Katakana Analysis Revised

カワイイ - Kawaii (cute) This popular term was first found The origins of this word comes form the kanji 可 (ka) for acceptable and 愛 (ai) for love.
The first appearance of this was in Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. This word is often written in katakana in order to draw attention to the word and distinguishes it from the normal text. Also, this word was a created word formed by the combination of two original kanji, and was modified from its original root word by transforming it into katakana.

バイキング - Baikingu (All you can eat buffet). This loan word was actually a mistake, as the original creators of the all you can buffet were intending to model it after a swedish smorgasbord, but the word was too long to use. The movie theater next to the Imperial Hotel was showing "The Vikings", and the owners of the restaurant decided to adopt this loanword because of a feast scene in the movie, and used it as the name of the restaurant. The name stuck, and it became famous across all of Japan.

Katakana is primarily used in order to differentiate certain words from the rest of the normal text of kanji and hiragana. In the case of kawaii, katakana can be used for made-up words that are meant to be juxtapositions of older kanji used in a much more modern fashion, and to make it a distinction and possible cultural identity that kawaii has become now. At times, katakana is used for words originally written in kanji just for the purpose of colloquializing the word, because some people, especially the younger generations in Japan, think using Kanji for certain words make it more distant. As such, some modern ways of writing vocabulary change certain kanji to katakana just for ease and understandability from the generation. Baikingu was adopted for the reason of it's associativity with the western world, and with it's status as a loanword, it has the foreign element that is very attractive to a lot of Japanese consumers. Each textbook is different in explaining katakana because of the truly nuanced nature of it's usage. There are even native speakers who are sometimes confused by katakana's usage in some situations. However, textbooks try to explain away the main usages of katakana - to distinguish from the normal text, whether in the form of onomatopoeia, loanwords, or made up words - in as simple terms as possible to make it easier for learners to get a general sense of katakana's usage.