{"id":41650,"date":"2013-11-13T04:11:57","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T04:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/kawaii-means-cute-in-japanese-but-its\/"},"modified":"2013-11-13T04:11:57","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T04:11:57","slug":"kawaii-means-cute-in-japanese-but-its","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/kawaii-means-cute-in-japanese-but-its\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Kawaii means \u201ccute\u201d in Japanese, but it\u2019s different from the Western \u201ccute\u201d precisely because it can also mean \u201ccool.\u201d This is not easy to understand, since things kawaii are usually small, round, warm, soft, and fluffy, and radiate something childlike, sweet, innocent, pure, and weak. In Japan, the relationships and interactions between cuteness and coolness are complex. While in the \u201cwhite\u201d European and American cultures, cool and cute are usually defined as opposites, kawaii unites them. This is possible because kawaii \u2014 like cool \u2014 is not entirely serious, but ironical. Both cool and kawaii are elastic; they are able to reunite contradictory elements and thus cover a large field of aesthetic expressions. \u201cKawaii\u201d is the most frequently used word in Japan and \u201ccool\u201d the most popular word of approval in the US.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/essay\/shades-of-cool-degrees-of-kawaii\">Shades of Cool, Degrees of Kawaii:\u00a0an essay by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein<\/a> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/tumblr.lareviewofbooks.org\/\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">lareviewofbooks<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kawaii means \u201ccute\u201d in Japanese, but it\u2019s different from the Western \u201ccute\u201d precisely because it can also mean \u201ccool.\u201d This is not easy to understand, since things kawaii are usually small, round, warm, soft, and fluffy, and radiate something childlike, sweet, innocent, pure, and weak. In Japan, the relationships and interactions between cuteness and coolness [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1537],"class_list":["post-41650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","tag-critical-toys","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-aPM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}