Cute things and phenomena are constantly in the news in Taiwan. The nation has recently witnessed the birth of a giant panda cub, the giant Rubber Duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman is floating in Kaohsiung City harbor and EVA Airways has just added a further Hello Kitty route to Los Angeles. Not to mention a steady release of cute mobile phones, tablets, laptops and just about any other consumer product imaginable.
The obsession with cute is a huge East Asian phenomenon, little understood in the West, and what many Westerners find most surprising is that not just young girls, but ostensibly sensible adults, are smitten with the bug and have large amounts of cash to drop on their hobby. The pink pound might be about gay purchasing power in the U.K., but in Japan the pink yen is mostly about Hello Kitty.
Caroline Favier, a Dutch toy collector whose extensive collection contains hundreds of curios from the region, might be expected to be readier than most to sympathize.
“Like most Westerners I don’t like cute,” Favier said in an online interview. “Actually, I like classic and tacky. I remember I couldn’t believe the first time I saw a 40-year old secretary’s Hello Kitty collection on her desk, and that was allowed in an office environment! It looked so unprofessional.”
But in Taiwan the young-at-heart like to buy cute things, irrespective of seniority. “My customers are of all ages, but mostly students, as this store is right by National Taiwan University,” Carolyn Lin, manager of a Non-no fashion accessories store in Taipei City’s Gongguan District, told Taiwan Today. “But we also get people in their 40s and adults bringing in their kids.”
Asked why people buy socks and apparel emblazoned with all manner of cartoon images, domestic and international, Lin seemed slightly dumbfounded, as if cuteness was so ubiquitous as to be beyond need of explanation. “They’re necessities. They just like the products because they’re fashionable.”
The phenomenon is so well-established that academics have taken an interest in cute mania, or ke’ai as it is known in Taiwan. What started in Japan with Hello Kitty has turned into a multibillion dollar global industry, which everyone from sociologists to psychiatrists is trying to understand.
“Ke’ai is a Chinese term that simply means loveable, and has a very long history,” Teri J. Silvio, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology in Taipei City-based Academia Sinica, told Taiwan Today in an email interview. Silvio has a huge collection of dolls, puppets and other figurines, as well as it being a serious research interest.
“The concept of lovability is probably universal. Anything that people feel positive about, in any way, can be ke’ai. In Taiwan today, ke’ai is often used to translate the Japanese term kawaii and the English cute. All of these terms have slightly different ranges of meaning.”
EVA Air continues to expand the number of routes flying jets in Hello Kitty livery.
Naturally, academic discourse has focused on the situation in Japan, where ke’ai culture began to take off in the 1970s. “There are many different explanations for why the kawaii aesthetic is so popular in Japan,” Silvio said. “Because kawaii products are most popular with young women, one explanation is that it reflects the sexist structure of Japanese culture, where women are expected to be weak and men to take care of them.”
However, Taiwan’s culture is far less sexist than Japan’s, so other arguments appear more pertinent to local conditions. “Others argue that the exaggeration of the kawaii style expresses dissatisfaction with the rigidity of adult gender roles,” Silvio added. “Many people in the popular culture industries argue that kawaii style is popular because it is comforting. Kawaii objects provide a kind of respite and healing from the competition and struggles of daily life in the contemporary world.”
The explosion in popularity of ke’ai also appears to have a demographic and material basis. Japan’s kawaii culture coincided with the huge increase in the number of young single women, often still living at home as real estate prices shot through the roof, but with large disposable incomes. Taiwan’s own demographic changes followed hot on Japan’s heels.
And although Hello Kitty may be the mouthless face of stereotypical ke’ai, Taiwan has plenty of ke’ai culture and products of its own. “Taiwan has always had ke’ai things. Lots of local designers are creating their own ke’ai characters, and some of them are quite popular in Taiwan,” Silvio said.
The ke’ai concept has become so pervasive that the whole country has been described as ke’ai. “What is cutest about Taiwan is not that it pretends to be imposing or great, but that it is not forcing itself to become anything. It has a flexible culture that takes each day as it comes,” ROC Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai said in Hong Kong in December, 2012. Pushing Taiwan as a Mecca of ke’ai makes sense, given the purchasing power of young female shoppers and sightseers across the region.
Many of Taiwan’s original cute products are not well-known, no doubt because they were produced decades before ke’ai mania took hold. But they have proved very influential on subsequent developments.
Tatung produced its first porcelain doll mascot in 1969, a piggy bank called Tatung Baby, and thereafter created them on an annual basis. The police and military soon copied the style, but it was not until ex-president Chen Shui-bian’s strategists created the A-bian doll that the figurines really entered mainstream consciousness. After all, if people of all ages like cute objects, then why should they not also vote for cute candidates? The last presidential election saw ardent Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ying-wen supporters buying dolls to show their support.
Modern conceptions of ke’ai have also entered the religious sphere. Silvio mentioned “the craze for cute figurines of Buddhist and Taoist gods a few years ago. Some gods, like the Maitreya Buddha and Tudi Gong, have always been cute. What’s happened recently is that they are being represented more often in a modern, Japanese style of cute rather than the more traditional Chinese styles, and the kawaii style is being used to represent gods that were traditionally not considered cute.”
The Mazu statue of Jin An Temple in eastern Taiwan’s Su’ao Port is perhaps the most striking example, although some Westerners might find its kitsch close to nauseating.
Puppet theater is another part of traditional Taiwan culture that is not typically thought of as ke’ai, but recent examples suggest it has huge potential in the ke’ai market. A year ago the author was bemused to encounter knights-errant puppet theater at the outbound customs inspections desk at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
The customer service video used puppets in traditional martial arts garb to explain the regulations against taking prohibited articles on board the aircraft. The male puppet was hauled aside by the customs puppet for a dressing down after the X-ray of his carry-on bag revealed a pair of swords. “Silly man, don’t you know anything?” his female puppet companion chided him. But he immediately got his own back when the X-ray revealed her bag was full of proscribed perfume bottles.
Cute puppets have also appeared in conventionally male settings. The Recruitment Center of Ministry of Defense in Taipei City’s Da’an District is currently using a puppet video to entice young people into defending the nation.
But perhaps the case for ke’ai can be overstated. Recent panda and rubber duck mania also lend themselves to alternative explanations.
“People thinking baby animals are adorable and wanting to look at them doesn’t seem to be a recent phenomenon, or particular to Taiwan,” Silvio said. “It’s just that a panda was recently born at Taipei Zoo. Wherever people have pets, there is ke’ai. The Rubber Duck in Hong Kong harbor seems more influenced by American Pop Art than Japanese girl culture.”
Write to Taiwan Today at ttonline@mofa.gov.tw