one • Kitty at Home: Kawaii Culture and the Kyarakutā Business

Chapter One

Kitty at Home

Kawaii Culture and the Kyarakutā Business

I define kawaii as things that could make me a fantastical world. For example, there are always great dreams that I want to get, but it is impossible to get the dream. Kawaii gives me some hope. I also think kawaii products or persons let me express my maternal instinct. It is limited to girls and women. It is part of our nature.

—M. Y., twenty-eight years old, personal communication, February 10, 2005

I personally think that kawaii concept has something to do with an expressionless face. I used to like Hello Kitty and Miffy [a Dick Bruna character] when I was still in junior high school. I especially liked Miffy. She had a no-expression face, but I still thought she was really cute. Stuff I really thought cute all had in common that they have no smile or other expression. Hello Kitty also has no smile or anything.

—S. N., thirty years old, personal communication, March 17, 2005

There is some notion of obedience or weakness in the concept of kawaii. We [Japanese] often use the word kawaii for babies and puppies that are smaller, weaker, and thus need to be protected. Kawaii has lots of components of femininity, such as obedience, dependency, and weakness.

—T. M., twenty-seven years old, personal communication, March 8, 2005

Basically, kawaii is associated with infancy that covers feelings of the need to protect the object. In other words, kawaii is a symbol of dependency. However, girls started to describe so many things as kawaii recently, so my definition of kawaii changed to include the meaning of “trendy.”

—K. A., in her thirties, personal communication, February 8, 2005

Hello Kitty in the 2000s is one of the most widely known commercial kyarakutā (character) in Japan, and kawaii is the most common descriptor of her. The Japanese women in their twenties and thirties quoted above whom I interviewed may have different definitions of kawaii, but all agreed that Hello Kitty falls squarely within the concept. She represents variously fantastical dreams, hopes, expressionless faces, maternal instincts of protection and nurturance, weakness, docility, dependency, childhood, and, more recently, trendiness.

Although Hello Kitty has had her ups and downs in popularity in Japan, she is definitely not a fad and seems destined to stay for the long haul. This is just as Sanrio would have it. According to Sanrio officials I spoke with in Tokyo, what the company wants is a product with high recognition, broad placement, and long-lasting staying power (Tohmatsu, personal communication, May 30, 2002). In this, Sanrio has succeeded superbly. If one seeks a national source and hub of pink globalization, then one must begin here. Over three decades after her “birth” by designers at Sanrio, she has become so recognizable in Japan that one need take but a few synecdochic parts—two ears and a bow, for example, or just the tilted bow itself—to conjure up the cute icon in her entirety. Increasingly, Sanrio itself pushes for this kind of visual shorthand, abstracting the cat, enlarging the bow, and making her referentiality ever more subtle. Reducing her elements to greater abstraction has given her even more visual power.

Hello Kitty can be found in department stores, gift shops, subway kiosks, toy shops, and souvenir stores throughout Japan. One can purchase high-ticket items such as Hello Kitty diamond-encrusted jewelry, customized cars and scooters, and computers, as well as low-priced erasers, cell phone straps, chopsticks, and facial tissue. No matter the size of one’s pocketbook, there is a Hello Kitty item to buy. And this availability has expanded and continued for well over three decades. Consumers see Hello Kitty as much an icon of the 1970s as of the 2000s, with a devoted multigenerational fan base in Japan.

In other countries, times, and contexts, such ubiquity might run the risk of oversaturation and critique. However, this is far less the case in Japan, where more is better—at least for marketers and a significant number of consumers. The appetite for consumerism and tolerance for sheer commercialism runs high as public symbols of prosperity and

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achievements of middle-class modernity, even considered American style (Yano 2004:132–33; Yoshimi 2000:221). Within this framework, to be modern is to identify with a class position that allows one to purchase with measured ease, if not abandon, especially given Japan’s extended economic recession since the 1990s. This backdrop to consumer culture helps explain the relative lack of critique of Hello Kitty, Pokémon, and other figures of popular culture in Japan—at least when juxtaposed with very vocal and public critics in Euro-America (see chapter 4). Consumption in Japan works as a public performance of status, achievement, knowledge, and identity, banking on the myth of middle-class homogeneity that increasingly faces dismantling in the wake of recessionary exigencies. The resulting “ambivalent consumer” finds herself caught between historic moralities of frugality, progressive cooperative movements, what is labeled “American-style” excessive buying, and the ludic pleasures of exuberant consumerism (Garon and Machlachlan 2006:14–15). Our background look at the development of Hello Kitty consumption in its country of origin must take these elements of the changing Japanese market and consumer culture into consideration.

This is not to say that Japan is unique or that Sanrio’s clever marketing is universally beloved there. Neither of these is true, and some critics in Japan, as elsewhere, decry Hello Kitty’s ubiquity. But it is to suggest that such sheer excess and pervasive commercialism have been normalized in Japan in the 2000s as everyday consumer culture.1 In large urban areas and even in small towns, no space is too small, no human arena too obscure to avoid the clutter of advertising and products. The jangling hyperactivity of marketers fuels this bustle of consumerism, even amid a less than robust economy in the 1990s and 2000s. Finding Hello Kitty everywhere is part of that bustle. In fact, Hello Kitty may be a sign of exactly the less-than-prosperous times as the perfectly affordable souvenir, as the purchase for oneself or another that reproduces the “small gift, big smile” company ethos as not only an economic necessity, but more importantly, a moral stance. In the 2000s, her purchase may signal that belt-tightening ways need not erode good cheer, social relations, or even intimacy. In short, Hello Kitty has become an expectation of the changing economic, political, and social landscape scattered throughout contemporary Japan.

But how did this come to be? What are the conditions by which a product once associated only with youth and females could be transformed into a viable part of the generalized marketplace? What is the

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changing context in Japan that could give rise to the phenomenon of Hello Kitty everywhere? What, in other words, are the elements of cute culture in Japan that have enabled the success of this product? In order to answer these questions, one must situate Hello Kitty first and foremost in the complex jumble of goods and practices of the 1970s and 1980s, a period of unprecedented growth, technological prowess, and cultural nationalism, otherwise known as the bubble period of Japan’s burgeoning economy. The bubble allowed middle-class practices to become more than the norm; they came to represent an assumption and hallmark of national achievement as “homogeneous Japan.” The unofficial public doctrine was that Japan had built a “classless” society by virtue of its widespread prosperity. Although this was far from the truth, the rise of Japanese cute culture, including Hello Kitty, should be seen within the discursive assumptions of a shared middle class and its unspoken aspirations.2

Our discussion follows multiple strands from this period, beginning with the figure of the shōjo (young unmarried female) as person, symbol, fetish, object, and, ultimately, consumer, from the 1970s on. The shōjo and her “girl culture” marked the rise of kawaii as a galvanizing touchstone of female, youth-oriented, affective, aestheticized, commodified Japan. These qualities circumscribe a genre of products known as fanshii guzzu (Japlish; literally, “fancy goods,” typically frilly commodities oriented to girls), of which Sanrio has been a chief purveyor. In fact, Sanrio’s complete makeover in the 1970s from a dry goods business dubbed “Yamanashi Silk” to fanshii guzzu specialist with a linguistically ambiguous name has been the key to its corporate success. As a company, Sanrio shifted its target consumer from an older group of women engaged in practical household activities, such as sewing, to a younger group—that of the shōjo—with discretionary income enabling the purchase of the frilly accoutrements to a not-yet-housebound lifestyle. The range of goods of Sanrio concomitantly shifted from the practical to the decorative (including the decorated practical), and from the sober to the cute, accompanying a new generation of consumers. Eventually, as the acceptability of cute spread to a wider age range, Sanrio’s market extended back again to the housewife, who could purchase cute items for her kitchen as well as her young child. Although not seamless, this spread tended to skip middle school and high school years during which Hello Kitty was considered too infantile for teenage cool. Part of the story of this chapter lies in how Hello Kitty became acceptable once

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more to a group that temporarily shunned it. This chapter details the process by which cute became cool in Japan.

The shift to fanshii guzzu may be related to another group of commodities that arose during this period, kyarakutā guzzu (Japlish; “character goods”). Whereas fanshii guzzu were meant to appeal strictly to females, kyarakutā guzzu could appeal to both male and female youth. The development of kyarakutā as commodities for sale, as well as their proliferation in the public visualscape, lends an anthropomorphized sense of kawaii-based empathy to contemporary Japan. In this chapter I analyze kyarakutā as part of a new mode that mixes emotion and identity within a commodity aesthetic of kawaii. The rise of Hello Kitty in the mid-1970s, then, must be contextualized within several interwoven strands of cute: shōjo, fanshii guzzu, kawaii, and kyarakutā. These form the shifting backdrop by which we may more fully grasp the pervasiveness of cute-cool culture—and Hello Kitty within it—in contemporary Japan.

Another strand important to understanding Hello Kitty in Japan is an older extant culture of gift exchange (including souvenir) and sociality. As Sanrio puts it, the company is a purveyor of gifting in Japan. Thus, assumptions of the central place of gifts in establishing and maintaining social ties fuel Sanrio’s marketing strategies. The sociocultural premium placed upon these ties makes Sanrio’s position as purveyor of gifts unassailable. Gifts form not only the rationale behind Sanrio’s sales, but also guide the company’s interactions with its customers. According to Sanrio, a successful transaction between customer and company is not purely a rational, economic practice; rather, it is part of an ongoing social relationship that accrues with each sale. This relationship generates future brand loyalty. The gift culture of Japan, then, seals the Sanrio deal—facilitating relationships between people, as well as between customers and the products they purchase.

As a case study in the ways in which these strands intertwine, I note some of Sanrio’s activities surrounding Hello Kitty’s thirty-fifth anniversary, celebrated from 2009 to 2010. These form a significant apex of kawaii goods and consumer-driven lifestyle that is Hello Kitty’s purview in Japan. The corporate celebration activities glorify Hello Kitty as both a domestic and international icon, representing the ultimate in what might be known in a global setting as Japanese Cute-Cool. Hello Kitty as Japanese Cute-Cool signifies youth-oriented, feminine Japan, which has gained global popularity in the 2000s. In short, pink globalization

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finds peak natal expression as corporate culture in these carefully designed and publicly executed paeans to Japan’s quintessentially CuteCool icon.

