On kawaii culture
July 28, 2026
The following piece includes mention of self-harm and eating disorders. Please read with care.
“Do you really think that you can take Hello Kitty with you when you get your PhD?”
This is something that a social worker once said to me. It was shortly before I was planning to start graduate school, and I was in my last round of inpatient treatment for an eating disorder. At twenty-seven years old, I sat before her wrapped in a fuzzy, pink Hello Kitty blanket. I was always cold. Along with the blanket, I had brought with me to the hospital two stuffed toys: a Hello Kitty plushie wearing a pink bunny costume, and a panda with big, heart-shaped eyes. I took comfort in propping them up against my pillows each morning.
I knew that these toys might make me look childish, but the sense of security they gave me far outweighed my worries about what other people might think. Stripped of the eating disorder that had once helped me feel safe and protected, I felt like a child again, anyway. In inpatient treatment, your meals come preportioned for you, and your daily schedule comes blocked out neatly on a chart. So, you look elsewhere for something to make you feel better. The best I could do was curl up on the couch, wrap myself in a Hello Kitty blanket, and cry.
As one of the only people of color in a program that must have had over thirty patients, I also found in Hello Kitty a comforting reminder of who I was outside the treatment setting. I am half Japanese and half white, and for me, Japanese kawaii (“cute”) characters like Hello Kitty carry tender feelings associated with identity and community. I have fond memories of visiting Harmonyland, a Sanrio theme park in Japan, with my mother as a child, and of trading small treasures from my Spottie Dottie pencil box with other Asian American girls at school. In treatment, I often felt alienated from the close relationships that formed among the other patients, so I relied instead on the nostalgia of Hello Kitty and other imaginary companions.
Unaware of the personal significance that kawaii held for me, my social worker, a white woman, viewed Hello Kitty as an infantilizing character for a twenty-seven-year-old woman with professional ambitions to cherish. At the time, eating disorders were still often associated with “Peter Pan syndrome,” the fear of growing up. Through starving yourself, you supposedly make yourself childlike: small, weak, in need of care, able to avoid adult responsibilities. This is probably why my social worker believed that I needed to give up Hello Kitty if I ever wanted to recover and pursue an adult life and career.
Over ten years later, I have made progress in my recovery and did indeed get a PhD. I have also never stopped loving cute things. My research revolves around cuteness and toys, so I suppose you could say that I got my degree with—not despite—loving Hello Kitty. I do not mention this to be smug, but because my experiences have caused me to reflect on why cuteness matters to how we think about mental illness, healing, and care.
In the popular imagination of mental illness, there exists the trope of the woman who retreats into childhood fantasy and surrounds herself with dolls and toys. For example, Polly from the movie Girl, Interrupted, who stays sweet and childlike to avoid acknowledging the burns on her face, or Nina from Black Swan, a ballerina who sleeps in her childhood bedroom decorated with plushies and pink wallpaper. This figure represents the gentler side of the “mad woman” trope: If a woman living with mental illness is not promiscuous, vengeful, and dangerous, she is typically portrayed as harmless, but naïve. Still “crazy,” just in a cute way, inviting other people’s protection and care.
Sick and disabled people more generally are often imagined as cute and childlike, and by extension, not valuable members of society. No one is completely autonomous and invulnerable, but when we become adults, we are expected to pretend to claim our worth in a capitalist system. Many sick and disabled people cannot pretend—or at least not without great sacrifice. Because of this, they are treated like children, as secondary citizens.
For many Asian American women, the infantilization of illness and disability proves even more damaging because we are already viewed as cute and compliant. As Asian American feminist scholars like Mimi Khúc and erin Khuê Ninh have shown, the model minority fantasy attaches our belonging to our ability to present ourselves as the docile creatures that society imagines us to be. We are permitted to become doctors, nurses, and caretakers, but not to become sick or disabled, or we risk being seen as burdens and disappointments to our families. In other words, we are expected to provide care but rarely to ask for it. Our own health and well-being are treated as luxuries that we cannot afford.
The pressure to embody this state of perfection weighed heavily on me as a multiracial Asian American growing up in Silicon Valley. Painfully shy and anxious from a young age, I kept my struggles to myself and performed the role of a good student, if an overly quiet one. One of the main ways that I received love as a child was through rigid expectations of high achievement, softened by small gifts of kawaii trinkets: pencils, stickers, and erasers featuring my favorite Sanrio characters like My Melody and the Little Twin Stars. These cute items served as incentives to work harder, little tokens of happiness that brightened up my study time.
Asian American women’s experiences are very diverse, and this experience reflects my specific positioning—as half Japanese and half white and raised in a community composed predominantly of tech workers. But I have spoken to many other Asian American women from very different backgrounds who somehow also remember kawaii trinkets as objects that disciplined them into model minority expectations.
Kawaii comes from Japan, but its spread across Asia—enabled by histories of empire and soft power influence—means that it has become a fixture in many of our girlhoods. Growing up in Silicon Valley, I experienced kawaii as a culture shared among Asian American girls, and I enjoyed kawaii-style products from Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam together with ones created locally in the Bay Area. Further, whether or not we identify with kawaii, its cute image has been projected indiscriminately onto Asian American women.
