“They love it very much,” says Yuko Kawanishi, a sociologist at Tokyo Gakugei University. “There’s a basic fondness among Japanese people for anything cute. Hello Kitty is just one example of that.” This past month, word out of Japan is that Hello Kitty will be marketed to young men, too. The line of bags, watches, and shirts will soon be available in the US.

The Land of the Rising Sun has long been a source of cute imports for the US, as we’ve adopted endless cute Japanese trends, known there as kawaii. Kawaii doesn’t have a real English translation, although it’s been appropriated to mean “cute.” But its meaning is so much more layered than that — kawaii is cool, amazing, trendy, extraordinary, fabulous, must-have, and on and on and on. It’s a feeling, a way of life, an aesthetic sensibility, and a high compliment rolled in one. Besides an affinity for character goods like Hello Kitty, My Melody, Little Twin Stars, and Pochacco, Americans have taken Pokemon, Sailor Moon, and other manga, a love of anime, and toys like Tamagachi and Lolita-Goth cos-play fashion, and made them our own. One need only observe Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku girls or Takashi Murakami’s limited-edition Superflat Louis Vitton bags to note how far kawaii has seeped into our own aesthetic.

The chronicles of twee-ification
What happens when you distill Chuck Klosterman, FOUND magazine, and Miranda July down to their artistic essences? At their core, they’re pretty much the same thing: offbeat, but just so; eccentric, but not too; awkward, but self-aware; quirky, but formulaic in their quirkiness. Each embodies a sensibility that slowly, with great purpose, has been morphing from cult-status to mass-appreciation. It’s now hitting upon an explosive convergence in the mainstream.

A coy combination of quirk (various cultural productions considered cute and fun despite their damaged, lame quality, à la not only the movie Napoleon Dynamite, but also the “Vote for Pedro” T-shirt phenomenon it spawned), kitsch (ironically appreciated found art, such as pink lawn flamingos and velvet Elvis paintings), cheese (Wayne’s World and Chicken Soup for the Soul), camp (Susan Sontag described it as the cultural elite’s brilliant excuse to enjoy and love the low-brow), and cuteness — call this mixture “quatsch,” if you will — has grown into the dominant affectation in contemporary youth culture. Who appreciates this kind of thing? It used to be hipsters, back when hipsterdom was still nervously measured as a sub-culture. These days, though, it seems everyone is a quatsch aficionado — it just depends on how you prefer to get your fix.

“Quirk has been defanged and embraced by the mainstream,” says Joshua Glenn, who writes “Brainiac,” a blog and weekly column for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section. Glenn cites Wes Anderson’s post–Bottle Rocket films, John Waters’s post-Polyester movies, and the acting styles of people like Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Jason Bateman, as examples of Mainstream Quirk. (A couple of years ago, the movement’s indie poster boy was the character of Seth Cohen, everyone’s favorite Death Cab for Cutie–listening, comic-book reading navel-gazer from the canceled Fox drama The O.C., although that honor seems to have been transferred onto Michael Cera of Arrested Development, Superbad, and Juno fame.) “It’s all been rendered palatable, ‘gettable,’ ” says Glenn.

A sophisticate’s taste for quatsch can be satiated in the critical ideology of McSweeney’s, David Eggers’s sprawling literary enterprise that publishes The Believer, literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,  McSweeney’s Internet Tendency , and a rotating catalogue of fiction titles. For all the good Eggers’s company and his non-profit work has done, there’s something tenaciously adorable about McSweeney’s that his audience finds simply delightful. Others don’t seem to find much pleasure in the whimsical, “Oh, the places you’ll go!” project-packaging; the universal “aggressive air of innocence,” as New York Times critic Judith Shulevitz called it, of their overall tone; or in what n+1 condemned as the “wide-eyed, juvenile, faux-naïf” tone of their editorial text. Why not just get it over with and call it “McTweeney’s?” McTweeney’s, then, is the next generation of quatschy publishing, and it’s no surprise that it’s often aligned itself with like-minded indie darlings — bands such as the Mates of State, comedians such as Flight of the Conchords’ Eugene Mirman, and no shortage of geek-chic fans.

At the other end of the spectrum is quatsch at its most artful and ingratiating. The chief example of this is Juno, a film recently nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Its competitors are four other movies, each sadder, more violent, and gloomier than the last. Juno, a film that some believe fits perfectly into the romantic-comedy genre while simultaneously breaking that mold, has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of its phony-humble beginnings as an off-center, idiosyncratic coming-of-age tale ever since it premiered in theatres this past December. Much like 2006’s supposed underdog arts sensation, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno was poised to utilize its apparent edginess as a launching pad for mainstream crossover victory. This unavoidable pattern combined with the calculated wave of pre-buzz and word-of-mouth endorsements until, suddenly, stripper-cum-blogger turned best-selling author and Juno screenplay writer Diablo Cody found herself pink-cheeked on Oprah’s couch alongside tour-de-force riot-grrrl (yet slated for an upcoming issue of Teen Vogue) actress Ellen Page.