Shōjo, Fanshii Guzzu, and the Creation of Girl Culture in Japan

Our discussion of the development of cute culture centers around the shōjo as an actual consuming figure, as well as a complex symbolic space before the public eye. In parallel with Daniel Cook’s discussion of the historical structuring of childhood through the market idiom of the children’s clothing industry in the United States, so, too, might the development of the fanshii guzzu industry in Japan be analyzed as part of the structuring of the “girl” or girl culture in Japan, of which Hello Kitty is iconic (2004). Cook’s analysis demonstrates ways in which a capitalist society develops a demographic category of person in part through marketing and consumption practices. In glib terms, if the “hat makes the man,” then here the fanshii guzzu makes the “girl” or shōjo. But how does that making through marketing take place? The steps involved in developing shōjo consumers are threefold: (1) create a sense of the shōjo symbolically, (2) ensure that the shōjo is an active consumer, and (3) extend consumer citizenship—that is, a sense of national purchase as membership in the buying club of Japan—to her by offering goods that are attractive and affordable, such as Hello Kitty. This scenario, however, does not do justice to the role of the shōjo herself. The development of shōjo culture in the 1970s and 1980s includes the role of the shōjo in developing her own expressive means dialectically, from the home and streets to the corporate boardroom and back again. Here, then, besides existing as a commodity, Hello Kitty acts as a highly manipulable symbol by which shōjo may define and perform themselves. The historical structuring of the shōjo in contemporary Japan suggests both growing “girl power” and public concern (even moral panic) for policing her limits (Kinsella 2005:145). This shōjo web of ambiguity and ambivalence provides Hello Kitty with a broad range of meanings and uses.

Creating the shōjo has been a historical process. Here, instead of focusing on her Meiji era (1868–1912) beginnings (see Robertson 1998: 63–65), I focus on her postwar configuration within the context of rising economic and national-global power of the 1960s and 1970s. The

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iconicity of the shōjo developed through media such as books, magazines, plays, songs, film, television, manga, and anime. In many of these depictions, the shōjo is simply a girl-child,3 often with infantilized facial features (not unlike Hello Kitty herself, except perhaps for the size of the eyes): large, round eyes, outsized in proportion to an inconspicuous nose and small mouth.4 The shōjo as a girl-child functions as a nostalgic figure for adults who see in her a state of natural grace and immanent possibilities for the adulthood that lies just ahead. Quite simply, she is Japan’s innocent girl next door.

Jennifer Robertson argues that historically the category of the shōjo “implies heterosexual inexperience and homosexual experience” (1998:65). In other words, shōjo innocence assumes intimate ties (“passionate, but supposedly platonic”) with other girls and women, while relegating boys and men to a separate, more distant sphere (68). This kind of highly acceptable same-sex intimacy typically occurs in school among sports team or club members. However, in some depictions from the 1970s on and particularly by the mid-1990s, hints of heterosexuality fall within the realm of shōjo purview, not so much as subject herself, but as object of voyeuristic fascination. During this time period, manga artists and others begin to draw her body as changed from that of flat-chested girl-child to the eroticized category of sex-child with womanly breasts, buttocks, and long legs (Masubuchi 1994:83). The erotic charge lies in the eerie, Photoshopped quality of the image: she has a child’s face and a woman’s body. Let me note here that the visual depiction of shōjo eroticism only placed in bodily terms what some would argue was already there in unspoken heteronormative pedophilia (see Allison 1996:29).5

The real or fictive nature of the sex-child image matters less than her public circulation as symbolic dream girl, at least for some men. It also lies in the purported fleetingness of the condition, as all too soon the child becomes an adult. The attraction, then, at least for her pedophilic admirers, is not for the woman but for the child. And it is as child that she becomes precious as a transitory figure threatened by impending adulthood. That threat can be performatively quelled through masquerade: adult women may dress as children, speak or act as children (e.g., the figure of the burikko, the woman with high-pitched baby talk who feigns the child, primarily to appeal to men), or cling to symbols of childhood (e.g., Hello Kitty) (Miller 2004b:148). This masquerade sets the stage for performances of shōjo-the-virgin, remade. Sanrio aids and abets this, especially with the development of goods for the adult fe-

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male market from the late 1970s on. These include Hello Kitty stockings, makeup, sanitary napkins, and even condoms.6

The simultaneous presence of both these versions of the shōjo— girl-child and sex-child—creates some of the public tension and ambiguity surrounding what has become a sometimes controversial icon. Both versions draw on that most public of shōjo symbols—the schoolgirl uniform, of which the most iconic is the navy blue sailor style (Mori 1985). The public sees actual shōjo most typically in uniform, commuting to and from school, walking the sidewalks and riding public transportation, wearing the uniform even on weekends and at nonschool functions.7 The public also sees the symbolic shōjo through quotations of her schoolgirl uniform in manga, anime, bars, and pornography. How do we interpret both versions of the shōjo, both uses of the schoolgirl uniform? The problem lies categorically. To the question “Is she a child or an adult?” the answer must lie not only between the two, but that she is both. The uniform worn as easily by a seven-year-old as a thirteen-year-old covers the breast buds of womanhood. The shōjo is a child whose eroticism rests in adult male desire for prepubescent females, a phenomenon dubbed rorikon (“Lolita complex”) in Japan. Ironically, the same uniform meant to contain sexuality becomes itself a tantalizing, sexualized icon. That desire draws not so much on bodies and uniforms—although these are necessary objects of scopophilic attention—but on the powerlessness and passivity they inscribe. It is the erotic charge of innocence as foreplay, of guilelessness as sexual position. One source of public fascination with the shōjo, then, rests exactly in her construction as the source of such forbidden pleasure, in what the feminist Naito Chizuko has called the “loliconization” of Japanese society—that is, “the commodification of children, young girls (shōjo), and young women as sexual symbols in society” (2010:328).

For example, the fashion magazine for females in their late teens and early twenties, Cutie for Independent Girls, which began publication in 1989, shows the shōjo as part of explicit sexualized consumer culture.8 Although targeting a post-shōjo audience, this magazine builds upon a referentially shōjo-based consumer culture that includes Hello Kitty. The May 1998 issue features Yuki, a wide-eyed female model (pop singer) with rosy cheeks and braids on the cover. Clearly Yuki, regardless of her actual age, is meant to convey the idea of shōjo. Inside, a six-page photo spread presents Yuki in poses of bondage and sadomasochism (see figure 1.1), asking “Who’s next?” Even if this photo spread were meant as a fashion

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1.1. Photo from Yuki spread in Cutie for Independent Girls (May 1998).

joke (as explained to me by several young Japanese men and women), that joke can only be viewed as disturbingly complicit with female subjugation, at both sexual and consumer levels. In this, rape becomes a form of kawaii chic with the sex-child shōjo featured as nothing less than a fashionable victim. Given the readership of the magazines—the audience for chic rape, the victims themselves—a photo spread such as this raises alarming questions of media responsibility in Japan.9

This does not necessarily say much about shōjo themselves—except perhaps as muse or wannabe perusers of fashion magazines that may contain such explicit images. (In this, others may peer over her shoulder.) Whereas much of the mediated presence of the shōjo tantalizes the heteronormative public with her presumably Lolita-like presence,

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for girls themselves this same historic period marks the rise of their own agency in terms of consumer and subcultural expressive power. Sanrio’s success—including that of fanshii guzzu, kyarakutā, and other cute products—could only take place within the context of an emerging girl culture, including a new generation of active young, female shoppers. During these bubble economy years of the 1970s and 1980s, shōjo staked a claim at the marketplace, cutting their eye-teeth on Sanrio and its fanshii guzzu. They gained this claim through the general rising affluence of this period, on the one hand, and through the shrinking birthrate, on the other. In effect, fewer offspring meant proportionately larger gifts for children; in Japan the gift of choice—especially the large amounts given to children as otoshidama (literally, year’s gem; money wrapped in ceremonial envelope) for New Year’s celebration—is typically money.10 The saying “children have six pockets” refers to the two parents and four grandparents who regularly and readily draw deeply from their own pockets to fill children’s purses with the means to shop. Another take on the same phenomenon is the “five-pocket child”—that is, one who receives money from five sources: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, and family friends (Creighton 1994:78). In the case of the shōjo, what she buys are the girl-culture goods that arose during this period and after, such as Hello Kitty.

The consumer power of the shōjo has been matched by other assertions of rapidly changing girl-culture practices, some of which have been interpreted as threatening to the status quo. Girl culture as deviant subculture in the 1970s and 1980s includes maru-moji (round script) and slang (often deliberately reconfiguring words with childish intonations), extended through graphemes enhanced by computers and cell phones in the late 1990s and 2000s as gyaru-moji (girl graphs). As Laura Miller explains, “[Japanese] girls use this writing style to confront gender socialization, in which femininity is linked to elegance and refinement not only in their comportment, but in how they fashion their writing of language” (2011:16). Educators, parents, and other adults consider these girl-culture expressions as deviant, even if the sense of societal disruption may be mild compared to same-age delinquents in the West. This form of bottom-up (no pun intended) cute culture suggested girls out of control; however, what it really portended was girls gaining control of their consumer lives and in-group expression.11

That sense of girl-culture threat only grew, especially with the emergence of a highly public bad-girl shōjo by the 1990s. She was the kogyaru

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(shortened from kōkōsei-gyaru, high school girl or gal; sometimes abbreviated simply as gyaru), a highly transgressive version of the shōjo, who combined variously modified schoolgirl uniforms (e.g., ultrashortened skirts), chapatsu (hair dyed brown), and extreme makeup (deeply tanned faces, eyes made up with light eye-shadow, heavy mascara, and eyeliner to emphasize round, “doll-like” eyes). The transgressiveness of the kogyaru should be understood within the context of kosoku (school rules) that have long regulated details of dress, accessories, undergarments, hair, makeup, and behavior for students in Japan (White 1993:223–26). In addition to challenging the kosoku, the kogyaru look upended more traditional standards of beauty: black hair, pale skin, almond-shaped eyes (Miller 2006:21). The kogyaru also inhabited a consumer lifestyle that carved out her subcultural territory with iconic urban spaces (e.g., Tokyo’s Harajuku and Shibuya), quickly shifting fashion accessories (e.g., variously, platform shoes, Burberry scarves), activities (e.g., purikura, shortened Japlish from “print club”—photo booths where one may easily produce decorated stickers of oneself—launched in 1995; see Miller 2005), and magazines (e.g., Egg, which began publication focusing on the kogyaru and her offshoots in 1999). If the kogyaru sported Hello Kitty accessories, she did so with a sense of irony for the girl-child she was publicly leaving behind. More importantly, the kogyaru challenged more traditional standards of language and comportment: demureness, modesty, self-effacement (Miller 2004a). Kogyaru stormed the urban stage as highly public young women laying claim to a comparatively brash persona with little concern for future adult responsibilities and great concern for the pleasures of the present. They became the first of a parade of successive deviant girl-culture personae, such as the dark-faced, raccoon-eyed ganguro (literally “face black”), the yamamba (“mountain witch”) with “witchy” dyed hair (Kinsella 2005), and at the opposite extreme, Gothic Lolita, dressed in outlandish, fairytale frills. These rebel faux shōjo took the street as their own stage, parading in an endless stream within particular enclaves of Tokyo. Their street fashion, including the occasional Hello Kitty accessories that complete the look, has garnered the incessant gaze of Japanese and foreign photographers, whose photos of these post-shōjo have been compiled in several art magazines and books (see the introduction).

