Word: kawaii
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...pinpoint exactly why these animals are so darn cute; maybe it's their small size relative to their fellow primates. Maybe it's their flirty, innocent playfulness. A snow white sifaka putting on a show before a crowd of onlookers, swinging back and forth - it's so toe-curlingly kawaii, as our Japanese traveling companions put it, you could die. Though cuteness alone isn't likely to save the lemurs from the forces that threaten them - hunting, deforestation and habitat destruction - it certainly puts them in a better position than their homelier endangered peers...
...beauty pageant look. Indeed, newspaper writers - reflecting the tastes of Japanese men - wondered if 5'9" Mori (who speaks English) embodies anything Japanese at all. Ligron, who has been approached to replicate her success in other countries, thinks it may be just as well. "Japanese men want infantile anorexic kawaii [cute] women in their 20s who act like they're 12. Now girls are beginning to find role models in women with real talent, careers, confidence." And who needs the Japanese market? Mori is now being considered for a role in the hit NBC series Heroes as the love interest...
...themselves in awkward situations because of these restrictions. While on duty policing Iraq as part of coalition forces, the SDF at times had to be guarded by Australian troops so that no one from Japan would be forced to fire a shot in anger. This is a military more kawaii than kamikaze...
Koichi Iwabuchi, a professor visiting from Waseda University in Japan, spoke about the social uses of cute. Iwabuchi described the social atmosphere of Japan as “very dark, very tough,” offering an explanation of the popularity of kawaii as a reaction to this toughness. Meanwhile, Thorn suggested that kawaii is used as “a playful parody of a patriarchal culture.” Hello Kitty as the face of resistance? Maybe...
...struck, not by darkness but by an explosion of Day-Glo pop. Kenji Yanobe's bubble-blowing Astro Boy wall sculpture, Myeong-eun Shin's floor of 400 plastic pink poodles, and Satoshi Hirose's room of 5,000 fragrant lemons seem to celebrate Japan's ongoing culture of kawaii (cute). But like a sugar-coated almond, "NEO-TOKYO" leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste...