stand two young women in various shades of pink from head to toe: shocking pink hair adorned with multiple pink barrettes, fuzzy pink kitten earmuffs, pink baby doll dresses, mismatched pink knee-high socks, and pink laced shoes. Around one woman's neck hangs that icon of cute: Sanrio Company's flagship character since 1974, Hello Kitty. Among the barrettes in the other woman's hair is, again, Kitty. Standing at the entrance to Harajuku?the commercial mecca of street youth culture in Japan?they pose, leaning into each other, hands clenched, kitten-paw-style, at their cheeks. In the insouciant style of these Tokyo women, the look is not passively sweet, but assertively in-your-face kawaii (cute). This is with a wink, gesturing to the cameras that await them. The women pose for multiple gazes, knowing that what they donned that morning might be seen thousands of miles away, captured by foreign and photogra phers and posted on Web sites or eventually published in magazines and glossy coffee table books. The interaction between viewer and viewed defines and reifies the spectacle of kawaii, or what I call Japanese cute. Nestled within the interaction, tucked among the frills of this Tokyo cute overload rests that mouthless icon of girl culture, Hello Kitty. Another gaze upon and, specifically, Hello Kitty comes from multiple news wire sources in August 2007. The headline declares, To Punish Thai Police, a Hello Kitty Armband. Reported widely from the Associated Press to CNN International to Al Jazeera, the story revolves around a new strat egy devised by Bangkok police to discipline not the general public, but their own male patrol force. Any delinquent officer would be shamed into compliance by being forced to wear a bright pink Hello Kitty armband. Hello Kitty?that ulti mate symbol of femininity in Asia and elsewhere?presumably provided a sufficient threat to the police officers' masculinity. As of the news item's