Kawaii descends from classical kaohayushi, face-flushed, the embarrassment of being unable to meet someone's eyes, and it once meant pitiable, the same word that survives as kawaiso. The blush of pity became the blush of adoration; cute and pitiful are one word that split.
The story of the seventies: Japanese schoolgirls began writing in rounded, childish 'kitten script,' marui-ji, decorated with tiny hearts and faces. Schools banned it as illiterate decoration. The girls kept writing, packaging designers noticed, fonts followed, and the rebellion ended up ruling the world from a sticker aisle. Cute as an insurgency started by teenagers with pens.
The postwar-critique claim: kawaii was cultivated, by design or by drift, to render a former military empire harmless, a nation rebranded as a plush toy. Exhibit A: the mascot that conquered the planet, Hello Kitty, was drawn with no mouth. On this reading, cuteness is not innocence but disarmament.
If cute began as the face you cannot look at, what is the word hiding in plain sight on every package?