Gender Difference in the Free Association for “Cute” and “Kawaii”

Abstract

In Japan, “Kawaii” is frequently used in various situations mainly by young female. Corresponding English word “Cute” that is pronounced as “Kyuuto” is also used in daily conversation. Our study compared the denotation of both words by applying the free association method, thus clarified the semantic commonality and the difference. The result of survey using 60 informants revealed that the stimulus word Kawaii produced more number of associations than Cute. And our further analysis revealed that Japanese people don’t have opportunities to use the English word Cute in their everyday life, thus they use it as a foreign origin word, and the word Cute contained the image of something of Western/foreign culture. In other words, the pragmatic (cultural) context might have influenced the semantics of the word through the free association that listed up the denotation.

1 Kansei Engineering and the Concept of Kawaii

As is well-known, Kansei is a Japanese word meaning the sensibility and Kansei engineering is now becoming popular in the whole world owing to the activity of Japan Society for Kansei Engineering (JSKE) and Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research (KEER) conference [1, 2].

The word Kawaii is one of the focus of Kansei Engineering [3,4,5,6,7]. A list of more relevant information can be found in Reference [5] (p. 60–61) although most of them were written in Japanese.

In our previous study [7], we asked to make a comparison among Kawaii, beauty and preference by showing 225 photographs to 89 informants (34 female, 54 male). As the result, Kawaii and preference showed no difference between female (r = 0.73) and male (r = 0.73). But Kawaii and beautiful for female (r = 0.60) and male (r = 0.69) and beautiful and preference for female (r = 0.60) and male (r = 0.72) were respectively showed significant difference between female and male. This suggested that females may have clearer differential criteria for each of Kawaii, beautiful and preference than male. Thus, the difference of evaluation structure among female and male is one of the focus of our study.

Anther focus is on the cultural aspect. The Japanese word Kawaii is now widely accepted as a part of (female) culture in Europe, Asia and the US. But, of course, there are words that has the same meaning to Kawaii in each language. For example, the English word Cute is considered to be the most adequate translation of Kawaii. Our question is how Kawaii and the corresponding word Cute are used differently in the same cultural context.

As a first step, we started the collaboration with Prof. Hiroko Chiba and Prof. David Berque of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, USA. They conducted a survey by adopting the same procedure with us for US students. In this context, the focus is on the difference between Cute and Kawaii.

Even in Japan, the word Cute is used as a foreign-origin word and is written as “キュート” and is pronounced “Kyuuto”. The meaning of “Cute” found in Japanese dictionary is “lively Kawaii, especially, of young female” [8, 9], or “considerately Kawaii, especially, of lively female” [10]. But these definitions should be confirmed based on the empirical study. We decided to make the comparative analysis on the use of Cute and Kawaii in Japan.

2 Method

2.1 Procedure

In order to clarify the semantic features of both words, we adopted the free association method.

We conducted the survey twice. The first survey was conducted using the pen and paper. We gave a blank paper to each informant and asked to write down their student-ID, sex, age, then draw a separating line at the center of the paper. On the upper side, they were asked to write “cute” and on the lower side to write “Kawaii”. Then they were requested to remind and write down the words that are associated with Cute or Kawaii. As shown in Table 1, total of 25 informants participated in the first day survey.

Table 1. Informants

The second survey was conducted using the PC and the informants typed the word associated with Cute or Kawaii. Total of 35 informants participated in this survey. Two data were merged and used in the following analysis. Thus, the total number of informants was 60 including 15 females and 45 males. It is unfortunate that we could not obtain sufficient number of female informants because Kawaii is typically a female culture.

Total of 20 min were given for the informants to write down the associated words. All the informants finished writing/typing their answers before the end of given time.

2.2 Basic Statistics

Total numbers of associations of each informant are summarized in Table 2. By applying ANOVA, it was found that the total number of associations by female is significantly larger than that by male at the 1% level and the total number of associations for Kawaii is significantly larger than that for Cute among female at the 1% level and among male at the 5% level.

Table 2. Total number of associations for Cute and Kawaii by female and male

2.3 Categories for Data Analysis

All the original data was typed in Excel and was classified into 17 categories as shown below (in alphabetical order),

• 1. Adjective: e.g. small, lovely

• 2. Animal: e.g. cat, dog

• 3. Character: e.g. Hello-Kitty, Disney Princess

• 4. Clothes and Fashion: e.g. gothic Lolita, China dress

• 5. Color: e.g. pink, pale color

• 6. Foreign Items: e.g. European things, overseas items

• 7. Human: e.g. girl, idols

• 8. Letter: e.g. Hiragana

• 9. Onomatope: e.g. fuwa-fuwa, hira-hira

• 10. Ornaments and Accessory: e.g. accessory, eyeglass

• 11. Person’s Name: e.g. Avril Lavigne, Ayame Goriki

• 12. Place: e.g. Harajuku, Tokyo

• 13. Plant: e.g. flower, tulip

• 14. Shape and Pattern: e.g. stripe, star

• 15. Sweets and Fruits: e.g. short cake, cinnamon roll

• 16. Toy and Equipment: e.g. doll, stuffed animal

• 17. Others: e.g. car, painting

These categories were generated by examining the adequacy of each category and by checking the duplicability.

