> [...]
> 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,” writes 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,” states 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 holding the potential as empathy generators.”
I wonder how these two points tie in to the modern obsession with cats. They seem to fill a real need people have, but speaking as someone who is unaffected by cat-cuteness (which is weird because I generally am very susceptable to cute things) and who is treated as a freak of nature by many, I think there's also a certain aspect of trying to conform to societal expectations.
PS: The Guardian aritcle is a reprint (republish? reshare?) of an article at Mosaic[0], which features a lot more pictures.