Kawaii Asian Girls Save the Day!Animating a Minor Politics of Care

Kawaii, a “cute” aesthetic commonly associated with Japanese anime, manga, and shōjo (girl) culture, has over the last few decades achieved tremendous global popularity and commercial success. While this phenomenon has prompted a growing body of research on kawaii, attempts to explain or evaluate kawaii’s global impact often continue to be bound up with assumptions of its superficiality, triviality, and frivolousness, assumptions that owe largely to kawaii’s association with visual commodity culture, the hyperfeminine, the infantile, and its Japanese origins (Brown 1–2). This essay seeks to recuperate kawaii as a basis for theorizing Asian American feminism through an analysis of contemporary Japanese mahō shōjo (magical girl) anime and Ruth Ozeki’s deployment of mahō shōjo aesthetic and narrative forms in her novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013).

Mahō shōjo anime depicts the transformation of ordinary Japanese schoolgirls into extraordinary girls with magical powers and has been at the center of feminist debates about the violence and viability of kawaii aesthetics.¹ While some critics herald the mahō shōjo warrior, popularized by the hit series Sailor Moon (1992–97), as a new, progressive gender identity and refreshing contrast to dominant depictions of passive Japanese womanhood, others take the genre as a whole to task for promoting a depoliticized brand of feminism. These critics argue that mahō shōjo anime renders feminism easier to consume by aestheticizing girl power.² As Anne Allison points out, mahō shōjo transformation “is more a ‘makeover’ than a ‘power-up’”—girl heroes gain kawaii costumes and weapons that double as fashion accessories (Millennial 138). By linking power to traditional practices of female beautification, mahō shōjo anime invites young female viewers to recognize themselves as consumers (not political agents) and to claim agency via shopping (instead of challenging patriarchal power structures and gender norms). Other critics call attention to how the kawaii aesthetics of the genre have been coopted to attract and entice male audiences.³ Mahō shōjo tend to strip down in transformation sequences, becoming seminude visual spectacles (Allison, Millennial 129). The debate about whether mahō shōjo anime offers positive, viable images and means of female empowerment has resulted in a critical impasse.

This essay examines how the series Puella Magi Madoka Magica (January–April 2011) offers a mode of sideways thinking around this impasse.⁴ This anime shifts the focus from questions of empowerment to powerlessness by foregrounding the various conditions that compel Japanese schoolgirls to become mahō shōjo in the first place. Madoka Magica mobilizes and deforms kawaii aesthetics to critique the social and economic precarity engendered by the global expansion of US neoliberal capitalism. In the anime, mahō shōjo cannot battle their way out of the structural forces of violence that govern their lives. Through the kawaii titular character, Madoka, the anime gestures to the urgent need for an alternative form of heroism grounded in an ethics of care. Madoka’s acts of care not only provide an antidote to the pain of neoliberalization but also catalyze new forms of social assemblage.

To further develop the dynamic politics and ethics of care that kawaii calls forth, this essay analyzes Madoka Magica alongside Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Ozeki draws on kawaii aesthetics and elements of the mahō shōjo genre to similarly highlight the precarity of her protagonist, a Japanese schoolgirl named Nao. The novel explicitly links the paraphernalia and affordances of cuteness to juvenile prostitution—Nao comes to be trafficked as a kawaii sex object. However, Ozeki also challenges the subject/object divide that privileges an independent, individual subjectivity as the means of achieving agency. In the novel, agency becomes reconfigured through a kawaii object—a Hello Kitty lunchbox that travels from Japan to the Pacific Northwest. The lunchbox, which contains Nao’s diary, serves as a vehicle for affective bonding that illuminates a new transnational feminist model of ethicopolitical collectivity. Ozeki translates kawaii (an aesthetic grounded in visual culture) to literary form, rendering explicit mutual vulnerability, emotional liability, and attunement to the Other as...