3 Result and Analysis

3.1 Typical Associations of Each Category

To clarify the image of each category more clearly, Table 3 shows the list of associated words that have the commonality among 20% or more of informants. Numbers in parenthesis show the number of informants who answered that word as an associated word.

Table 3. List of associated words that have the commonality among 20% or more of informants.

3.2 Total Associations of Each Category

Total of 1168 associations were generated by 60 informants where female (N = 15) generated 518 associations (213 words for Cute and 305 words for Kawaii) and male (N = 45) generated 650 associations (244 words for Cute and 406 words for Kawaii). Female answered more associations (average of 14.2 words for Cute and 20.3 words for Kawaii) than male (average of 5.4 words for Cute and 9.0 words for Kawaii). Table 4 shows the percentage of total associations for each category. Shaded cells show 0%, underlined cells show more than or equal to 10% and bold letter cells show more than or equal to 20% of total association.

Table 4. Percentage of total associations for each category.

Table 4 shows that female informants mostly associated both of Cute and Kawaii to Adjective (15.5% and 20.7%), then to Character (13.1% and 4.9%), and Human (12.7% and 13.4%) while male informants mostly associated both of Cute and Kawaii to Animal (21.7% and 25.1%), then to Human (17.2% and 16.7%) and Character (15.6% and 12.8%). In addition, Onomatope appeared more frequently in female informants (5.6% and 4.9%) than male informants (0.8% and 1.2%)

Regarding the difference between Cute and Kawaii, Character was more frequent for Cute (13.1%) than Kawaii (4.9%) among female informants. But Cute Character included Hello Kitty for 5 times among female and 7 times among male, even though Hello Kitty was born in Japan. Hello Kitty appeared for Kawaii only for once. Another typical difference can be found for Foreign Items for which Cute generated more associations (4.2% for female and 4.1% for male) than Kawaii (0.7% for female and 0.0% for male).

3.3 First Associated Word

Assuming that the word that has the strongest association with the stimulus word or the shortest path to the stimulus word in the memory network might be recalled first (or faster), analyzing the first associated word for each informant will be meaningful. Based on this idea, all 60 first associated words for Cute and Kawaii were picked up and shown in Tables 5, 6 and 7. Shaded cells show 0%, underlined cells show more than or equal to 10% and bold letter cells show more than or equal to 20% of total association.

Table 5. Percentage of first associations for each category.

Table 6. First associated words for Cute

Table 7. First associated words for Kawaii

The most frequent association for Cute was Character (14), and Animal (11), then Adjective (9) and Human (9). On the other hand, the most frequent association for Kawaii was Animal (26), then Human (12).

Among Characters, Hello Kitty was the most popular (2 for female and 5 for male).

In Animal category, Cute was associated with cats (including kitten) (5) and dogs (2), and Kawaii was associated with cats (including kitten) (10) and dogs (7).

4 Free Description on Both Concepts

Informants in the second survey (N = 35) were requested to write their own definition of Cute and Kawaii or any free comments on both concepts. The result is shown in Table 8. A common tendency among female informants and male informants was that Cute is a mixture of Kawaii and cool, and is something of foreign origin, while Kawaii is a wider concept than Cute and includes it within. Kawaii is mainly used for animals and human beings. Furthermore, female has a steady and clear image to Cute and a soft and light image to Kawaii. In general, male tend to describe the difference by concrete things and situations while female tend to describe by adjectives and Onomatope.

Table 8. Free descriptions (2^nd survey)

5 Discussion

Results found from this survey could be interpreted that Cute as a “Japanese word” is not a simple translation of Kawaii, and it is not necessarily be “lively” as dictionaries have shown. Kawaii is a Japanese word that has an everyday life as a background context, while Cute is a quasi-Japanese word that has some distance from the everyday life. This tendency can also be found in definitions that the informants gave. In other words, the meaning or the semantics of the word may sometimes be influenced by the context of use or the pragmatics.

6 Conclusion

Free association method was used to clarify the difference of meaning between Cute and Kawaii. Total of 60 informants were requested to write down the recalled words for Cute and Kawaii at the same time during 20 min. The analysis of data showed a difference between the two words and between the female and male. Further analysis of the first associated words showed that Cute means somewhat longing feeling that is not the same with Kawaii, nor the same with the dictionary definitions. On the other hand, the result for Kawaii suggested the everyday situation where familiar things and objects are regarded to be Kawaii. This result suggested that the meaning of the word (semantics) is influenced by the context of use or the cultural context (pragmatics).