weekend in March, at the exit of the Shinkansen bullet train at Kumamoto station, I looked around for signs of cute fever. I was not disappointed: I caught sight of the enormous head of Kumamon on the lower floor, in a mock stationmaster’s office that had been specially built for him. The train station shop was filled with Kumamon items, from bottles of sake to stuffed animals. In the city, his face was spread across the sides of an office building, with birthday banners hanging from the semi-enclosed shopping arcades that are a feature of every Japanese city.

Six years ago, Kumamoto wasn’t known for much. There is an active volcano, Mt Aso, nearby, and a 1960s reproduction of a dramatic 1600s-era castle that burned down in 1877. Kumamoto residents believed there was nothing in their city that anyone would want to visit. The region is largely agricultural, growing melons and strawberries.

But in 2010, Japan Railways was working to extend the Shinkansen bullet train to Kumamoto, and the city fathers were eager for tourists to use it. So they commissioned a logo to promote the area, hiring a designer who offered a stylised exclamation mark (their official slogan, “Kumamoto Surprise”, was a bright spin on the fact that many Japanese would be surprised to find anything in Kumamoto worth seeing).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image of Kumamon etched on the grass at Suizenji Ezuko Park in Kumamoto. Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

The exclamation point logo was a red blotch, resembling the sole of a shoe. The designer, seeking to embellish it, and knowing the popularity of yuru-kyara, added a surprised black bear. Kuma is Japanese for bear. Mon is local slang for man.

He was endowed with a mischievous personality – Milkinikio Mew, who came from Hong Kong for his birthday celebration, called him “very naughty”. Kumamon first made headlines after Kumamoto held a press conference to report that he was missing from his post, having run off to Osaka to urge residents there to take the train. The stunt worked. Kumamon was voted the most popular yuru-kyara in 2011. (Japan has a national contest, the Yuru-kyara Grand Prix, held in November. The most recent one was attended by 1,727 different mascots and nearly 77,000 spectators. Millions of votes were cast.)

A few Kumamoto officials resisted Kumamon – their concern was that he would scare off potential tourists, who would worry about encountering wild bears, of which there are none in the prefecture. But the Kumamoto governor was a fan, and cannily waived licensing fees for Kumamon, encouraging manufacturers to use him royalty-free. Rather than pay upfront, in order to get approval to use the bear’s image, companies are required to support Kumamoto, either by using locally manufactured parts or ingredients, or by promoting the area on their packaging.

The side of the box of the Tamiya radio-controlled Kumamon Version Buggy has photographs of the region’s top tourist destinations. In one of the songs on the exercise DVD released on Kumamon’s birthday, as he leads his fans through their exertions, they grunt, “Toh-MAY-toes … straw-BEAR-ies … wah-TER-melons” – all agricultural products that are specialities of Kumamoto. In every grocery store, Kumamon smiles from every punnet of strawberries and honeydew melon wrapper.

The bullet train began service to Kumamoto on 12 March, so the date is now used as Kumamon’s official birthday. He was there to greet the first scheduled train, a moment recreated during his birthday festivities. Fans lined up at the station to hug him, reaching back for a lingering last touch as they were led off to make way for the next waiting fan.

In 2014, Kumamon gave a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, where his title was given as director of PR. The journalists posed respectful questions. “How many staff do you have, to help you out with your activities?” one asked. The answer – “We have about 20 staff members in our section” – was delivered by one of those subordinates, Masataka Naruo, who enjoys telling people that Kumamon is his boss.

The day before the start of the celebration, Mew and her friends were shopping in Kumamoto. They wore Kumamon T-shirts and carried Kumamon backpacks. The three women showed their discoveries to each other. They owned a lot of Kumamon products already. “He’s very cute,” said Tong, in English, by way of explanation.

But for a mascot to be successful, being cute is not always enough. For every popular yuru-kyara, there are a hundred Harajuku Miccolos – a 5ft-tall yellow-and-brown bee, who I met standing on the pavement outside the Colombin bakery and cafe, celebrating Honey Bee Day with three hours of loitering in front of the cafe, greeting passers-by, or trying to. Most barely glanced in his direction and did not break stride, though some did come over and pose for a photo. There was no queue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kumamon reads his correspondence at his office in Kumamon Square in Kumamoto. Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Imag

Harajuku Miccolo, Colombin’s signature character, is cute yet obscure – the common fate for most yuru-kyara. The city of Osaka has 45 different characters that promote its various aspects and who must fend off periodic culls in the name of efficiency. One administrator piteously argued that the government officials who create these characters work hard on them and so would feel bad if they were discontinued.

Harajuku Miccolo is trying to avoid that fate.

