The Japanese word for feeling is “kawaii (cuteness),” which is now used worldwide but is difficult to explain because it is a “feeling.” This study used a bottom-up and mix-media qualitative method designed for this research to construct visual models for feelings that arise in everyday life: the “Diverse Joint Method (DJM) for Visual Narratives.” Three researchers worked in parallel to construct three different diagrams from the same 92 kawaiirelated visual images. Based on the common features among the three diagrams, such as “face and expression,” “round and soft,” “action and gesture,” and “space and atmosphere,” we constructed a simulation model, “a visual image of super-kawaii.” By focusing on diverse images based on different perspectives on “kawaii,” we identified new features of this phenomenon, such as “gathering similar ones” and “wrapped ones.”