The combination of shōjo, sex, shopping, and girl subculture came to a media head in the late 1990s, when newspapers, magazines, and television shows jumped on the bandwagon reportage of enjo kōsai (“com-

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pensated dating”).12 If adults previously wagged their tongues at corrupted handwriting, language, and dyed hair, the idea of shōjo selling their social and sometimes sexual attentions for sizeable spare change confirmed the worst societal fears. These girls looked to be entirely out of control. Notably, enjo kōsai became associated with kogyaru, to the extent that elements of the kogyaru look became visual codes for the business of paid socializing. With the skirts of their schoolgirl uniforms hiked impossibly high and prim white knee socks scrunched to a baggy slouch (dubbed rūzu sokkusu, “loose socks”), the girls turned everyday hangouts such as McDonald’s into illicit meeting places to hook up with clients. The 1997 hit film Baunsu Kogyaru (Bounce Kogyaru) by Masato Harada further cemented the association of kogyaru with enjo kōsai by depicting schoolgirls trading sexual favors for cash. What made matters worse were the stereotypical reasons given for engaging in such a trade, namely, that girls needed the money so that they could shop to their heart’s content. These shōjo traded up: they relinquished Sanrio in favor of Louis Vuitton. The public outcry was not so much against the (older, male) customers; rather, it was against the shōjo as the schoolgirl gone irreparably bad. Enjo kōsai raised alarm bells around the shōjo and her cute culture: Had consumerism gone too far? Was this a sign of the moral turpitude of the time?

Although kogyaru and enjo kōsai may seem a far cry from the safe world of fanshii guzzu and Hello Kitty, they are not. Rather, in Japan, these various meanings of shōjo coexist in constant tandem, the one providing the backdrop for the other and vice versa. It is the juxtaposition of girl-child and sex-child, of lunch boxes and condoms sharing a logo of Sanrio characters, of sadomasochistic bondage and cute goods within the same magazine, that generates a deep and variable pool of meanings given the shōjo and her evolving girl culture. Thus, one set of images of the shōjo invokes at some level the full range of contradictions. One sees and “not-sees” the range of images and meanings continually, focusing on one and then the other in a type of wink, crossreferencing them playfully and provocatively. This is not to say that all adults and children throughout Japan see this full range, but that the range exists as widely circulating public discourse. The eye upon the shōjo includes all of these images, even if parts of it may be selectively focused or blurred at any one time. This holds true whether the viewer is a marketer, a parent, a peeping tom, or even a shōjo herself. The various meanings given shōjo play a part in both the identity categories

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as well as the subjectivity of girls. Sanrio juggles all the images at the same time, extending them further by playing them off each other. It is the corporate wink that officially decries the co-optation of the Hello Kitty massage wand as a vibrator by seekers of Internet porn (see chapter 5), at the same time as creating a promotional poster seen in a Sanrio store in Yokohama of a seminude young woman coyly covering her breasts while taking a photo with a Hello Kitty camera. Here is the seeing-but-not-seeing work of the wink. Sanrio’s corporate wink teases the multivalent symbol of the shōjo—girl-child, sex-child, consumerchild. Through the blurred image of the shōjo, the line between innocence and sexuality, between childhood and adulthood is not so neatly drawn in contemporary Japan. Hello Kitty as symbol of the shōjo and her girl culture, which moves from street to corporate to street again, plays upon this blurring.

Kawaii as the Emotional Touchstone of Girl Culture

What remains consistent throughout the blurring is the concept of kawaii. Our goal here is not necessarily to define kawaii or enumerate its typologies, since these kinds of exercises have been conducted numerous times by others.13 Rather, it is more productive for our purposes to note ways and contexts in which the concept may be invoked in contemporary Japan, as exemplified in the quotes with which I began this chapter. In other words, I ask, What is the work that kawaii effects as a discursive strategy? How does it circumscribe the social, emotional, and gendered context of Hello Kitty in Japan? Objects or people described with squealing excitement as kawaii may vary by individuals—from infants to centenarians (at least those without debilitating physical infirmities), from pink handbags to serious works of art, from young animals to quaint buildings. With this kind of range, being able to come up with an all-inclusive definition matters far less than examining the sociocultural work its label accomplishes.

As Sharon Kinsella notes, kawaii has been called “the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese” by crea magazine, and a brief overhearing of conversations, especially among shōjo in contemporary Japan, is enough to confirm that claim (1995:220–21). Yet such benign ubiquity calls forth its own cadre of detractors. Critique of the ubiquity of kawaii in Japan tends to come variously from intellectuals, conservatives, fringe youth subcultures,

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and sometimes shōjo themselves (McVeigh 2000b:136). Nevertheless, this ubiquitous word in contemporary Japan takes its form relatively recently, changing from kawayushi (early twentieth century to 1945) to kawayui (1950s to 1970) to its present kawaii (1970s on)—in general, sharing overlapping meaning with the English cute, but with an added layer of vulnerability derived from its etymological link with kawaisō (pitiable, pathetic). The link between the cute and the vulnerable rests in the Japanese concept of amae (dependency), based in the prototypical child-mother dyad. According to the psychologist Doi Takeo, the fundamental link between child (as one who amaeru, “depends on, including solicitations of dependency”) and mother (as one who amayakasu, “is depended upon, including making oneself available to fulfill such dependency”) acts as a socially valued, emotional template for any number of relationships in Japan, including that between adults (1971). Kawaii acknowledges that template, invoking the “relationality”—ongoing connections between one person and others, as well as with objects—that lies at the core of the concept (Allison 2004:43).

In fact, kawaii relationality overlaps with Anglo-American “cute.” The film critic Mary Ann Doane (1989) analyzes what European and American marketers have long known: certain kinds of commodities invoke empathetic—even motherly—responses from adult female consumers. Those commodities are “cute.”14 Building on “consumer empathy,” cute commodities generate what Lori Merish calls “a structure of emotional response that assimilates consumption into the logic of adoption. Thus, the special relevance of cuteness to one particular commodity: the doll. . . . What the cute stages is, in part, a need for adult care” (1996:187). Hello Kitty functions as exactly this kind of cute commodity, generating what Merish dubs “sentimental [maternal] materialism” (2000). Hello Kitty and other kawaii objects act as prompts for an empathetic response of caregiving, as Merish describes. However, in Japan there is an additional twist: some consumers do not only want to adopt the cute commodity; as discussed above, they want to become it. As Kinsella notes: “Cute fashion in Japan was more than merely cuddling cute things; it was all about ‘becoming’ the cute object itself” (1995:237). Becoming Hello Kitty may not literally mean transforming oneself into a cat; rather, it suggests becoming the kawaii object that calls out for other’s people’s nurturance, as exemplified by Hello Kitty. This temporary return to the land of kawaii is part of the masquerade of adult women as shōjo. In this way, the fandom in Japan surrounding cute commodities, from aidoru

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(“idol”; young popular singer-entertainer) to Hello Kitty, embraces both a strong sense of caring as well as becoming the object of care that constitutes an escape into the very doll-like qualities of kawaii.15 Herein lies the retreat of kawaii as an amae-based concept.

The kawaii retreat is more complex than a strict dichotomy between the powerful and powerless (see McVeigh 2000b:141–42). Rather, kawaii outlines a particular gaze upon the world, including people and objects, that establishes a relational position of the gazer and the gazed-upon. Instead of an inherent quality of an object or person, kawaii is a mode of regard. That is, by dubbing some object or person as kawaii, the viewer proffers a gaze that is both softened and charged with empathy, intimacy, and emotion (144). Invoking kawaii says as much about the viewer as the viewed. In this, kawaii becomes part of an intransitive verb: kawaii suru (my theoretical linguistic construct), suggesting to endow an object with endearing qualities and thus establish a relationship of care and intimacy. Although this is what Doane and Merish call a “maternal” impulse of adoption, one may “nativize” the act in Japan and call it an assertion of amae.

The heightened valence of kawaii and the nostalgia for an idealized childhood that it circumscribes directly points to adulthood as burdened with responsibilities and obligations (Allison 2004:40). This kind of nostalgia pits the freedom of childhood against the restrictiveness of adulthood. Within this context, kawaii represents a temporary state of abnegation. Surrounding oneself with kawaii objects may be interpreted as pure escapism. This is not to say that men do not suffer from the pressures of adulthood, but only that culturally sanctioned forms of escape may be gendered. For women, one can be both “childlike” and “maternal,” both the cared for and the caregiver, by way of kawaii. This way of being says as much about the desirability of shōjo as well as the expectations placed upon adult females.

Perhaps one of the most instructive lens through which to distinguish kawaii from cute is to briefly examine what consumers outside Japan say about their differentiation. This is exactly what global fans of Hello Kitty do, as I discuss further in chapter 3. They remark on the creative flexibility of Hello Kitty. Crafted in ambiguity, Hello Kitty encompasses innocent childhood, on the one hand, and its own distancing commentary through clever, sly, even tongue-in-cheek, play, on the other. This perception stands in contrast to what they see as the straightforward, more unidimensional expression of American

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characters, such as Precious Moments (Christian-linked sentimentality) or Disney figures (often tied to specific narratives, such as blockbuster children’s films). What many global fans recognize and tout is the relative complexity of Japanese kawaii, compared to Anglo-American cute. Part of that complexity is the inclusion of contradictory elements within one concept such as kawaii. This perceived contradictory mixing includes the possibilities of physically deformed elements, such as missing limbs or misshapen figures, resulting in “sdk” (superdeformed kawaii) as a genre of kawaii renderings. It also includes the possibilities of socially deformed elements, such as scowling anticute children of the popular artist Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1959), whose underage subjects often smoke, swear, and overtly defy notions of etiquette.16 Sianne Ngai contends that cuteness contains within it the possibilities of provoking “ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones. For in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle” (2005:816). The very deformability of the cute—the tweaked “ugliness” of kawaii—is part of its vulnerability. The broad umbrella of kawaii, then, extends to include these ironic, playful, even crushingly subversive elements that wax and wane through time as the very stuff of “cool.” Here I am not suggesting that all stuff kawaii is and always has been cool, but that the coolness factor has been variously attached to a moving target of kawaii as it transforms over time.

