On the 50th anniversary of Hello Kitty (long article)

Jul 13

Hello Kitty turns 50. What will the next cat's meow be?

The global rise of Hello Kitty, who turns 50 this year, tracks that of Japanese culture. What, then, does the next half-century of kawaii have in store? This is an op-ed I wrote for The Japan Times.

Hello Kitty is turning 50 this year, on Nov. 1, to be precise.

Looking back at her long career — which saw the character become one of the world’s cutest icons — also makes me wonder about the future of cute culture, aesthetics and products as new technologies like artificial intelligence expand the realms of possibility. And of commerce.[1]

One thing can be said for certain. As she approaches her golden jubilee, Hello Kitty is very wealthy indeed.

Though it is hard to pin an exact figure down, some estimates have Hello Kitty’s earnings at over $80 billion over the course of her career — making her one of the world’s highest-grossing media franchises, alongside the likes of Pokemon, Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh[2] .[1]

Not only is she rich, Hello Kitty is famous, too. She was named Japan’s official tourism ambassador to China and Hong Kong in 2008 and rang the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 10, 2010, to mark her parent company Sanrio’s anniversary.[2]

That is quite a career for someone with a face made up of three circles, six lines, a red hair bow and a lot of blank space. But this is partly explained by the fact that Hello Kitty’s journey from girlish trinket to cultural ambassador has followed the rise of Japan’s soft power from niche to global powerhouse.

Hello Kitty, born in 1974, made her debut in Japan the following year, on a plastic coin purse. Popular with Japanese schoolgirls, Sanrio promptly expanded her domestic product line,[3] but the Tokyo-based company had bigger plans.

Since her inception, Hello Kitty was meant to go overseas to challenge one the world’s most recognizable fictional characters and cute icons, Mickey Mouse[4] — an ambition that seemed outrageous at a time when American popular culture dominated the world.

Hello Kitty made her first appearance in the United States in 1976, in Europe in 1978 and Asia (outside of Japan) in 1990.[5] Yet her international fame rose slowly at first.

While Mickey was tied to Disneyland and an idealized vision of small-town America, when Hello Kitty was introduced to the world, Japan did not have the cultural cachet that it has today. In fact, Japanese products were generally seen as cheap and poorly made.[6]

That is why Hello Kitty’s backstory is that she is from London and called Kitty White. Nothing about it is Japanese, and, at first, few people even realized she was created in Japan.

Hello Kitty did not represent a specific identity or lifestyle to most of the people who liked her, with one important exception. The Asian American girls who were her early fans coveted her precisely because she was a Japanese product.

The soon-to-be cultural icon was, for them, an intimate symbol of pride in their Asian identity, a feeling that many girls found difficult to express openly.[7]

Erica Kanesaka, a scholar of Asian American literature and culture, explains how she felt a special connection to the Hello Kitty trinkets she received from her mother as a girl. “Because kawaii was not yet mainstream in the US, these small treasures felt rare and private, just for me and other Japanese and Asian American girls,” Kanesaka wrote in a column last year. [8]

We now take for granted that kawaii culture is a major part of Japan’s soft power, but since this boom in popularity began among children, it took a long time for it to permeate the general public.

Those born after Hello Kitty’s mid-1970s debut gradually came to realize that many of the things they liked as kids were from Japan: from TV shows like “Power Rangers” and “Sailor Moon,” to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, to Super Mario, Walkmans and Game Boys.

As a result, many cultivated their interest in Japan as adults, and by the 2000s, Japanese culture had become cool,[9] with people desiring things because they were from Japan, not in spite of it.

By the turn of the millennium, many Hello Kitty fans had grown up, with women aged 18 to 40 representing the core of this group.[10] Around this time, Sanrio rapidly increased its licensing arrangements and a huge range of Hello Kitty-themed products aimed at adults were launched, from vacuum cleaners to snowboards.[11] Sanrio even licensed a Hello Kitty vibrator.[12]

Though Hello Kitty is now widely recognized as a Japanese character, she does not represent Japan in the same way that Mickey Mouse stands for the U.S.

I think this points to the secret of her success, namely her simple, enigmatic design. Japanese illustrations in the style of hikime-kagibana[13] — literally, “dashes for eyes, hooks for noses” — depict faces with simple lines and go back a thousand years, to the Heian era.

A blank expression allows the viewer to project their own desires and longings. Lacking well-defined features, including a mouth, Hello Kitty becomes whatever you want her to be.[13]

Or does she? Ten years ago, for Hello Kitty’s 40th anniversary, Sanrio sponsored an exhibition dedicated to her in Los Angeles. When the curator described her as a cat, the company was quick to correct them, saying that she is actually a little girl.

This news shocked many fans, and the statement “Hello Kitty is not a cat” went viral. According to Sanrio, she never walks on all fours and sits like a person. Plus, she has a pet cat of her own, Charmmy Kitty, who does walk and sit like a feline.[14]

Whether she is a cat or a girl, Hello Kitty has become more than just another character.

One clue to her influence was a Sanrio-sponsored exhibition that ran from late January to mid-April at Somerset House in London to mark the character’s 50th anniversary. Titled simply “CUTE,” the show had ambitions beyond displaying Hello Kitty in her many iterations.

It explored the long history of cuteness in Western and Japanese art and popular culture, and featured a range of contemporary artists who express this aesthetic in their work. (That being said, I can confirm that the exhibition did feature a Hello Kitty-themed disco and a shrine.)

As I noted in a recent Japan Times commentary, cute culture dominates the world and has increasingly become a global obsession.[15]

What, then, is the future of cuteness? Will Hello Kitty’s simple appeal continue to engage us? Or will new technologies like generative AI and robotics find new ways to supercharge cuteness, pushing our buttons, instead of the other way round?

Japan already leads the way in developing robots that affect our emotions, with examples including Aibo, Sony’s robot dog, and GrooveX’s Lovot, a fuzzy animal-like droid that only wants love.

These machines are already equipped with cloud connectivity and personalities that can develop over time. But there are limits to these technologies and many owners report becoming bored with robots that demand constant attention, no matter how cute.

However, imagine if robots like Aibo or Lovot were able to absorb every cute video ever uploaded to YouTube and TikTok. Generative AI offers that possibility.

Trained on millions of genuinely cute moments and humans’ responses to them, these robots would never run out of charming ways to appeal to us. The robot apocalypse that many fear may arrive with a whimper, not a bang.

However, one thing about this scenario gives me pause. Back in 1974, Hello Kitty’s original designer, Yuko Shimizu, made several drawings of cute cats. When her assistant saw them, she pointed to one and cried “kawaii!” This design became the iconic character, and even Shimizu could not figure out what made that particular version cuter than all the others.[16]

If they are going to tear down our defenses to dominate us through cuteness, our future robot overlords will first have to crack a deeply human code. One that an adorable cat-like girl has mastered over the past half-century.

[1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-25-highest-grossing-media-franchises-of-all-time/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/like-swallowing-a-pack-of-parma-violets-cute-at-somerset-house-reviewed/

[2] Christine Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific, Duke University Press Books (April 29, 2013): 258.

[3] Matt Alt, Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, Crown (June 23, 2020): 122.

[4] Yano 16.

[5] Yano 9.

[6] Yano 10

[7] Yano 138.

[8] https://catapult.co/stories/the-mixed-race-fantasy-behind-kawaii-aesthetics-japanese-post-racial-cute-licca-chan-erica-kanesaka

[9] Yano 15, 16

[10] Yano 10.

[11] Yano 10