Goodbye Kitty

Will the tyranny of Japan’s cutest export ever end?

Sanrio brought Hello Kitty to the West in 1976, yet despite endless innovations in other forms of popular culture—Al Gore’s Internet, the radicalization of fondue, the subtle evolution of wide-legged pants—Hello Kitty hasn’t changed. Her oval, wide-set candy eyes sit miles away from her tiny yellow nose. Her moony white head, which teeters on her body, has a balloon-y bow. Her delightful outfits change according to the situation—gardening, instant-soup time. She’s the very essence of adorable.

Enthusiasts buy everything Hello Kitty: air purifiers, banana covers, vitamins, tarot cards, bicycles. Kimora Lee Simmons’ new Glam Kitty jewelry line has a watch for almost $2,000, and a necklace for $25,000. Urban Outfitters currently offers three Hello Kitty T-shirts, as well as limited-edition Hello Kitty statues.

Hello Kitty is a new interface for the video game World of Warcraft, and NEC recently released a black Hello Kitty Swarovski-studded computer with a heart-shaped mouse, so you can palm Kitty’s face while you search online for the latest Kitty product.

She’s everywhere. Just like last year. And the year before. Hello Kitty is the “it” girl of cute every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year.

But why? Is there such a paucity of imagination that we can’t conceive of anything cuter?

Last year The New York Times published a lengthy disquisition on the nature of cuteness. It’s about roundness and softness. It’s about having a too-big head and blinky, forward-facing eyes. It’s about looking vulnerable. Hello Kitty fits the bill. The Times’ Natalie Angier wrote: “New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex.” Hence the Hello Kitty vibrator.

To puzzle out the mystery of Hello Kitty’s rule, we wrote to the guy who runs HelloKittyHell.com, a website devoted to chronicling innovations in Kitty land—not because he wants to (so goes the premise) but because his wife is obsessed. We thought he might tell us why Kitty is so dominant since he lives in Japan. “My guess is it’s because she contains many of the characteristics of a baby,” he wrote in an email. But so do babies, and they don’t rule the world.
Kitty porn: Chief Auto Parts gets winterized.

There’s no question the Japanese are geniuses when it comes to cute—or kawaii. It’s a pervasive element in Japanese popular culture. As Wired magazine put it a couple years ago, “The Japanese are born into cute, and raised with cute.” Hello Kitty does the breastfeeding.

But why does she translate globally? Some say it’s because she doesn’t have a mouth—that if you draw one on her, you can make her look angry, sad, grumpy or mean. Sanrio is aware of this dangerous speculation.

“Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth?” is a FAQ on the company’s website.

The answer: “Hello Kitty speaks from her heart. She’s Sanrio’s ambassador to the world and isn’t bound to any particular language.”

Except, perhaps, the language of cute. That’s one language she speaks exquisitely—except for one word: “Goodbye.”

Source: Philadelphia Weekly

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Her delightful outfits change according to the situation—gardening, instant-soup time. She’s the very essence of adorable.

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Her delightful outfits change according to the situation—gardening, instant-soup time. She’s the very essence of adorable.