It is important to historicize the complexity of kawaii that global fans acknowledge. The flexibility of Hello Kitty may be seen as a by-product of both her physical blankness that was the genius of her rendering from the outset, and the inherent contradictions within the concept of kawaii, as well as Sanrio’s extended marketing a decade after her birth. In effect, the blank slate with which she was drawn, as well as the playfulness of kawaii, contributed to her adaptability as logo, and her adaptability as logo enabled her extension to new products and markets. A word, though, about the blankness with which Hello Kitty has often been described: this is not sheer blankness, but one couched always in kawaii, always made appealing by playing upon vulnerability. In short, this is blankness to a purpose, with that purpose resting precisely in the affective, feminized tug of kawaii.

The original Hello Kitty from 1974 was a simple mouthless cat in primary colors, seated to the side with head facing forward,17 adorning

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children’s goods such as lunch boxes, coin purses, and pencils. The image is flat and abstract, pared down to the most basic lines and shapes that lead one to imagine the rest. Here is the blank slate as the jejune of childhood, both in the image as well as in the objects she adorned. However, by the late 1970s and 1980s, when Sanrio decided to extend the market for Hello Kitty to adult females (described earlier as reclaimed shōjo), the kawaii expression of Hello Kitty goods included added layers that might appeal to a broader age range: new colors in an extended palette, varied costumes, more accessories, new bodily positions, other linked commodities.

While not losing its young consumers, Hello Kitty as logo placed on a variety of goods targeted to an older crowd became a commentary upon kawaii itself. The very juxtaposition—childhood logo placed upon adult-oriented items—affirmed the expanded purview of kawaii. I contend that the wide variety of objects or persons described as kawaii in Japan connects with this extension of children’s goods and images into adult realms. This kind of generalized “cutification” of Japanese society ties directly to marketing practices, which I discuss further in the next section. I am not here claiming causality: this is not a chicken-and-egg question of which came first, marketing practices or extension of kawaii. Rather, it is important to note their parallel emergence in Japanese contemporary society from the 1970s through today. Our discussion thus necessarily includes shōjo, girl culture, fanshii guzzu marketing, and kawaii as closely intertwined parts of an era.

Kawaii as developed through consumer goods takes childhood as only a starting point. Innocence—or its seeming expression—becomes the raw materials from which to develop more complex, multilayered imagery. Like the seen-but-not-seen aspects of shōjo, kawaii as exemplified by Hello Kitty includes cute and its distancing through twists of meanings, commentaries, and nuances that fall within the framework of asobi (play). In fact, it is the culturally sanctioned field of asobi that extends meanings and uses into surprising places. As depicted on the cover of a 1998 Kitty Goods Collection (figure 1.2), the extended range of expressivity in colors, bodily positions, and costuming allows Hello Kitty to take leave of her original moorings of the 1974 image. Literally taking wing, these flights of Sanrio fantasy take each Kitty iteration to the edge, affirming and reaffirming her appeal to children and adults alike. She is drenched

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1.2. Cover of Kitty Goods Collection, vol. 2 (1998).

in asobi. Here lies the process by which cute becomes cool in Hello Kitty’s development, leaning on asobi as a critical link. Such a framework encompasses the seen but not seen, enveloping shōjo, kawaii, and other elements of consumer culture in contemporary Japan.

Kyarakutā as the Embodied World: The Koizumi-Shishiro Dance

That cultural framework of asobi is fundamental to the ubiquitous presence of kyarakutā, such as Hello Kitty, filling the visual- and socialscapes of contemporary Japan. Tracing the extension of kyarakutā from childhood decoration into the adult world parallels the rise of shōjo and kawaii. These three elements intertwine as follows: all kyarakutā are kawaii, tying them to youth, including shōjo; the widespread proliferation of kyarakutā suggests the overall feminization (by way of shōjo)

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and “cutification” (by way of kawaii) of contemporary Japan. The 1970s in this way witnessed the rise of kyarakutā, jumping beyond the bounds of children’s goods into gradually more and more of the general adult world. By the 1980s, many companies, institutions, and large-scale events felt need for their own kyarakutā mascot, whether designed anew or licensed from preexisting, well-known cartoon figures. This includes, for example, (1) banks with kyarakutā hypervisible on advertisements and other paraphernalia (e.g., Tom and Jerry as the Bank of Yokohama mascots; Hello Kitty as the Japan Credit Bureau [jcb] mascot);18 (2) governmental institutions using kyarakutā to convey publicservice messages (McVeigh 2000b:150–53); and (3) large-scale events, such as Expo 2005, held in Aichi prefecture with kyarakutā mascots Kiccoro (Forest Child) and Morizo (Forest Grandfather).19 Kyarakutā refigure the material world into a personalized one, full of cute characters who beckon, soothe, and only gently admonish, as Laura Miller clearly points out (2010).20 Miller analyzes the use of animal figures in public culture in Japan, past and present, as a “zoomorphic urge” that follows principles of displacement—that is, “the psychological mechanism that allows us to redirect attention and emotions away from areas thought to be indelicate or troublesome” (2010:69). A world suffused with kyarakutā is thus softened through its investment in emotion, always holding the potential for comforting sociality.

On the one hand, use of cute kyarakutā by businesses means appealing directly to that segment of the population with increasing buying power—young females. Branding a company or institution through particular kyarakutā makes them not only distinctive one from the other, but distinctively kawaii and thus appealing. On the other hand, use of cute kyarakutā by governmental institutions “softens” their image and message for the general populace. This is the affective labor of kawaii. Kyarakutā allow more typically distant, formal institutions, such as police departments, to seem congenial and approachable. Through kyarakutā, government may be imaged as friend rather than authority figure. This serves important functions, especially because the trade in support and assistance is supposed to run mutually between government and citizenry: government is structured as the citizen’s friend yet the citizen is theoretically government’s ally. Thus, kyarakutā as both commodity and ally outline the disarming presence of kawaii, suggesting an ingenue mask of power.

As developed from the 1970s through the 2000s, kyarakutā func-

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tion by steps: (1) emotionalizing and humanizing the everyday material world through embodied kawaii, and (2) commercializing that same world. Although not all kyarakutā are commodified, those that are bought and sold allow the consumer to take a part of that figure home in what Anne Allison calls “pocket intimacy” or portable companionship (2004:45). Surrounding oneself with kyarakutā creates a nest of comfortable familiarity, both knowable and knowing (Steinberg 2012:81). The convenience of their miniaturization means that that nest is as portable as the cell phone strap in one’s purse.21 In fact, the cell phone strap offers the convenient opportunity of customizing one’s surroundings with kyarakutā, turning an everyday appliance into an expression of kyarakutā-based identity. Ownership of kyarakutā guzzu holds forth the possibilities of buying into and creating an intimate relationship with some part of what the figure represents.

The flexibility of kyarakutā lies in the fact that they are not only objects, but more commonly, transferable logos—that is, branded, visual, recognizable symbols that identify goods. And as logos, they can “mark” their territory endlessly, increasing the number and variety of goods for sale. This is exactly the process of Sanrio, as it extends Hello Kitty products manifold through licensing agreements. Sanrio, of course, is not alone in this. The character licensing business in Japan, as elsewhere, continues to grow, reaching new markets, cultivating new strategies, and developing new means to extend itself. In effect, Hello Kitty as logo is perfectly encapsulated by one of Sanrio’s smaller, cheaper items. This is a pair of cardboard-framed hologram lenses through which any concentrated light source magically transforms into an outlined image of Hello Kitty.22 The Hello Kitty hologram glasses are nothing short of marketing genius. Through the logo principle, any surface or object can be decorated with a kyarakutā such as Hello Kitty, thereby stamped indelibly as kawaii and linked to a company or institution.23 In fact, the work of logo goes both ways, especially as two recognizable commodities enter into a mutual licensing agreement: as one example of many, Hello Kitty (cute) on a Fender guitar (cool) suggests that the hard-rock world of the guitar is made more accessible to the kawaii world of shōjo, at the same time as Hello Kitty and kawaii are given a new tongue-incheek wink of meaning. The wink defines cute as newly cool.

The proliferation of these logos means more than the cutification of the everyday world; it suggests the corporatization of kawaii and its brand of asobi through kyarakutā. As Allison argues, “No longer con-

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fined to particular objects . . . , spaces . . . , or times . . . , ‘play’ [through kyarakutā] becomes insinuated into far more domains of everyday life. The border between play and nonplay, commodity and not, increasingly blurs” (2004:47). The resulting kyarakutā overload potentially turns the everyday world visually into an elaborate, excessive playground of logos whose every detail is planned, executed, and coordinated around cartoon figures. Furthermore, this very overload creates a hunger for more, as Marc Steinberg explains: “The generation of consumer desire depends in large part on the material ubiquity of the character image and its proliferation across media forms” (2012:42). Here is the work of the Hello Kitty glasses. Call this a “theme park” for the visualscape of kyarakutā, including its foundationally commercial impulse. Certainly, Sanrio’s Hello Kitty theme park, Purorando (Puroland), is an overt manifestation of the principle. But I argue that the logo-driven proliferation of kyarakutā makes of urban Japan a kind of visual theme park of kawaii as an embodied, commodified world. This is a world that Steinberg characterizes as “anymovement, anywhere, anytime,” referring to the portability of small kyarakutā merchandise, found in all places (“stickerability”), marking the urban- and mediascape at any given moment (2012:79).

Not only can any object or surface become stamped or stickered with kyarakutā by way of logo; real-life figures may themselves transform into kyarakutā through processes of caricaturing, miniaturization, and subsequently commodification. Consider the following: when the popular prime minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro is rendered in stylized cute caricature, he can become a kyarakutā.24 This is exactly what the Liberal Democratic Party did when it created the kyarakutā “Shishiro” (Mr. Lion, referring to Koizumi’s trademark wavy “mane” of hair; Koizumi himself played up the image with the nickname “Lion Heart”) at the outset of Koizumi’s rule in 2001.25 In truth, Shishiro was not a real lion, or even a real cartoon lion, but a caricatured human figure (recognizable with Koizumi’s face and hair) dressed in lion costume.26 Furthermore, as in many caricatures, Shishiro was drawn from particular visual and personality elements taken from Koizumi himself. Thus Koizumi’s “cool” was drawn into Shishiro’s cute physicalization. With Shishiro’s cartooned image sketched on public messages, his doll figure bought and sold on goods ranging from T-shirts to mugs to hand towels, his figure prominent on the governmental website, Koizumi as kyarakutā proliferates. Although a photo can have the same degree of prolifera-

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tion, the efficacy of kyarakutā renders him endearingly approachable, much as one might know, recognize, and pleasantly regard a cartoon figure. Shishiro draws upon and creates appeal from an image that is fixed, stylized, and contained.

