America really invented cute, when you think about it.

When Japan was rebuilding after the war, America built the world's greatest edifice to cute and led the Disneyfication of the world.  

Look at the phenomenon of Shirley Temple and the like.

The cult of cute is alive and well on Renderosity. Even the leather-clad warriors are "cute".

For a quick lesson on the history of the word from the American Heritage Dictionary:

"Word History: Cute is a good example of how a shortened form of a word can take on a life of its own, developing a sense that dissociates it from the longer word from which it was derived. Cute was originally a shortened form of acute in the sense "keenly perceptive or discerning, shrewd." In this sense cute is first recorded in a dictionary published in 1731. Probably cute came to be used as a term of approbation for things demonstrating acuteness, and so it went on to develop its own sense of "pretty, fetching," first recorded with reference to "gals" in 1838."