Not many people have seen a Siberian flying squirrel. This is partly because they live deep in forests and emerge only after dark, and partly because there are not many of them left.
The rare little fluffballs are on the IUCN Red List and have completely disappeared from many of the Baltic countries in which they used to live, mostly because of deforestation.
You’d think such an adorable creature would not be in as much danger as, say, the Komodo dragon, because everyone who sees the squirrel gives a spontaneous AAH (admit it, you went AAH when you saw this picture).
Being cute does not always translate into practical protection, however, although the small colony of Siberian flying squirrels (Pteromys volans) in the north of Japan enjoys high status on the list of national treasures, as do their cousins the Japanese flying squirrels (P. momonga), a handful of whom can be found in the south.
This should come as no surprise when you look at Pokemon, Hello Kitty, Manga, Anime and a million other examples of kawaii.
There is no satisfactorily accurate English alternative for kawaii (not to be confused with the name of a shop that sells healthy green juices). Cute just doesn’t cut it — although cute is in itself a not uninteresting word.
If you really want to insult someone, tell them their Nobel Prize acceptance speech was ‘cute’.
Cute comes from “acute”, which originally was used only in the context of short sharp illnesses (as opposed to those pesky chronic diseases). After a century or two, acute also came to mean sharp or penetrating or fearsomely intelligent. And this was exactly what “cute” — in the 1700s just a lazy way of pronouncing “acute” — meant at first: someone or something smart or clever.
How cute branched off from clever acute and started to mean first pretty and then puppy-like (and sometimes both) is flummoxing. There was also a time when cute was slang for annoying, which might please anyone underwhelmed by Hello Kitty paraphernalia.
Come to think of it, cute is still somewhat ambiguous. If you really want to insult someone, tell them their Nobel Prize acceptance speech was “cute”. They won’t thank you for it, but if you call their child or hedgehog cute they will be delighted.
Getting back to kawaii, cuteness might be the common English translation, but kawaii is much more than cute. It is an economic system, a political ideology and a cultural mindset, all rolled up in an adorable fluffy package of childlike desirability.
Writing on the Explore Japan website (taiken.co) in 2019, Louise Dupuy expands on the multifaceted nature of kawaii: “The modern day word is derived from the Taisho Era (1912-1926) ‘kawayushi’, meaning embarrassed, pathetic, shy, vulnerable, lovable and small. Kawaii refers to a feeling of love, care, and protectiveness … it can mean the following: Childish, innocent, round, rebellious, lovable, pathetic, western, and acknowledged. It also denotes a person who bears no undesirable traits.”
A person who bears no undesirable traits is even rarer than a Siberian flying squirrel, if you ask me, but do send pictures if you ever spot one.
Kawaii can be very lucrative, not so much for Siberian flying squirrels, who don’t have bank accounts and are frequently rendered homeless, but for the manufacturers of all things pink and shiny and big-eyed and childlike, beloved by infantilised adults as well as children.
The impulse that makes us go AAH when we see a cute handbag or a Siberian flying squirrel is tied to an important evolutionary survival mechanism: even if we don’t like children, kittens, seahorses or Pokemon characters, the protective feelings aroused by these attractively vulnerable creatures means we are less likely to kill and eat them.
Kawaii may not have done much to help the Siberian flying squirrel survive, but it’s still a fun word to use.
DISCLAIMER: I wrote this column only so we’d have a reason to use a picture of a Siberian flying squirrel.
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