Here one can invoke the principle of migawari (self-other exchange; surrogacy), with Shishiro acting as visual stand-in for Koizumi. Takie Lebra argues that, in Japan, surrogacy carries special legitimate cultural weight: the dainin (surrogate) holds symbolic credibility of its own, connected to and enhancing the honnin (actual figure) (1994:113). I call this process “emergent authenticity” by which surrogates multiply the power and legitimacy of the actual person (Yano 2010b; see the introduction). Just as dainin may carry responsibility in representing honnin, so, too, may the many Shishiro kyarakutā each carry significance for Koizumi himself, amplifying his presence through each iteration. In effect, Shishiro accomplishes what a photograph cannot: by its own sense of embodiment, kyarakutā take on personality and being as a truly multidimensional figure. This is what enables migawari. The dialectic between Koizumi and Shishiro works multiply: Koizumi provides the fundamental material from which Shishiro is drawn; Shishiro as kyarakutā renders Koizumi even more kawaii than he might be. Thus, Koizumi and Shishiro—honnin and dainin; person and kyarakutā— together engage in a dance of emergent authenticity.27

This dance of emergence exists in other Japanese cultural forms, as well. For example, Otsuka Eiji cites the process in traditional retellings— dramatic adaptations and citations of shared stories in kabuki and Japanese puppet theater—whereby “the competence or originality of an author is judged by examining the appearance of various small narratives from a shared grand narrative” (2010:111). He links this to more contemporary fan activities such as dōjinshi (fanzine), in which the grand narrative is also shared (original author and subsequent fan authors) and emergent (interaction of original work and subsequent fan-based works). In migawari, kabuki, puppet plays, dōjinshi, and various other cultural productions that build on a sense of repetition, authenticity, worthiness, and even identity emerge as process, rather than a singular product.

Likewise, through the process of becoming kyarakutā, Koizumi transforms into more than a person, more than a prime minister; he becomes a “mediatized,” commodified figure with suprahuman powers both grand and intimate. These powers lie in the endearing qualities of

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kawaii. In effect, Koizumi gains more through his miniaturization as kyarakutā by assuming the kawaii position to disarm. The process of miniaturization itself makes Koizumi more “graspable,” more understandable, more endearingly kawaii, and far less political (see Schattschneider 2003:204).28 As one Japanese man in his thirties comments: “I feel Shishiro doesn’t have any political odor. I don’t see any connection between the character and Koizumi’s identity as a politician” (personal communication, June 17, 2011). A Japanese woman in her thirties echoes this sentiment: “[Shishiro has] good appeal to kids and probably to young girls, who don’t have any interest in politicians. They don’t care what Koizumi thinks or even who he really is. But if the [Shishiro] character is cute, it’s just fine” (personal communication, June 17, 2011). Instead of political prowess, Shishiro amplifies Koizumi’s limelight by lending a new apolitically cute twist to his public presence.

These powers also lie in the seductions of excess. Whereas less was more through miniaturization, more is unremittingly more through oversaturation. This is what kyarakutā offer: Shishiro can inhabit the intimate spaces of people’s homes as easily as the public spaces of urban sidewalks. Note here that Koizumi the kyarakutā is not considered any less “masculine” by way of his cutification as Shishiro. Rather, he offers the Japanese public a new form of masculinity that is a deliberate break from a long line of staid politicians—a fashion trendsetter with his long wavy locks, unthreatened by his miniaturization, strengthened by his willingness to adopt the kawaii position. Koizumi the kyarakutā also gains more as commodity because he can then become an object of ownership. Imagine the “pocket intimacy” of a politician in one’s purse: becoming kyarakutā transforms a symbol of authority into a fetish of consumption.

It is easy enough to dismiss kyarakutā as the “cutification” of the material world, as many might in response to the constant barrage of cartoonish figures dotting the urbanscape of contemporary Japan. While not denying such critique, it is equally productive to assess the cultural and socioeconomic resources that might generate the widespread use of kyarakutā, such as Hello Kitty, as well as suggest some implications wrought by their ubiquity. What do kyarakutā as an industry and as a way of life suggest about Japan? The question here is not only why kyarakutā, but also why kyarakutā now? What, in other words, do Hello Kitty and other cartoonlike figures say about contemporary Japan? I suggest that as well as looking to current issues of kawaii and shōjo, we

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examine past practices in seeking answers. It is this combination of the past in the present that gives the kyarakutā phenomenon—including Hello Kitty—particular significance.

The proliferation of kyarakutā suggests cultural processes at work that define particular, ongoing relationships to material objects. The work of Ellen Schattschneider on spirituality and human-made resemblances—first in the mountain asceticism of northern Honshu (2003) and subsequently in bride dolls at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine (2009)— transforms our discussion of kyarakutā in contemporary Japan from mere commercialism to culture past and present, in its most profound sense. Schattschneider draws specifically on two Japanese concepts to interpret objects: mitate (referentiality) and migawari. She utilizes the theory of mitate (to see + to arrange)—the bestowing of objects with often oblique meaning—to understand processes of intertextual reference. Dubbed by the Japanese anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao the “art of citation,” mitate rests in the human act of juxtaposition in order to create semantic linkages (1991:58). Yamaguchi explains: “When an object is displayed on ceremonial occasions, . . . a classical reference [in history or literature] . . . is assigned . . . so that the . . . object merges with . . . [that which] is being referred to. . . . Mitate, then, is the technique used to associate objects of ordinary life with mythological or classical images” (58). Mitate, in effect, operates within a continual, highly referential mode of citation, the circulation of meaning extending backward and forward in time. Although kyarakutā such as Hello Kitty may not reference mythological or classical images, cute icons work on a symbolic level as “citation” of particular places, times, or objects, especially those associated with childhood. Mitate is useful in thinking through kyarakutā because it assumes the power of objects and figures as loci of referential meaning. Rather than seeing simply a mouthless cat, one sees a highly codified figure that calls up nostalgia, childhood, or the multivalent shōjo.

In fact, the meaning system of mitate can connect objects with the spirit world. Schattschneider emphasizes the fluid relationship between the mortal and the divine—the one becoming, representing, and quoting the other at any given moment—so that the potential for both is omnipresent (2003:55). That potential is actualized through human acts of imitation and representation, including that of migawari. Dolls and other anthropomorphic figures act as “prophylactic guardians” that “ease people through personal and cosmopological transitions”

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(2009:302). Seen in light of Schattschneider’s analysis, kyarakutā—as dolls, as surrogates, as guardians—may be interpreted as not mere decorations, but as buffering protectors, easing the stresses and strains of daily life.

The buffering presence of migawari acts in two ways. First, kyarakutā can act as surrogates for specific persons or institutions where anxiety may be housed. Shishiro is a prime example of a kyarakutā surrogate for a figure of authority. In this, kyarakutā render potential elements of fear or discomfort kawaii, and thus more approachable. Second, kyarakutā can act as a more generalized comforting presence in daily life. Here it may be one particular kyarakutā, as well as the overall proliferation of these figures that provide comfort. This is akin to what childhood psychologists call a “transitional object”—something that helps the child shift from the dependence of the home to a more independent state. The classic transitional object in Euro-America is the much beloved blanket or teddy bear carried by toddlers around everywhere. Here, kyarakutā such as Hello Kitty serve as transitional objects bridging the gap between the “wet” uterine warmth of the family to the “dry” detachment of individual life, for adults and children alike.29 The omnipresence of kyarakutā frames daily life as always accompanied, constantly swaddled in public and private by cute talismans of anthropomorphized form. Guardianship by way of kyarakutā runs parallel with Japanese ideals of infant mothering, which is characterized not so much by verbal interaction (American style), but by physical copresence (Lebra 1976:139–40). Kyarakutā, like mothers, provide “wet” comfort and nurturance by simply being there. It is the constancy that counts. We can thus reinterpret Hello Kitty’s oversaturation as part of the very constancy that makes her into a comforting presence. By this cultural logic, familiarity does not breed contempt, so much as intimacy.30

That presence does not need to be bought. Even if one is not a purchaser of kyarakutā guzzu, one may be an inadvertent, visual consumer by virtue of their proliferation. In that mode of excess, kyarakutā animate the material world as a sensate, emotional womb. These miniature mascots suggest life always accompanied, sharing intimacies with the support group of pocket pals. Hello Kitty is one of these pals. Her mouthless countenance provides a sounding board to synchronize with the mood of her viewer. She is the “blank” mirror that never fails, providing the right touch at the right moment (see chapter 3 for further discussion of this process). In fact, Hello Kitty needs her fans to sustain

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her commercial viability, as much as her fans may need her to sustain their lives. Without their purchase, Hello Kitty dies a quiet death. Furthermore, her inveterate cuteness speaks to the helplessness that is part of her appeal. She draws people to her through her vulnerability. In a very real sense, it is the mutuality—Hello Kitty and consumer, each dependent upon the other—that locks the relationship. She leans on them as they lean on her. She can thus become the one-cat kyarakutā support group upon which one may continually and unabashedly “interdepend.”

The Business of “Social Communication”: Generative Gifting

Although Hello Kitty may be considered a person’s portable, commodified support group, she enables a larger circle of sociality through her function as a gift. As many scholars have noted, gift giving has long oiled the wheels of social “embeddedness” in Japan, through practices of reciprocity, obligation, respect, hierarchy, and mutuality (Befu 1968; Rupp 2003). Gift giving balances the precise ledger of social obligations between and among individuals, families, businesses, and institutions.31 Marcel Mauss covered this social terrain well, explaining ways and means by which gifts create and maintain whole social networks in numerous cultures and through time (1967). Although this may be standard social fare, gift exchange in Japan has a particularly coercive quality to it that generates heavy burdens of obligation. In practices of exchange, gifts establish and maintain a tightly interwoven system of relationships in Japan. The contexts of exchange range from highly codified chūgen (midyear gifts) and seibo (year-end gifts) between families and businesses, to the more individuated, but no less codified, practices of exchange at weddings, funerals, and other occasions. At all levels, gift exchange generates regular, large-scale flows of goods and services, with whole industries built around the requisite practices of social embeddedness.

Sanrio understands gifting as sociality well. The company claims its part of an industry in “social communication”—here specifically targeting females from tweens to young adults. This “communication” takes place through old-fashioned letter-writing tools of pencils, pens, and stationery, and also more centrally through gifts. By calling itself a promoter of social communication, Sanrio adopts the unassailable position of enabling and even enhancing Japan’s interpersonal ties. Whereas

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stationery stores, small gift boutiques, and souvenir shops may have been doing much the same thing, Sanrio made social communication a genre and a central part of its brand. Through social communication, the company claims to uphold the very fabric of social life in Japan, providing readily bought solutions to threats of anomic, urban living. Placed within the framework of the 1970s period of Sanrio’s corporate development, the rationale addresses the meteoric rise of Japan as a global economy, made possible in part through the intense urbanization and movement of people from the countryside to cities. “Social communication” also addresses the rise of shōjo, Sanrio’s target market.