In my case, my Japanese mother was not a “tiger mom” stereotype. She was a hardworking person who was too busy to have much time to supervise me. Still, it was not hard for me as a child to discern how to earn the approval of the adults around me—and that anything short of perfection would constitute failure. Many other Asian American girls in my community also struggled with mental illness in private while trying to uphold a perfect image.
While the “good little Asian girl” exists only as a figment of imagination, we already know what she is supposed to look like: she is cute, petite, and thin. Her small body speaks to her status as an object primed to be used and abused by others.
With this image of the “good little Asian girl” in mind, some people might see nothing but harm in what kawaii represents for Asian American girls and women: the small, subservient role that we are assigned to play within the confines of model minority femininity. Accompanied by our Hello Kitty accessories, we supposedly become like Hello Kitty ourselves, the cute, happy mascots of a smoothly functioning capitalist society. Never mind the cost to our own health and well-being. It saddens me now to think that my submission was bought at such a low price, obtained in exchange for stickers and erasers.
Writing in the early 2000s, the scholar Anne Anlin Cheng coined the term “wounded beauty” to describe how white feminist concepts of beauty’s injuriousness are not simply compounded by racism. That is, while much has been said about the ways that beauty harms women, fashioning us into decorative objects, beauty signifies differently for women of color. Asian American women are at once excluded from normative white beauty and exoticized as beauty’s exemplars.
Cuteness, too, is an aesthetic that holds distinct meanings for Asian American women, perhaps especially so for those of us who are East Asian. From the China dolls and lotus blossoms of twentieth-century cinema to the popularity of kawaii and pretty K-pop idols in our present moment, we are haunted by our adorable likenesses.
Today, I understand my attachments to kawaii culture not only in relation to my childhood nostalgia, but to the mixture of affection and aggression contained within the aesthetic. When you see something cute, you may find yourself wanting to squeeze it and smash it just as much as you may want to kiss it or give it a hug. Cuteness inspires both tenderness and hostility. When it comes to kawaii specifically, these mixed feelings cannot be separated from the aesthetic’s origins in histories of empire and war.
As the scholar Joshua Paul Dale has shown, the beginnings of kawaii can be traced far back to Heian-era art and culture, to Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, and later in the Edo period, to the artist Maruyama Ōkyo’s playful puppies. However, the aesthetic as we know it today took shape in postwar Japan. In the aftermath of World War II, kawaii emerged in response to the country’s dizzying transformation from a hypermasculine imperialist force to a nation forced to adopt a more passive role in global affairs. Japan’s love for the feminine, childlike, and adorable is often thought to parallel the nation’s defeat and disarmament in the postwar period.
During this time, kawaii provided a means for Japanese girls and queer youth to resist expectations of conformity in Japan. Instead of quietly accepting the norms of adulthood, many young people turned to the pleasures of girlishness and whimsy. Dressing in colorful, creative fashions such as dresses festooned with frills and ribbons became a way for young people to express themselves and to reject the dull uniforms of normative society.
In the 1970s, Japanese girls developed a new style of handwriting called koneko-ji (“kitten writing”) that subverted the traditional handwriting style taught in Japanese schools. In place of standard Japanese characters, they invented a rounded and playful script dotted with cute symbols like hearts, stars, and smiley faces. Schools attempted to ban the trend, but they could not stop its spread.
By the late twentieth century, kawaii became diffused across everyday life in Japan, appearing everywhere from anime and manga to ordinary consumer goods. Accordingly, when Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, kawaii was there to help soften the impact. During this time of economic precarity, kawaii characters like Tarepanda, a tired panda who flops around, or Rilakkuma, a lazy bear, became especially trendy. Their adorably exhausted demeanors mirrored feelings of public fatigue. Iyashi-kei, or “healing,” products, services, and media—such as animal cafes and self-care items in cute packaging—tapped into kawaii’s power to provide momentary relief from exhaustion and stress.
A little figurine that smiles up at you might not truly heal you, but it might help you survive the day. Cuteness can bring comfort and warmth to the mundane cruelties of life under capitalism. At the same time, it can be a heavily consumerist aesthetic that risks subduing us to these injustices, tempting people to simply collect more trinkets without challenging the larger structures that harm us. In some kawaii fan communities, the irresistible pull of cuteness can feed a vicious cycle of overconsumption and overwork.
Nevertheless, kawaii’s power for connection and self-expression helps secure what I see as its promise for imagining and inciting better worlds. As a child, I was unaware of kawaii’s roots in alternative subcultures, of how it has been a form of resistance uplifting femininity, playfulness, uniqueness, and care. This knowledge casts my recollections of kawaii as a disciplinary tool in a different light.
