"It's so cute!"

“It’s so cute!” It is the usual expression when girls or children see something that is really adorable, such as a dog. Recently, girls and children started to become the target of the whole tourist industry, since they cover a huge portion of the usual tourist crowd. Therefore, cartoon-ization becomes a really important commercial strategy to attract the attention of the tourist crowd during their visit. A cute cartoon mascot is designed for everything, starting from the Olympic dolls, World Expo’s Haibao, and Xi-an Expo’s Chang-An Flower Doll. Cartoonized icons can be seen everywhere on the tourist route. Those icons were printed and manufactured onto different items, which range from a small eraser to a large bike.

Even architecture cannot escape this popular trend. In Kyoto, it was discovered that the famous Kyoto Tower is turned into this cartoonized mascot. The mascot was designed using the shape of the Kyoto Tower as its head and body, with alternation on proportion to make it looks “cuter”. Enormous glittering eyes and a weird funny looking “o” shaped mouth was added to give Kyoto Tower some cute facial expression. Young crowd of tourist were taking picture with the big mascot doll standing at the entrance to Kyoto Tower. It might be funny to a lot of people, but this method of objectifying a structure in a more abstract way successfully capture the popular trend and the immerging group of younger tourist crowd as a commercial strategy.