Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Example one: "A young black man strolls down the street in Oakland, California's African American community. He is wearing a Chicago Bulls athletic suit with expensive matching sneakers. The sneakers are untied and he walks with a light limp, leaning just a bit to one side. His arms take turns trailing behind him as he ambles on his way. He knows he is cool and looks good. He follows the popular rap groups and knows all the latest dance steps. Since he lost his job as a stock clerk six months ago, he has been unable to contribute to the support of his two children, who live with his former girlfriend and her mother. Halfway down the block, he runs into a good friend who is similarly dressed. They exchange a variety of low-five and high-five handshakes. Using a combination of Black speech patterns and street terminology, they discuss the latest happenings and exchange ideas about generating some income." [1]

Example two: "Tokyo. A group of extremely high-heeled Japanese girls wobble towards a group of Japanese young men who are sitting at a restaurant table. The girls' faces are made up with thick layers of cream foundation and powder and all of them wear sparkly things in their hair. As they listen to the men, their outlined mouths are permanently smiling. Their shaded eyes, emerging under heavy fake eyelashes, adopt the shape of golf balls and convey the impression of astonishment as well as the vague feeling that whatever the males are saying will not be fully understood. The perpetual look of embarrassment, an effect of a sophisticated application of rouge, contributes to this impression. While they clap their hands whenever one of the males makes a joke, the few words that the girls occasionally breathe into the conversation come across as squeaky and "cute" sounds modeled on anime voices. Finally, one girl takes out her telephone from which six plush animals dangle and shows off a recently added glittery toy. In unison the other girls scream: kawaii!" 

What do these two examples – the one African American cool, the other Japanese cute or kawaii – have in common? At first sight not much. The one is masculine and preoccupied with the dissimulation of emotion, the other is feminine and engaged in the ostentatious display of sentimentality. Cool produces an aesthetic of the emotionally restrained and the detached while kawaii excels in attachment to creations with resonances in childhood. Cool appears as an aesthetic used by the leader of the gang while kawaii seems to remain the option of women who have decided to become children. In spite of these exterior oppositions, both phenomena have important conceptual structures in common: both act against the plainness of official societies (the blandness of white America and the uniformity of Japan). In a more global context, they are even linked: they combat, both in its own way, the American "uncool" aesthetics of Disney.

At the turn of the millennium, international youth culture is dominated by mainly two types of aesthetics: the Afro-American cool, which, propelled by Hip-hop music, has become "the world's favorite youth culture;" [2] and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute, that is distributed internationally by Japan's powerful anime industry. Hip-hop has become "the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world" [3] and "Black aesthetics," whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioral outfits are to a large extent based on cool, has become “the only distinctive American artistic creation"(White and Cones: 60). At the same time sixty percent of the world's cartoon series are made in Japan and Japanese games running on PlayStation 2 and Nintendo are as popular. [4]

The USA and Japan are cultural superpowers and global trendsetters because they make use of two particular concepts that are complex and difficult to define, but continue to fascinate the world: cool and kawaii. While, as we will see below, in "white" European culture, cool and cute were, most of the time, defined as opposites, Afro-Japanese aesthetics is able to fuse both by following its intrinsic ironical patterns, so that the Washington Post could call Japan "the coolest nation on Earth." [5] 

Cool and kawaii attitudes need to be analyzed in order to understand the relationships that are actually leading to a fusion of both aesthetics. Afro-Japanese aesthetics is perhaps best represented by the Japanese clothing brand Bape (A Bathing Ape) which has become the preferred brand of the arguably most popular American rapper Lil' Wayne and is also worn by Pharrell, Kanye West, Mos Def, The Roots, Questlove, Faith Evans, and Pusha T. Bape combines cool Hip-Hop style with particularly kawaii motives and offers products like the Panda Hoodie or other animal themed Hoodies that replace the aggressive and popular Shark Hoodie. The brand’s character Milo, a particularly cute monkey, is printed on clothes but appears also on the newest Nintendo DS Light game boy where he joins Supermario, another character that Bape uses for fashion design. For rapper Common, the line is "all about that next level of fashion" (Hall 2005). BAPE developed within the Tokyo Ura-Harajuku movement and combined a cynical view of Japanese society with an opposition to mass-produced trends. In spite of its anti-establishment posture, BAPE has established highly visible tie-ups with global companies as Pepsi-Cola, Disney, and Nintendo.[6]

The purpose of the present research is to analyze possible conceptual links between these two concepts as well as evaluate their differences. Only the location of underlying structural parallels can yield an explanation of the exclusive success of these two cultures. 

See alsoMy New Blog "What is Cool"