Now, when I think of kitten writing, I am reminded of the loopy print style that Asian American girls adopted when I was growing up in the Bay Area in the late ’90s and early 2000s, with its lowercase “l”s written in cursive and its use of toggled capitalization. While working hard for our straight As, we furtively passed around notes written in this style of handwriting on kawaii stationery. The notes were not exactly an act of rebellion, but they were still a small way to resist the pressures weighing down on us through connection and self-expression. Cuteness helped us reclaim a little bit of ourselves outside of the sphere of adult control.
Over the past few decades, kawaii culture has been embraced by people around the world. My college-aged students of diverse identities adorn their laptops with kawaii stickers and their backpacks with kawaii charms. Whenever I see these small expressions of individuality in public, I wonder what each keychain says about each person—why someone loves Hangyodon or Chiikawa or Sumikko Gurashi.
Together with the global mainstreaming of kawaii, sick and disabled people worldwide have found comfort and connection in the aesthetic. On social media, people in these online communities show off their favorite kawaii fashions and decorate their bedrooms with kawaii plushies. For some of them, cuteness has become a symbol of pride in illness and disability, a way of reclaiming vulnerability as a positive value. This trend became especially popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of us turned to cute things—from Squishmallows to Animal Crossing—to help survive isolation and uncertainty.
However, there also exists a darker side to this trend. Digital aesthetics such as traumacore, which developed around the late 2010s, incorporate Hello Kitty, My Melody, and other kawaii characters into memes and artwork that depict trauma and self-harm. In one such image, the Sanrio character My Sweet Piano, a gentle-looking pink lamb, floats in a bathtub while wielding a knife. Razor blades, bandages, and pills surround her. The text above her reads, “i’m drowning in my thoughts… i can’t escape myself.” Traumacore combines the nostalgia of kawaii with explicitly disturbing themes, suggesting that darkness can be hidden even within seemingly safe and perfect childhoods.
Likewise, new styles and sub-aesthetics from Japan have used kawaii to express hard feelings. Yami-kawaii, meaning “sick-cute,” is one such sub-aesthetic. Beginning around the same time as traumacore, it has attained worldwide popularity for combining kawaii elements with references to sickness, self-injury, and suicide. In Japan, a place where mental illness remains highly stigmatized, many young people have taken solace in this softer and more indirect way of representing and releasing their pain through fashion and art. In Harajuku, an alternative fashion district of Tokyo, you can find T-shirts and merchandise featuring Menhera-chan, a magical girl who cuts her wrists to fight the evils of the world.
I understand the importance of this means of expression and recognize that, for many young people, cuteness can help defang something that is otherwise very difficult to confront and communicate. I am now forty years old, however, and I have mixed feelings about trends that depict mental illness in an adorable light. Any romance that my eating disorder once held for me has long been displaced by the fear of living with it into middle age, something that few people would consider cute or aesthetic. As a teenager, I remember visiting pro-anorexia message boards where we confessed our pain to each other in all-lowercase letters and miniscule fonts, trying to make ourselves and our voices as tiny as possible. We favored thinspiration images that showed delicate bones together with pretty motifs—flowers, lace, and antique dolls—all in pale, pastel colors.
Because of these memories, I get anxious whenever I see eating disorders given a cute face. I want to say, “No, stop, there’s a monster underneath there. Turn around. Run away.” So, too, I worry about how kawaii’s incorporation into the imagery of mental illness can risk reinforcing the projection of fantasies of injury and harm onto Asian women. As Asian women, we are not only fetishized for our imagined attractiveness, but for our imagined madness and fragility.
Think of Cho-Cho-san in Madame Butterfly cutting herself on stage night after night to thunderous applause. It is not only Asian beauty that is fetishized in the American imagination, but often, the attractiveness of its death. It can be hard to separate the beauty—or the cuteness—from the blood.
Still, I cannot resist the appeal of the heart-eyed panda plushie who continues to sit in his place by the pillows on my bed. While I was once accused of infantilizing myself for putting him there, I recognize now in kawaii culture not just the ways that it kept me small, but the ways it helped me survive.
The same things that sustain us can also hurt us, something that I try to keep in mind when reflecting on what it means to be cast as a model minority. Playing the role of someone small and nonthreatening can be a matter of safety, but it also comes with the pain of forcing yourself to squeeze and contort into shapes that do not fit.
The last time I visited my parents, my mother gave me a box of mementos that she had saved from my childhood, mostly school reports and certificates given out for minor accomplishments. Together with these items, I found a small pink notebook that I must have started at around age thirteen. Glittery stickers decorated its pink cover. Inside, I found lists of diet foods, calorie counts, and weight goals, all printed in my neat, girlish handwriting. I wondered why my mother had bothered to keep this item. Maybe she never opened it up before tossing it into the box, thinking it just another artifact of my good behavior.
At first, I wanted to destroy the notebook, to tear it up and throw it away. Instead, though, I lingered over its pages, a more honest artifact of my girlhood than any of the school documents or prizes. I felt a sense of tenderness toward the thirteen-year-old girl who saw no strangeness in putting cute stickers all over her efforts to disappear. I put the notebook back in the box. Among the jumble of faded certificates and report cards, the stickers sparkled.
This piece is part of the Summer 2026 issue.