“He is not a success yet,” one of his handlers admitted, distributing cubes of the cafe’s trademark honey cake. “Many are not as successful …”

“… as Kumamon?”

“We’re trying …”

Nobody is cute in Shakespeare. The word did not exist until the early 1700s, when the “a” in “acute” was replaced by an apostrophe – ’cute – and then dropped altogether. Acute came from acus, Latin for needle, later denoting pointed things, so cute at first meant “acute, clever, keen-witted, sharp, shrewd”, according to the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which doesn’t suggest the term could describe visual appearance.

The newer usage was still being resisted in Britain in the mid-1930s, when a correspondent at the Daily Telegraph included cute on his list of “bastard American expressions”, along with OK and radio. The portrayal of cute, chubby babies is largely absent from visual art before the 20th century. Babies in medieval paintings are depicted as wizened miniature adults. Cute images of the kind we have become accustomed to began showing up around 1900, when popular culture was discovering the bottomless marketability of cute things. In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from cupid) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan). Cuteness and modern commercialisation became intricately linked.

Still, kewpies followed the lines of actual human anatomy more or less, the way that Mickey Mouse resembled a real mouse when he first appeared on film in 1928. A half century of fine-tuning made him much more infantile, a process the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously described in his “biological homage” to Mickey, in which he traced the mischievous and sometimes violent mouse of the late 1920s as he morphed into the benign, bland overseer of a vast corporate empire. “He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty character of Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom,” Gould wrote.

In Japan, the fascination with cuteness is visible in girls’ handwriting. Around 1970, schoolgirls in Japan began to imitate the caption text in manga comics – what was called koneko-ji, or “kitten writing”. By 1985, half of the girls in Japan had adopted the style, and companies marketing pencils, notebooks and other inexpensive gift items, such as Sanrio, learned that these items sold better when festooned with a variety of characters, the queen of whom is Hello Kitty.

Her full name is Kitty White, and she has a family and lives in London (due to a Japanese fad for all things British in the mid-1970s). The first Hello Kitty product, a vinyl coin purse, went on sale in 1974. Today, about $5bn worth of Hello Kitty merchandise is sold annually. In Asia, there are Hello Kitty amusement parks, restaurants and hotel suites. EVA Air, the Taiwanese airline, flies seven Hello Kitty-themed jets, which carry images of Hello Kitty and her friends not only on their hulls, but throughout their cabins, on the pillows and antimacassars.

“If your target is young women, the market’s saturated,” said Hiroshi Nittono, director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka University, talking about the market for cute products in Japan. That is certainly true. In an effort to stand out, some yuru-kyara are now made intentionally crude or semi-frightening. There is the whole class of kimo‑kawaii, or “gross-cute”, epitomised by Gloomy, a pink bear whose claws are red with the blood of his child owner, whom he habitually mauls. Even Kumamon, beloved as he is, is still subject to a popular internet meme where his works are revealed to be done “for the glory of Satan”.

Because the practice of putting characters on products is so prevalent, Nittono, a placid, smiling man who wears a cravat, has been working with the government on developing products that are intrinsically cute. He suggested we meet at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Hiroshima, where he is finishing up a tenured academic position.

For the past few years, Nittono and the government have been collaborating to develop cute items, a few of which were laid out on a table in his office: a squat make-up brush, a bowl, a brazier, a few medallions and tiles. Given the mind-boggling array of cute merchandise available at shops in every mall around the world, the display was a little lacklustre.

Nittono’s group is exploring how cuteness can be used as a device to draw people toward products without blatant branding.

“We use kawaii for such sentiment, feeling – kawaii things are not threatening, that is the most important part, small and not harmful,” said Nittono. “A high-quality product is somewhat distant from the customers; it looks expensive. But if you put kawaii nuance on such products, maybe such items can be more approachable.”

“If you have something cute, then you want to touch it, and then you see the quality of it,” added Youji Yamashita, a ministry official.

Objects can also be unintentionally kawaii. With her husband Makoto, Date Tomito owns Bar Pretty, a tiny side-street tavern in Hiroshima. Six people would be crowded sitting at the bar. Makoto walked in from the market bearing a small plant in a yellow pot, a present for his wife.

“This is kawaii,” Date said, holding the plant up, elaborating. “There are lots of different meanings for kawaii: cute, small, clumsy. Some things just have a cute shape.

“It’s never bad,” she added. “I never use kawaii in an ironic way. Kawaii is kind of the best compliment around Japanese people, especially girls and women. They really like kawaii stuff and things.”

Not all women agree. Hello Kitty has caught the interest of academics, especially in Japan, where the progress of women has lagged behind other industrial nations. Girlishness is a national obsession – Japan did not ban possession of child pornography until 2014 – and its most popular female icon, Hello Kitty, doesn’t have a mouth. If cuteness does become a field of academic study, then much credit has to be given to the feminist pushback against what Hiroto Murasawa of Osaka Shoin Women’s University calls “a mentality that breeds non-assertion”.