Here I do not mean to overhistoricize gift giving and Sanrio’s place in the industry. Undoubtedly, gift exchange carries great historical depth in Japan, playing an important sociocultural role from premodern times to the present. Yet, Sanrio’s clever branding of itself as a gifting center focuses attention not so much on economics as on emotion. The company thus created itself during the rise of the “girl” in an era during which people raised fewer questions about the quantity of life (i.e., the prosperity of the 1970s and 1980s), and far more about the quality of life (i.e., the spiritual, emotional, and social well-being of people in large cities). Even when questions of the quantity of life have returned in recessionary Japan of the 1990s and 2000s, Sanrio’s adoption of social communication as a brand promise addresses the handle of quality-oflife questioning. In fact, social communication has been recontextualized in the 1990s and 2000s to address millennial concerns with iyashi (healing), yearning for the soothing life to ameliorate daily stresses.32 Although purchasing a cute Hello Kitty souvenir as a gift for a friend can be an individual act, it can be interpreted as addressing a national need to assert and sustain emotional ties between people. These ties go beyond the social, with its obligations and responsibilities, and into the realm of affect. Following company logic, inasmuch as Japan needs a strong interpersonal network of citizens sustained through practices of gift exchange, and inasmuch as that network comes under threats of modernity and stresses of daily life, Sanrio plays its part in addressing a national need. According to its position of social communication, Sanrio handles that need not through rigid, formal ties that bind, but through informal, flexible bonds of kawaii. This is not business so much as it is old-fashioned social and emotional healing.

That healing falls upon the shoulders of girls and women. Much as household gifting remains the responsibility of women, here Sanrio’s

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practices of gifting are primarily female. In fact, females take part in both old-fashioned obligatory gifting and newer forms of informal exchange, as authorities of the social.33 Girls and women become familiar loci of “wet Japan”—that is, a Japan based in emotion, sociality, and intimacy (Yano 2002:102). These are small yet vital pleasures of the heart, materialized in the form of a Hello Kitty cell phone strap, and given to another. The affective labor of the gift and practices of its giving hold to a small, warm, and ultimately feminine accountability that works within the premises of kawaii. Sanrio is not part of the industries built around formal presentational gifts, group to group, set within social hierarchies, precisely calculated. Those come at high prices, preselected by custom, wrapped for showy presentation.34 Rather, Sanrio gifts are small, personal, informally wrapped acts—what McVeigh calls “trafficking in sentiment” (2000b:177). They are the anti-chūgen, anti-seibo exchange. Although some Sanrio gifts may be given in obligatory fashion (e.g., souvenirs of a place visited), most are exchanged informally, as prestations of affection. Especially when given laterally—female to female—they form part of the intimate bond of shōjo culture. The sincerity of gifting and the emotive healing that accompanies it are assumptions of Sanrio’s social communication positioning.

Sanrio’s company slogan— “Small gift, big smile” 35 —encapsulates its position as both a center and a catalyst of such exchange. The slogan creates a clever measure of affect: for the price and ease of a small gift, one may receive a big smile in return. The message suggests that Sanrio makes this exchange possible by providing gifts for all people, budgets, and occasions. The inherent strategy of the company lies exactly in this flexibility. If one has a large budget or special occasion, one may purchase expensive items, such as Hello Kitty diamond-encrusted watches. However, more commonly, if one has a limited budget or even when money is not an issue, Sanrio can offer gifts that may be modestly priced and pleasing. This is everyday gifting of the (purposely) “small gift.” Sanrio’s attraction for consumers revolves around kawaii goods, whose production does not necessarily rest in large sizes or prices. It is the gift that can be purchased casually and frequently— “gift lite,” if you will, but more importantly, “obligation lite,” because this is the gift that does not require the receiver to repay in any specific form or expenditure. Here is the hallmark of the fanshii guzzu industry: the cheaper gift—not only in actual price but in its seeming trivialness—the closer to the spirit of kawaii. This is reflected in the generally female colloqui-

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alism that a nedan (price) may be considered “kawaii”; that is, besides inexpensive, it is attractively and artlessly so.36 This results in expressions such as kawaii nedan (“cute” price) or nedan mo kawaii (even the price is “cute”). By these criteria, what could be more kawaii than a Hello Kitty eraser, cell phone strap, or coin purse? Here, size matters: smallness carries significant cultural weight as link to shōjo, kawaii, fanshii guzzu, and kyarakutā. These elements form the affective cornerstone of the large-scale empire of gift giving called Sanrio.

In fact, Sanrio includes its own “small gift” to its customers whenever anyone makes a purchase, as part of the wrapping (see Hendry 1993). This is a premium (omake)—typically a small toy attached to the Sanrio bag or wrapping paper.37 By including a small gift as part of the transaction, Sanrio practices what it preaches: even the smallest of gifts can elicit the biggest of smiles. This is not about money so much as affect that structures an ongoing social relationship—here, customer to company, person to object. Part of the smile is in the very lack of obligation appended to the “small gift.” Within the context of a burdensome gift exchange culture, this in itself is noteworthy.

The very smallness of the gift may generate a personal impulse to give—that is, the goods themselves, including their kawaii appeal and accessible pricing, may prompt gift giving at a nonobligatory level. It is this generative gifting—informal, voluntary exchange prompted by the kawaii nedan of the object in conjunction with affect—that becomes Sanrio’s social key. (Note that the kawaii nedan also fits the pocketbook of young children.) In these ways, gifting by way of Sanrio may occur not necessarily as a means to balance a ledger of social obligation, but as a more spontaneous act of care and consideration. Sanrio’s array of small gifts presents the possibility of affective interaction—as well as its manipulation. With the availability of small gifts (generating big smiles), then one may regard social exchange—whether as giver or receiver—as a constant and unexpected possibility. One may gift another casually and intermittently, which alters the social calculus. With the possibility of gifting ever present, prestation can be built upon a whim—whether of sincere emotion or impulse buying—rather than upon codified practice. It is exactly the element of surprise that Sanrio enables, leading to “heartfelt communication.” (The surprise gift is embedded in Sanrio’s structure, as can be seen in the name of some of its corporate boutique stores globally—Sanrio Surprises.)38

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Kitty on the Go: Traveling Souvenirs, Trinket Seductions

One form of gifting that comes as no surprise is that of the miyage (souvenir; often used with honorific as omiyage).39 Social etiquette in Japan demands that any traveler return with a miyage for all to whom one is socially obligated and from whom one has received a senbetsu (a goingaway gift; typically money). Those on the long list of “giftees” can range from a company boss to fellow employees to family and friends. The weighty obligation of miyage acts as one of the most burdensome aspects of travel for Japanese (some even going so far as to keep their trip a secret to avoid the gifting obligation). Sanrio joins other companies in anticipating travelers’ needs, providing miyage for every imaginable tourist site throughout Japan, as well as many tourist sites abroad.

What goes into the making of a souvenir? To serve the purposes of Japanese travelers for whom souvenir purchases (often as gifts for others) are not optional but requisite, a souvenir should invoke the stereotypical, visual icons of a place. Dean MacCannell calls this form of souvenir a type of “sight displacement” by which “an individual seeks to identify himself [sic] with a sight by sacralizing one of its markers” (1999:124). The “operation of the souvenir” thus lies in the ready perception of the relation between the object and its sight (Stewart 1993:146). In pragmatic terms, the souvenir must provide such iconic visual reminders, while remaining affordable and portable (preferably small, easily packed, and unbreakable). The affordability of the souvenir varies by the requisite size of the gift. A person to whom one is greatly indebted and from whom one has received a large sum of money as senbetsu warrants a more expensive souvenir than does a casual acquaintance. The calculations are easily made, weighing the cost of the miyage against the senbetsu received. What the souvenir industry of Japan has thus developed is, first, a standard set of purchasable icons of a place and, second, a range of prices within which recognizable icons may be bought. Thus, if dried seaweed is a specialty product of an area, then a souvenir shop may carry a range of price offerings of the seaweed, from 1,000 (approximately $10) to 5,000 yen (approximately $50). Sanrio, too, offers a range of products as place-based souvenirs, from a Hello Kitty–decorated cell phone strap for 500 yen (approximately $5) to a Hello Kitty ceramic plate (approximately $50).

The development of Hello Kitty as a prime souvenir throughout Japan has only increased her ubiquity. Roaming the Japanese archipelago,

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one encounters Hello Kitty as souvenir seemingly everywhere. If travel may be visualized as a series of snapshots of famous places, then each of those views now includes a “Kitty-ed” image. Thus, as MacCannell puts it, the Kitty souvenirs act as “displaced replicas or effigies of the sight they mark, serving simultaneously as one of its markers and as a little sight in its own right” (1999:124). Hello Kitty had long been regionalized through fairly simple modifications to the product, showing the cat in the context of famous sites. However this process has escalated in recent years through Sanrio’s gotōchi (regionally based identity) line of Hello Kitty goods, catalogued in three volumes for fans, and constantly expanding (Sanrio 2005, 2008, 2010).40 The mouthless feline greets one at souvenir shops throughout the country, taking different local guises. And in the tradition of meibutsu (famous products associated with a place, developed as part of regional identity and as souvenir goods), Hello Kitty takes on the identity of every tourist destination. She does so with the ease of the blank canvas, the simplicity of her rendering physicalizing her relative storylessness. The wizardry of Sanrio lies in releasing Hello Kitty from the confines of “cat-hood”; rather, she may become anything. This makes any distinctive feature or product of a tourist destination fair game: in Yokohama’s Chinatown she is a steamed dumpling; in Kyoto’s Gion district she is a maiko (geisha apprentice); in rural Tosa she is a fighting dog; in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward (known for its industrial pollution and obake ghosts seen in the smoke), she can even be the smoke emitted from factory chimney stacks.41 She both takes on the distinctive characteristics of each place, as well as marks each place with her scent. Maps throughout the two catalogues depict Japan as a series of Hello Kitty souvenirs, each keyed to the famous sites or products of the locale.

Theorists of tourism and souvenirs such as MacCannell and Susan Stewart talk about the quest for authenticity in the exotic, resulting in the “souvenir of the exotic” (MacCannell 1999; Stewart 1993:146). However, the work of the Hello Kitty souvenir is twofold as an object both foreign and familiar (see chapter 7). The souvenir provides the requisite visual representation of the “exotic” or “foreign” (here I use the words to reference “not home”) place, even while framing that representation through the very familiar Sanrio icon. Furthermore, even the exotic is represented only through iconic representations—dumplings, geisha, fighting dogs, industrial smoke. The code of the souvenir only works within idioms of familiarity. A product from Hello Kitty’s gotōchi line thus embodies a “souvenir of the familiar.”

