Joshua Paul Dale is a professor of American literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo and a pioneer in what is apparently a burgeoning academic field called ‘Cute Studies’ – or what Damon Runyon might have called ‘Pretty Cute’ Studies, as in ‘“Are You Kidding Me? You Study This?” Studies.’

In fairness, Dale makes a strong case for his subject to be taken seriously. Irresistible is packed with references to all sorts of neuroscientific studies and cultural studies and studies about theories of animal domestication and the evolution of ‘affiliative social behaviour’, which lead Dale to posit that cuteness is a ‘species-wide emotion’.

Is it an emotion? I don’t think so. But one can only admire the breadth and range of his cute examples, from Pokémon  and Hello Kitty to the rise of cupid art, P.T. Barnum’s baby shows, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Konrad Lorenz’s ‘child schema’ (Kindcherschema), Shirley Temple, and the more recent phenomena of VTubers (I had to look this up, but it is, as you might expect, a virtual YouTuber, i.e. a computer-generated avatar YouTuber) and ‘furries’. I also had to look this up, but if you’d like to do the same I would suggest taking care, since furries turn out to be people who like to adopt a ‘fursona’ and dress up in fancy animal costumes, with some of them displaying distinct proclivities towards, shall we say, animal mating behaviours. I used to think I was down with the kids but in my understanding of cute subcultures I am about as naive, it seems, as an old-fashioned High Court judge.

The book swells to a conclusion in which Dale claims that ‘cuteness breaks down barriers and gives us an opportunity to experience another sort of existence – one in which we guard ourselves a little less and invite others in a little more. In a world that feels increasingly polarised, is this such a bad thing?’ I’m not at all convinced, alas, that cutification is going to save the world’s current problems. (Older readers may remember a very funny Harry Enfield sketch about a gay Hitler – ‘Stuka bombers? Not too camp?’ – which rather puts paid to such a hope. For all its big ideas, the real appeal of the book in fact lies in its detailed analysis and discussion of a key number of cute Japanese cultural artefacts, books and artworks.

The Japanese word for cute is kawaii. It is impossible, according to Dale, to

walk for more than a minute through a shopping street in Japan without overhearing the word kawaii, often exclaimed in a chorus among groups of young women. In fact, kawaii might be the most popular word in the Japanese language.

It certainly seems to be a predominant mode in Japan, not only of delighted response but of deliberately delightful representation. Dale rehearses various theories about the recent rise of cuteness in the country. According to some, it’s been a way of appearing harmless and inoffensive after the second world war; to others, it reflects the rise of consumerism in the country, which has encouraged unfortunate but widespread traits of narcissism and childishness.

Dale also traces the phenomenon back much further, to various Heian-era masterpieces, including Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, with its ‘exploration of the pleasures offered by small children, animals and objects’ and something called the Chōjū giga (Scroll of Frolicking Animals), attributed to the monk Toba Sōjō and whose title pretty much sums up its contents: it’s a scroll, featuring frolicking animals. Such works established a distinct aesthetic, characterised, according to Dale, by ‘a preference for smallness, the treasuring of the transient and perishable and an enthusiasm for simplicity’.

In the modern era, Dale points to the continuation and development of the Japanese cute aesthetic in the work of the illustrator Yumeji Takehisa, whose female faces have weirdly large eyes, Junichi Nakahara, another illustrator whose work in Japanese girls’ magazines feature rather sickly cute-featured characters, and Osamu Tezuka, the so-called ‘God of Manga’. Studio Ghibli, for some reason, doesn’t get a mention, though surely the cutest Japanese creation in recent years is Ghibli’s Totoro, who looks like a cross between a giant cat and an owl and whose weird, pettable appearance may well help to explain the rise of Keir Starmer, the fall of Boris Johnson, and the otherwise inexplicable careers of, say, Ed Sheeran, Thérèse Coffey and Michael Fabricant.