Japanese women still live in a culture where single women in their 30s are sometimes referred to as “leftover Christmas cake”, meaning that after the 25th – of December for cake, birthday for women – they are past their expiration date and hard to get rid of. Nobody wants them.

Those surgical masks worn in public are to avoid colds, pollution and allergies. But many Japanese women say that they wear them “date masuku” – just for show – because they didn’t have time to put on their makeup, or because they don’t consider themselves cute enough, and they want a shield against the intrusive eyes of their crowded world. In a German study of 270,000 people in 22 countries, when respondents were asked whether they were happy with how they looked, Japanese people came last.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Hello Kitty theme restaurant in Hangzhou, China. Photograph: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Joshua Paul Dale, a 50-year-old cultural studies scholar on the faculty of Tokyo Gakugei University, has been the driving force in cute studies. Part behavioural science, part cultural studies, part biology, the field is so new it hasn’t had a conference yet.

Dale was the first to put together an online cute studies bibliography, a list now containing over 100 publications. They range in alphabetical order from C Abidin’s “Agentic cute (^.^): Pastiching East Asian cute in Influencer commerce”, from the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, to Leslie Zebrowitz et al’s “Baby talk to the babyfaced”, from the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

Cute studies – part behavioural science, part cultural studies, part biology – is so new it hasn’t had a conference yet

Dale also edited the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture’s special cuteness issue, published in April 2016. “The articles collected in this issue demonstrate the flexibility of cuteness as an analytical category, and the wide scope of the insights it generates,” he wrote in the introduction.

Cuteness has not yet emerged as an independent scientific field – Dale estimates that only a few dozen academics worldwide focus on the topic – but he is hopeful that it is in the process of happening. When we met at his light-filled apartment in the Sendagaya section of Tokyo, he made a comparison with porn studies, which now has its own quarterly journal, created after academics united to focus on a topic they felt was being neglected by researchers, out of misplaced squeamishness.

Hiroshi Nittono contributed to the East Asian Journal’s special issue. Nittono, who authored the first peer-reviewed scientific paper with kawaii in its title, postulates a “two-layer model” of cuteness: not only does it encourage parental care of newborns, but once a baby moves into toddlerhood and begins interacting with the world, cuteness promotes socialisation.

“It’s interesting because it’s inherent in the concept itself,” Dale told me. “Cute things relate easily to other things. It kind of breaks down the barriers a little bit between self and other, or subject and object. That means it invites work from various fields. It’s interesting to get people together from different fields talking about the same subject.”

Japan has uniquely embraced cuteness as a reflection of its national character, the way tea ceremonies or cherry blossoms were once held up as symbolic of Japanese nationhood. In 2009, the government appointed a trio of “cute ambassadors”, three women in ribbons and babydoll dresses whose task was to represent the country abroad.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Taiwanese airline EVA Air flies seven Hello Kitty-themed jets. Photograph: China Foto Press / Barcroft Medi/China Foto Press /Barcroft Media

Humanity has always embraced household gods: not the world-creating universal deity, but minor, more personal allies to soften what can be a harsh and lonely life. Not everyone has the friends they deserve or the baby they would cherish. Often people are alone in the world. Teddy bears exist because the night is dark and long and at some point your parents have to go to bed and leave you. There is real comfort in cuteness.

“Filling in an emotional need is exactly where kawaii plays a significant role,” said Christine R Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific.

“Even in America, journalist Nicholas Kristof has written of an ‘empathy gap’ in today’s society,” said Yano. “He points to the place of objects that may be considered promoters of ‘happiness’, ‘solace’, ‘comfort’. When a society needs to heal, it seeks comfort in the familiar. And often the familiar may reside in ‘cute’. Witness the use of teddy bears as sources of comfort for firefighters in the wake of NYC’s 9/11. So I see kawaii things as potential empathy generators.”

Kumamon evokes a ton of empathy. In the weeks after the Kumamoto earthquake, Kumamon was so necessary that in his absence his fans conjured him up themselves, independently, as an object of sympathy, a tireless saviour, an obvious hero.

Three weeks after the 14 April earthquake, Kumamon visited the convention hall of the hard-hit town of Mashiki, where residents were still sleeping in their cars for safety as 1,200 tremors continued to rumble across the area. His visit was reported on TV and in the papers as news, as if a long-sought survivor had stumbled out of the wreckage alive. The children, many of whom had lost their homes in the earthquake, flocked around him, squealing, hugging, taking pictures. Their friend had returned.

This article first appeared in Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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