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In the process, Hello Kitty develops quite uniquely not only as a souvenir, but also as the ultimate Japanese souvenir, a chameleon-like national meibutsu—always the same, always different. Like brands elsewhere, she retains her distinctiveness, even as she adapts to new contexts. Through the gotōchi line of goods, all places become Kitty, even as all places fall within the umbrella Japan. In fact, if one is to take a postmodern view of the flexibility of signs, all places become Japan through Kitty. This is overstating the case. And yet the possibility exists that if Hello Kitty has become a symbol of Japan, then her imprint upon various domestic tourist destinations marks each of these with her version of the nation. That version of Japan marked by Hello Kitty includes cuteness, commodity, orientation toward youth, femininity, playfulness—and cool.

Kitty’s gotōchi line typically focuses on small, portable items, such as cell phone straps. Thus, not only is Kitty found seemingly everywhere at each famous destination; she may be bought and personally taken everywhere.42 Like a charm bracelet whose individual charms may represent particular personal experiences or places visited, Kitty gotōchi cell phone straps represent an individual’s personal history or—as a gift bestowed by friends—one’s friends’ travels. Each souvenir must be bought in situ, proof of a traveler’s journey. Migawari—in other words, surrogacy—works here as well. Owning a cell phone strap of a particular place means that you, interchangeably with one’s friends and kin, have traveled there. Thus the distinction between honnin and dainin—the person and the surrogate—is erased in the souvenir.

The Hello Kitty gotōchi line forms a collection and, as such, a consumer practice that is endless by its very constitution. In other words, Sanrio’s issuing of a gotōchi line as a collection makes possible ever new goals for consumers—that is, amassing the most complete set of items as possible. Note, however, Sanrio’s manufacture of desire: an individual’s gotōchi collection can never be complete so long as the company keeps producing ever new souvenirs of ever new destinations, in a simultaneous movement outward to additional places with a more intricate move inward to smaller and smaller divisions of previously covered places. For example, within Tokyo, Sanrio has created “gotōchi special area limited” designs that include individual wards of the metropolis, seasonal festivals, transportation vehicles, and key sights. The impulse to collect a set of physical mementoes based upon one’s travels is not, of course, unique to Japan or to Sanrio. But I would argue that in Japan,

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collecting these mementoes becomes part of the experience of being in a place and can exist outside the realm of commerce. This includes photographing oneself at iconic sites. It also includes the practice of stamping: at each train station and at many famous sites, one finds a table with a red ink pad and one or more large stamps, which indicate the name of the place and some identifying physical marker; by stamping one’s book or sheet of paper, travelers may create a record of the places they have visited. This practice costs the traveler nothing, and denotes ways in which the practice of souvenir collecting may exist outside any kind of economic enterprise.

Hello Kitty’s souvenir travels to and throughout Japan extend and embed her reach. In fact, her ubiquity makes her ties to mobility and modes of transport seem inevitable. She decorates bicycles, scooters, cars, taxis, and buses through license plates, interior accessories, and exterior customizing. Particular train lines within the Tokyo metropolis, especially those that take passengers to Sanrio’s Purorando theme park, carry her imprint. From 2005 to 2009 Taiwan’s eva Airways offered specially decorated Kitty planes on flights to and from Japan (including a Hello Kitty–decorated departure lounge at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport). And at major international airports in Japan—such as Narita, Osaka, and Fukuoka—one finds Kitty goods sold in departure lounges, tempting would-be shoppers with one last opportunity to buy Japan’s ultimate kyarakutā. Recognizing the power of the cat, the Japanese government in May 2008 named Hello Kitty as the country’s official goodwill ambassador of tourism welcoming visitors from China and Hong Kong (discussed further in chapter 7).43 As Sanrio gloated, word of this marketing feat shot around the news media globally, complete with a photo of a pink kimono–clad Hello Kitty (a costumed actor) receiving her certificate of appointment from the head of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism, Tetsuzo Fuyushiba. Sanrio’s head, Tsuji Shintarō, called the appointment “an honor,” pledging to “work hard to attract many visitors” (msnbc 2008). Undoubtedly, this public relations coup for the company is the result of much hard work that begins and ends with gifting as its corporate trademark.

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Case Study: Sanrio’s Anniversary Celebration in the Twenty-First Century

I end this chapter with an analysis of some of the activities in 2009–10 surrounding Sanrio’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration of Hello Kitty, whose “official” birth date is November 1, 1974. I examine Sanrio’s website coverage of “anniversary news” (Japanese and English); Hello Kitty 35th Anniversary Book (in Japanese); Hello Kitty Memories (in Japanese) (Sanrio 2009a); and Three Apples: An Exhibition Celebrating 35 Years of Hello Kitty (in English) (Sanrio 2009b), a catalogue of a Hello Kitty–themed exhibit organized by Sanrio in the United States and held in Los Angeles in fall 2009—as a case study in the practices of the company. (I discuss Sanrio art-related activities more fully in chapter 6.) This analysis inevitably points us outward from Japan toward Hello Kitty’s global audience, the subject of the rest of the book.

One of Sanrio’s first projects in celebrating the anniversary was to create a marketable theme, distinctive design, and associated products. The company chose the theme of Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Hello Kitty Colors, distilled and expressed through a rainbowlike display of her tilted bow in five shades, with meanings given in Japanese and English: red (nakayoku, friendship), pink (kawaii, cute), yellow (omoiyari, heartful), green (kibō, wish), and lavender (yasashii, sweet). Each of these elements deals directly and purposefully with the social and emotional—that is, social communication. For each of these colors, Kitty’s bow becomes a billboard of English: for example, “Red has a meaning of friendship” for the red bow, “Pink has a meaning of cute” for the pink bow, and so forth. English here acts semantically, aesthetically, and symbolically, as simultaneously conveying information, embedded as a pure design element, and referencing the ongoing prestige of English in Japan. By presenting Kitty’s bow in these anniversary colors as an interconnected unit, Sanrio taps into the marketing impulse to purchase the related items as a set, one in each shade—whether it is a set of plush figures, pencils, cell phone straps, or coin purses. For each of the anniversary products, the colored bow covered with a subtle background patterning of English words signifies not only Hello Kitty, but also her thirty-five years of longevity.

In fact, Sanrio’s design decision to distill Hello Kitty’s image to simply a bow has meant ever bolder abstraction. In the anniversary goods, Sanrio has enlarged Hello Kitty’s bow over her left ear to the point of

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dominating the image. The larger the bow, the proportionately smaller the face, creating an even greater sense of “neotenous” chic in beret or turban fashion.44 In some products, Hello Kitty’s design has been pared down to an outsized bow, below which are placed two dots (eyes), a circle (nose), and three parallel lines radiating on each side (whiskers). In other products, all that remains is the bow itself. Such carefully calibrated abstraction creates myriad symbolic and marketing opportunities: a large bow in one’s hair may be all one needs to signify a whole cat; a red bow appears throughout the Hello Kitty 35th Anniversary Book as a logo theme; the bow at times references the ribbon on a gift, making whole pages of the Anniversary Book appear as a present for the consumer.

Glancing through the print and Internet materials for Hello Kitty’s celebration makes it quite clear who the target consumer was in the 2000s—young women. Although Hello Kitty may have originally been conceived within the framework of coin purses, lunch boxes, and pencils for young girls, none of the above are part of the anniversary book or website, except as part of a historic look at the past thirty-five years of marketing. Instead, the anniversary book presents couture fashion and other high-ticket items in thematic black, with red accents, for grown-up “girls.” These items include a black sequined bag by fashion line Anteprima (50,400 yen; $543 in 2010), black Reebok sports shoes (13,650 yen; $147), and a Swarovski crystal pendant (48,000 yen; $518)—all with Hello Kitty emblazoned throughout. Although these may not represent the apex (i.e., most expensive, such as diamond watches) of Hello Kitty shopping, clearly neither are they meant for young girls. In fact, shōjo act as a marketing reference point to define what Sanrio calls “girlish culture” (in English, but also included in the book in Japanese as onnanoko-rashii). Within the context of the thirtyfifth anniversary, Sanrio defines “girlish culture” as objects, such as Hello Kitty, which “capture the feelings of girls, no matter what age” (Sanrio 2009a:10). For the occasion, Sanrio has issued a special edition of Hello Kitty goods themed green and red with notably two bows—a green one by her left ear and a larger red one positioned in her lap to make Hello Kitty herself appear as a gift.

The anniversary book contains a profile of Hello Kitty filled with faux data of her “biography.” If anthropologist Igor Kopytoff calls for a “cultural biography of things,” then Sanrio heeds such a call on its own terms, providing a complete backstory and biography of Hello

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Kitty (1986:64). Much of this had been on Sanrio’s website for years (with Kitty’s family members and friends introduced in 1976), but I contend that the backstory was never crucial for Hello Kitty consumption, which was relatively untied to narrative, whether on corporate websites, through television shows, or books.45 However, the company has taken the anniversary celebration as an opportunity to reiterate Kitty’s story as a three-part, detailed data sheet: (1) Kitty’s Profile, (2) Kitty’s Family, and (3) Kitty’s Friends (Sanrio 2009a:6–7). We find out that she—like other storybook characters46 —is British, having been born just outside of London on November 1. We learn details of her physical self, including weight (three apples), height (five stacked apples), blood type (A; the most typical among Japanese, as noted in Sanrio’s profile of Kitty, and thus purportedly indicative of particular character traits), and exact anthropometric dimensions (in mock centimeters, height, face width, length of head, distance between eyes, length of nose, width and length of torso, length of feet).47 These details provide the materiality that helps make Kitty physically real. Other details make her socially real by embedding her within a kinship tree. We learn her full name, Kitty White, along with members of her family and their individual characteristics—her father, George (a salaryman with a sense of humor); mother, Mary (a housewife who likes to bake apple pies); identical twin sister, Mimmy (who wears her bow over her right ear); grandfather Anthony (who paints as a hobby); and grandmother Margaret (who makes puddings). (It seems more than coincidence that the names of her parents and grandparents—George, Mary, Anthony, Margaret—echo that found in British royalty, who, like Kitty, also live outside London.)

Sanrio’s “fact”-filled details, including specific dates, laboriously flesh out the quotidian dimensions of this product’s life. We learn that Hello Kitty’s hobbies include tennis, piano (with ambitions to become a classical pianist, supported by her parents, who purchased a grand piano for the family in 1981),48 eating cookies her sister Mimmy bakes, and playing with her childhood “boyfriend” (hatsukoi, first romance) Dear Daniel. Furthermore, the anniversary book includes three pages of Hello Kitty trivia (“Kiti no Himitsu, Naze Nani Tribia” [Kitty’s secrets trivia]), formed around thirty-one questions (Sanrio 2009a:40–42). We learn, among other things, that Kitty’s favorite flower is a daisy (in Japan, symbolic of childhood), her favorite Christmas present is a teddy bear she received from her father in 1982, and the country she most likes to travel to is Japan, where she can wear a kimono. The more detailed the

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information, the more Kitty’s image solidifies into a living, breathing fictional character. Importantly, one of the trivia questions, question 27, is the query of many foreign observers: Why does Kitty have no mouth? Sanrio’s answer: Kitty has no mouth so that she may better reflect the feelings of those who look upon her (2009a:42). (The company does acknowledge that in some earlier animated renditions, Hello Kitty was drawn with an operating mouth.)

