I write often about Japan’s love for kawaii (cute) culture, which has come to define the country as much as anime, manga and high-tech electronics. Cute imagery pops up in the most unlikely places in Japan, like in the instruction manual for a DVD player, showing a little manga version of the device sweating to let you know to avoid storing it in a hot, humid place. One of the cutest things to the Japanese are kigurumi, essentially a full-body costume that includes a head covering, like the cute bear- and panda-ear parkas and hoodies from Japan we’ve been carrying. In the Super Mario Bros. games from Nintendo, one of the cutest outfits Mario wears is the Tanooki costume, a kigurumi suit that turns him into a cute furry tanuki, which a Japanese animal often called a “raccoon dog” in English. I was amused to see that PETA had come out against the “barbaric” practice of killing poor tanuki for their pelts, using Tanooki Mario to garner media attention, though they backtracked and tried to pretend it was all a joke when fans called them out on it. For the record, I’ve never encountered any mention of the animals being killed for their furs, and in fact tanuki are regarded as magical creatures in the same way foxes are, and are largely left alone.(In addition to these cute kigurumi suits, there are the anime masks that scary middle-aged men wear to become Sailor Moon or the Pretty Cure girls, but we won’t contemplate those.)
Those kigurumi full-body suits are very cute.
