moe

Provenance — where it came from

Moeru written 萌える is an old, quiet word: buds appear, grass comes up, a tree puts out leaves. It shares its sound exactly with another moeru, 燃える, to burn. Japanese is typed by sound and then converted, so when you type moeru both characters appear in the same list of candidates, one line apart.

In the early 1990s, on dial-up bulletin boards, people started writing 萌え for a particular reaction to a fictional character: warm, sudden, hard to defend, and quite strong. How it began is disputed and has stayed disputed. One account says it was simply the wrong candidate chosen for 燃え, “burning,” and the mistake was funnier than the original. Others point to two characters from 1993 who went by the name Moe and came up often in those conversations: the heroine of Kyōryū Wakusei, an animated serial on NHK, and the lead of Taiyō ni Smash!, a manga for girls. Someone who worked on the NHK series has said the word was already in use before it aired. No version has been settled. What is agreed is where it happened: in typed text, among strangers, before the web.

What the word named was harder to say in any existing vocabulary. Moe was usually described as neither love nor desire. It was the response to a specific designed detail — a gesture, a way of ending sentences, glasses, a small clumsiness — and to the fact that someone had drawn that detail on purpose. Once the feeling had a name, the details could be listed too: characters were moe-kyara, and the features themselves were cataloged as moe-yōso, moe elements. Whether the feeling was a form of attraction to a person, or something that only worked because the person did not exist, was argued from the start and never resolved. The sharpest version of that argument concerns how young the drawn characters are, and how they are drawn.

By the mid-2000s the word was everywhere. Densha Otoko — a story posted to a message board, then printed as a book and filmed for cinema and television — put the vocabulary in front of a general audience; moe took a place on the year’s buzzword list; Akihabara became the address the newspapers used for it. Businesses noticed. Later, farm towns put drawn characters on their rice bags, and the rice sold.

Then it thinned out — the word, not the practice. In the 2010s and 2020s the same ground was taken by 推し (oshi, № 013) and by tōtoi, “precious.” The change is grammatical as much as anything. Moe names what happens inside you. Oshi names what you do about it.

Field notes — how it’s used