The first thing to note is that Sanrio creates and uses these biographical details in a process of constant authentication. Information acts as a narrative force, providing details that flesh out Hello Kitty (and her family and friends) as not simply a plush or logo, but an individuated, agentive being. Through these fictionalized details, kyarakutā become true, individuated characters with whom one may form relationships. Although American companies such as Mattel may create backstories for dolls such as Barbie, Sanrio provides a rich narrative and physical details for an anthropomorphized, highly stylized cat. Here lies the work of animism, imbuing animals, objects, phenomena—and Hello Kitty is all three—with a soul and lifeworld akin to humans. Some may interpret this endeavor as particularly Japanese. However, I also interpret this endeavor as particularly mercantile. The eagerness to suspend reality in the commercial production of an entirely fictionalized kyarakutā world suggests a culturally based investment in the viability of such a dreamscape of consumption.

Second, in all of these myriad details, Sanrio presents Hello Kitty as a middle-class quasi-British girl with “American accents,” living the quintessential, comfortable life in a white family (as if cats were racialized), coincidentally named White. The only elements that tie her to Japan are her blood type and an appreciation for certain things Japanese, such as wearing a kimono. The inherent ironies of such a fictive possibility do not faze her Japanese consumers in the least. Hello Kitty speaks to their own cosmopolitan possibilities in a Japanese version of the global world, enhanced by the horizon of both Sanrio’s and consumers’ imagination. Thus Hello Kitty is neither Japanese nor a cat; she is a kyarakutā.

Third, and most importantly for our discussion, this backstory draws her as not a mere blank slate; instead, she is knowable and knowing through her global typicality. Hers is the Euro-American-based (albeit Japanese re-created) storybook life that children in many parts of the industrial world may recognize and share. She sounds and feels familiar.

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Hello Kitty as in-filled kyarakutā jumps off the page and into the personalized relationality that lies at the heart of social communication and affect. Although I contend that many consumers in Japan and abroad do not know or care about the narrative details included in the anniversary book pages (or Sanrio’s website), what concerns me more is the fact that Sanrio took pains to create such a biography, thereby inviting the possibility of a particularistic relationship, consumer to cat, and cat to consumer. The details layer further dimensions by which a consumer may choose—or not—to engage with Hello Kitty as a personality.49

Fourth, the details of Hello Kitty’s biography position Sanrio’s cat exactly where she was always intended, as a global figure. It is, in part, as global figure that Hello Kitty fulfills the promise of her thirty-five years. Sanrio’s celebration of those years includes proof of just how global she is, even before a primarily domestic audience (i.e., the anniversary book in Japanese). In short, an important component of Hello Kitty’s middle-aged achievement lies in her popularity outside Japan, expressed in the anniversary book as “sekai-chū kara Love Call” (Love call from round the world). Here we find the “Love Call” cool-quotient affirmation of American female Hello Kitty fans, such as the singers Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, and Britney Spears; the actress Cameron Diaz; and the celebrity rich girls Paris and Nicky Hilton. The “Love Call” extends to everyday people, as well, in photos of Sanrio stores on every continent: New York, Hamburg, Kent, Paris, Bogotá, Seoul, Shanghai, Moscow, Dubai, and Oman. Hello Kitty’s strong Asia connection proves an important stronghold, expressed as a large drawing of Hello Kitty in pink qipao (cheongsam), waving at readers with the Mandarin greeting “Ni-hao” (How are you?). Calling Taiwan a “Kitty Tengoku” (Paradise), the article provides details on the Hello Kitty Resort Cottage, Kitty Café (serving Kitty Cake), and countless Kitty goods everywhere found in foreign Asian destinations. Clearly, Kitty’s thirty-five years in business could be marked most clearly by the breadth of her reach “everywhere.”

Sanrio’s Nostalgia: Creating the Intimacy of Looking Back

That reach extends not only laterally across oceans, but also backward in time. A large part of Sanrio’s celebration of Hello Kitty’s anniversary lies in creating and performing the very historicity of the cat, embedding her in each of her thirty-five years. To this end, all anniversary celebration narratives (Sanrio’s website and all three books) include a

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retrospective of Hello Kitty, tracing year-by-year changes. Sanrio’s website and publications emphasize Hello Kitty’s original 1974 image as a visage from one’s childhood. However, even as consumers may have grown older, Hello Kitty does not. She remains continually youthful, like the shōjo she represents. In fact, the Sanrio website provides two retrospective series: one for images and one for products. Through images, one may chart Kitty’s transition from the original 1974 seated Kitty in red, white, and blue, to the suddenly trendy 1987 “monotone Kitty” with Kitty in white outline against a solid black background, to the predominantly pink Kitty of the 1990s, to the thematic black, white, and pink Kitty of the late 2000s. The retrospective display of products includes key moments in product development, inevitably including the first coin purse, but quickly moving to the plethora of goods through the years. Just as 1987 produced the suddenly trendy black-and-white Kitty image, so, too, did products from that year onward include more and more goods for young adult women; these include black bikini underwear (1987), men’s neckties, to give as presents (1996), pink cell phone holders (1997), pink sake sets (1999), wine openers (2002), and Fender guitars (2007). The Hello Kitty 35th Anniversary Book even includes a retrospective of “premiums”—the free “small gift” attached to Sanrio packaging (Sanrio 2009a:32–33).

There is more than objects at stake here. By sketching the historic arc of products and design, Sanrio traces the development of a Hello Kitty lifestyle. The book Hello Kitty Memories displays the developing array of Kitty objects for use by adults (primarily women) in home decor, tableware, cooking, cleaning, entertaining, and relaxing (e.g., aromatherapy). The Hello Kitty 35th Anniversary Book illustrates “Yoga Kitty,” with both Hello Kitty and a human model assuming poses. In short, these books present thirty-five years of Hello Kitty as a lifestyle brand. Sarah Banet-Weiser’s work on the American children’s network Nickelodeon is useful for our discussion here. Banet-Weiser suggests that Nickelodeon develops as a “way of life” as part of a relatively new culture of branding “akin to other citizenship practices, such as national affiliation and loyalty” (2007:81–82). A Hello Kitty way of life touches each aspect of consumers’ existence, from day to night. And if one began as a consumer of Hello Kitty in one’s childhood, the opportunities for the Hello Kitty lifestyle extend through time, for as long as thirty-five years of Sanrio-based citizenship.

Thus, Kitty’s history becomes one’s own. This is why the Sanrio ret-

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rospective may speak with such poignancy to longtime fans. One may chart one’s own life through Kitty products: each object serves as, in Marita Sturken’s words, a “technology of memory,” each design a visual, Proustian “madeleine” (2007:9). Because Hello Kitty does not get older throughout her thirty-five-year history, she can represent eternal, blissful childhood, the perpetual shōjo—in other words, one of the most powerful sources of nostalgia in Japan. This kind of nostalgia making becomes nothing short of nostalgia marketing, as Kitty slips effortlessly into yet another bin of consumer desire. The beauty of Hello Kitty is that she never changes, yet never stays the same. Trading on the familiar, Hello Kitty’s adeptness rests in always providing the consumer with something new to buy. Sanrio thus fashions the thirty-fifth anniversary of Hello Kitty as a long-standing shopping opportunity managed through affective responses to a constructed, purchasing (or gifting) past, as well as looking ahead to the future.

That past can only be accessed through a sense of memory. In fact, Sanrio takes memory seriously as a central part of its business and a key element in the affective labor of “social communication.” Sanrio informally refers to what they do as omoide no o-shigoto (memory work)—the production of nostalgia. “Memory work” involves more than a sense of the past; it includes deliberate manipulation of affect, resulting in a positive imaging of that past. Furthermore, memory work, instead of being restricted to a person’s particular past, may be fictionalized as a general sense of the past that Hello Kitty’s consumers may or may not know firsthand. Sturken’s notion of cultural memory—“memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning”— informs our discussion (2007:3). Here, the cultural product of Hello Kitty imbues a faux-European storybook past with Japanese cultural meaning. This is memory as reworked image, marking someone else’s past (more to the point, an imagined version of someone else’s past) as one’s own. The constructed past, then, becomes a resource for nostalgia, packaged and commodified, fairy-tale style. For example, one of Hello Kitty’s 1985 product lines detailed as memory work in the anniversary book is named “Country Series” (Sanrio 2009a:37). Here the “country” is America, and the memory is of cherry pies baked as part of life in San Francisco (dubbed “American lifestyle”). Sanrio physicalizes this “memory” in deep “cherry” reds, sepia-tone backgrounds with checkerboard patterning, and the English words “Down Home; Kitty’s

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best home cooking” (2009a:37). This form of memory work creates and commodifies a fictive American (or British admixture) past as nothing more than a style resource. Nostalgia operates in two ways here: first, to pull the consumer back to her own childhood filled with Hello Kitty objects, and second, to remind us that those objects typically reference a storybook past set in England/America, with mothers who bake pies and fathers who tell jokes while smoking a pipe.

Nostalgia as a style resource situates “Hello Kitty the product” as ever the same, ever changing. The shifting “retro-intimacy” of Hello Kitty deliberately places Sanrio’s cat outside of time and within the highly marketable realm of commodified memory. This appeal—far more to adults, far less to children—demonstrates Hello Kitty’s many reconfigurations from her original coin purse image. In fact, she is all grown up, even as she remains a child. This neat trick of imaging occurs within the frame of Sanrio’s invention of the affective industry labeled “social communication.” Directly addressing a human need for connection, Sanrio positions Hello Kitty as, in effect, an enabler of communication, providing the decorative infrastructure of sociality (e.g., old-fashioned stationery, new-fashioned cell phone straps).

Through the disarming quality of kawaii, Hello Kitty embodies intimacy itself, whether through gifts or communiqués. That she does so with a global reach only adds to the luster and achievements of her thirty-five years. Why this cat? I argue that it is exactly Hello Kitty as enabler of intimacy—bridging people through “heartfelt communication,” prompting generative gifting through kawaii nedan (small gift, big smile), providing the affective labor of kyarakutā, appealing simultaneously to female children and adult women in their shared girlhood, spanning generations of consumers, leaping oceans to transnational fame, transcending years through nostalgia—that drives Sanrio’s marketing claims. At the very least, Hello Kitty offers the seeming “benignness” of kawaii as it sweeps through Japan and outward to global points beyond.

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