Hail to the Cat

Hello Kitty—the Empress of Cute

photography by Koichiro Doi & Junai Nakagawa

In recent years Hello Kitty has burgeoned into one of Japan's unique cultural exports. A mouthless cat in the third grade—we know little more about her—this feline has relied solely on her charms to build herself into the global phenomenon she is today. Kateigaho International tries its best to get close to this ultimate pop diva.

Hello Kitty pin A cultural delicacy: Metal pin presents Kitty dressed for kabuki theater.

Sanrio's Fabulous Feline Franchise

text by Brian Bremner

A global fashion icon and postmodern mega-brand, Hello Kitty is one of the most powerful and peculiar stories in modern-day marketing. After all, we are talking about a minimalist graphic rendering of a cat, albeit one with a moon-shaped head and no mouth. And yet, at the symbolic level at least, Hello Kitty fascinates both marketing mavens and cultural anthropologists for the streams of meaning that she conveys to consumers across the globe. Some adore her. Others loathe her. But grant this much to Hello Kitty: She is one deep cat.

Understanding her visual power requires going beyond the usual financial metrics of commerce. To be sure, Hello Kitty has been very kind to her corporate overlords at Sanrio, the Tokyo-based entertainment concern that launched her as a character product back in 1974. She now represents a half-billion-dollar-a-year franchise for the company and her likeness appears on more than 20,000 products, everything from children's trinkets to luxury watches. Three decades since her launch, her popularity has radiated outward from Japan to markets worldwide.

Hello Kitty Stars and Stripes Many limited-edition products are sold only in a single country or region. Pictured here is a stars-and-stripes Kitty, available only in New York.

Other iconic characters such as Mickey Mouse and Snoopy have enjoyed worldwide stardom too, but there is something uniquely Japanese that sets Hello Kitty apart. First of all, she is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Sanrio designers have purposely limited her story to the barest of details. We know that she was born in London, weighs the same as three apples, and likes to make friends; she has a mother, father, and sister (Mimi), and the surname of White. Still she lacks an extensive body of film work or a comic strip that would define her in any meaningful way.

And yet a blaze of desire surrounds this image, which like a mirror reflects what is in the eye of the beholder. To some Japanese girls back in the 1970s, the cat reflected what they imagined to be the idealized English childhood of cookies and milk. During her late-1990s boom in Asia, she represented a wacky artifact of Japan's kawaii (cute) pop culture. Today she is both a bit of a nostalgia fix for mothers of a certain age worldwide and an emblem of camp chic for pop divas such as Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera, both of whom have publicly confessed to being Kitty freaks.

Think a little more deeply about Hello Kitty and this tabby reflects some interesting cultural truths about Japan. She is the latest incarnation of the country's long and fabled love affair with graphic arts—everything from scrolls to woodblock prints, manga, and anime. Japan has been called a "culture of the visual," one where images often convey more meaning than verbal communication. The theory is rooted in the fact that pictographs, or Chinese kanji characters, are the building blocks of the Japanese language. Or consider this: As any visitor to Tokyo or Osaka quickly realizes, the visual and commercial landscape of today's Japan is awash with cute and precious animated characters that hawk all manner of products. You just don't find this love of graphic design in other world capitals, or at least not on this scale.

Hello Kitty purse
© Sanrio The first piece of Hello Kitty merchandise ever to be produced was a small plastic wallet, released in 1975.

Of course Hello Kitty does have her share of detractors. To some Western and Japanese critics, the cat's love of all that is sweet and precious fosters an unhealthy sort of infantilism in young girls. The feigned cute poses, affected squeaky voices, and other perhaps annoying mannerisms one can find with careful observation of teenage girls on the streets of Shibuya have alarmed some domestic critics. On the West Coast of the United States, performance artists have even written scathing satirical pieces about Hello Kitty that decry the supposed warped values about female gender roles the cat represents. Others rail against the character for representing nothing more than crass and soulless consumerism.

That debate aside, Hello Kitty reflects yet another interesting facet of Japanese culture: its growing clout in the global marketplace for ideas, fads, and buzz. Back in the 1980s, Japan was feared in the West for its manufacturing excellence and unique brand of state-directed capitalism. The signifying image wasn't Hello Kitty but rather an economically predatory Godzilla. Today, Japan's most interesting exports are not compact disc players but cultural creations. And it's not just cute characters like Kitty. Creative artists such as animator Hayao Miyazaki, fashion designer Issey Miyake, and classical music conductor Seiji Ozawa enjoy global followings. Western journalists are now publishing pieces about Japan's "Gross National Cool."

There is simply no denying that during the last decade or so various forms of Japanese mass culture—cuisine, film, fashion, and architecture among others—have gained traction abroad. While Japan's economic clout has certainly ebbed, that is not true of its cultural influence. This is all the more remarkable at a time when globalization has many other societies worried about a U.S.-centric worldwide pop culture overwhelming their own. So let us tip our hats to Hello Kitty, a cat with no mouth that, nonetheless, manages to speak volumes to consumers near and far.

Brian Bremner is the Tokyo-based Asia Economics Editor for BusinessWeek magazine and has written about Japan for more than a decade. He is co-author of the recently published book Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon.

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