Some of you may curse the day that you – or perhaps more likely, your partner – heard of Marie Kondo. Ever since her ...

I clearly recall my first trip to Japan. I arrived at Narita Airport after a 15 hour flight, having slept very little because I was so excited to actually get there. It was still rolling through my ...

“I don’t think it’s to appear to be healthy, it’s purely a style statement,” Tokyo-based French fashion designer Julien David said of activewear’s rise in the country. “The biggest shift in Kawaii is ...

Kawaii. You hear it in anime, you hear it on TV shows, and you hear it on the streets of Japan, where the word is spoken by young and old alike. With people around the world growing up on Japanese ...

Pink globalisation, the spread of cute goods from Japan to other parts of the industrial world, has been a stronghold of consumption in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly with Hello ...

"Gross" characters are proliferating in a country known for kawaii, and now even local governments' mascots are trying to out-weird one another. Long considered the global capital of cute, Japan is ...

On social media feeds all over the world, puppies experience hiccups for the first time, hamsters eat tiny tacos and cats befriend monkeys. And they do it a lot. Kawaii is inescapable in Japan, where ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. In the late 1970s, British inventor James Dyson painstakingly refined his design for a new, improved vacuum cleaner.

It is hard to believe that we are approaching a decade since Kyary Pamyu Pamyu reignited international interest in Japanese kawaii with her 2011 hit song “Ponponpon.” Perhaps “reignited” is an ...