The Cute Side Of Yuru - Kyara

The cute side of Yuru - Kyara.

Yuru-kyara roughly translated into English as ‘loose, easy, lazy, careless, half-hearted, lenient.’ These characters are mostly created to appeal to children as well as adults. Most Yuru-kyara are created by companies and organizations as part of their brand promotion so that people would easily associate their products when they see these mascots.

Most mascots are created to be cute, fluffy and adorable. The majority of mascots are made from folklores, just the name of the place they were from or what kind of animals they were created of. The behavior surrounding these yuru-kyara as official or unofficial mascots allows us to reexamine border crossing tendencies between human and non-human aesthetics and identities. These characters often being sexless, vaguely reminding the audience of animals or humans, yet shows enough personality that makes it impossible to see them as merely animal-like figures. Ohkura (2011) proposed that the existence of ‘kawaii characters’ with their highly sensitive techniques contributed to the large export surpluses of Japanese games, cartoons, and animations (Ohkura referred to the term ‘digital content’).