seven • Japan’s Cute-Cool as Global Wink

Chapter Seven

Japan’s cute- cool as Global winK

It is not so much Japan itself as a compelling culture, power, or place that gets signified (despite the fact that this is precisely what the Japanese government is trying to capitalize on in all the rhetoric and attention currently given to Japan’s new soft power in the globalization of J-pop). Rather, “Japan” operates more as signifier for a particular brand and blend of fantasy-ware: goods that inspire an imaginary space at once foreign and familiar and a subjectivity of continual flux and global mobility, forever moving into and out of new planes, powers, terrains, and relations.

—Anne Allison (2008:107)

On August 10, 2010, Hello Kitty rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange (nyse), kicking off the celebration of Sanrio’s fiftieth anniversary.1 The event was widely reported in global news media, but the following coverage of the event as the cover story for the August issues of License! Global is particularly germane to this book. “In celebration of Sanrio’s 50th anniversary, Hello Kitty along with Sanrio executives recently rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Kunihiko Tsuji, Sanrio’s chief operating officer . . . joined Hello Kitty at the nyse last Wednesday to ring the closing bell. A yearlong 50th anniversary celebration kicks off today, based on the Sanrio philosophy ‘Small gift, big smile.’”2 That philosophy has reached an apex of global marketing in yet another media opportunity. The article continues with more surprising Kitty sightings, this time in London, at a trade awards show, with mock casino and lounge and appropriately attired servers:

In other related news, a specially branded Sanrio installation will be on show at The Licensing Industry Awards in London on Sept. 9. . . . The deal includes sponsorship of the casino, which will offer Hello Kitty prizes for the first, second and third winners and a branded lounge area where guests can relax over drinks after the awards ceremony. Table service will be provided by waitresses dressed in Hello Kitty clothing. . . . New character images and Sanrio’s 50th anniversary celebration artwork will be projected within the area with free product samples.3

Key elements of the story encapsulate many of the practices and implications of pink globalization that we have been discussing. First and foremost is its positioning at the center stage of global marketing and multinational capital—in this case, at the nyse and at a London trade show. Second is its headline-making status. Hello Kitty and Sanrio in the twentyfirst century are newsworthy, capturing the spotlight through mediasavvy strategies such as this. Third, Hello Kitty’s (Sanrio’s) ubiquity— growing the brand in both products and meanings—has been enhanced through notable tie-ups with other global companies present at such a licensing industry awards show. The playground teems with co-branded partnerships that share and enhance products, images, practices, customers, and ultimately meanings. Growth, in fact, is a way of life for the “small gift, big smile” company, which constantly adds more products, more characters, more venues, even more artwork (chapter 6). Fourth and last, Hello Kitty is obviously no longer child’s play. Japanese Cute-Cool well surpasses its initial juvenile purview, extending to the far reaches of plausibility. Talk of a casino, branded lounge area, and waitresses in Kitty costume sounds more like Playboy material than a kindergarten playground. These four elements—global marketing, media spotlight, ubiquity, and adult play—constitute the force of pink globalization and the point of this book.

However, there is another component that is equally important, not mentioned in the article: customers. Consumers and fans run alongside production and marketing to flesh out the phenomenon as “fantasyware,” as Anne Allison puts it in the epigraph. It is not only the imaginary space of the “foreign and familiar” that Allison asserts, but working beyond into the terrain of the foreign as familiar (and yet importantly retaining its foreignness as part of its “cool”) that is the point here. Pink globalization suggests the possibilities of the foreign becoming as famil-

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iar as any—especially given the intimacy of cute—even while maintaining the distance of cool. The cool draws global consumers into a circle of familiarity. Any discussion of pink globalization must pay equal attention to diverse fan practices and meanings that define and play with this imaginary space, juxtaposing macroprocesses and microprocesses, boardroom decisions and consumer choices, global headlines, intimate conversations, and public or private Internet discussions. Our ethnography of pink globalization, by way of Hello Kitty, careens through these sites and practices while seeking a guided, if open-ended, path. In this final chapter, I examine macroprocesses— “Superflat” seductions, “Cool Japan” hype, soft-power buzz, and globalization—and weave these back into the micropractices of fans’ lives, particularly through the very winking presence of Hello Kitty.

Bad Boy Cool: Murakami Takashi and the Seductions of Superflat

One of the more prominent macroviewpoints from which we must engage Hello Kitty in the 2000s is that of the Japanese provocateurimpresario-artist, Murakami Takashi (b. 1966). Whereas the artists discussed in chapter 6 interact with Hello Kitty as a prompt to play in various ways, Murakami appropriates Hello Kitty as a prompt to generate controversy.4 By incorporating Sanrio’s cat and other Japanese pop culture icons, alongside works of related art by a coterie of friends, and curated in prominent exhibits in the United States, Murakami lobs what he considers to be atomic-bomb-sized barbs in the laps of global viewers.

The insouciance with which Murakami does so finds its origins in the art for which he is best known, first Japanese Neo Pop in the early 1990s, and its further development from 2000 onward as his self-styled “Superflat” movement.5 Japanese Neo Pop adopts the language of Japan’s hyperconsumerist popular culture and frames it through a politicized lens of critique. As Midori Matsui writes, “Japanese Neo Pop distances kawaii culture through the rational analysis of its popular icons. These artists deliberately adopt ‘childish’ gestures in order to make a subversive attack on the ideological structure that keeps the Japanese infantile. In that sense, the Neo Pop artists themselves are empowered critically, gaining a degree of mastery over the chaotic conditions of Japanese postmodernity” (2005b:216). Superflat builds on this “subversive

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attack,” adopting the visual language of flat, two-dimensional surfaces of digital technologies and Japanese animation. The flatness of the aesthetic surfaces parallels the flattening of (Western-derived) social realms that divide high art from pop culture. Murakami’s “Super Flat Manifesto” from 2000 culls some of the movement’s critical elements:

The world of the future might be like Japan is today—super flat. Society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two-dimensional. . . . One way to imagine super flatness is to think of the moment when, in creating a desktop graphic for your computer, you merge a number of distinct layers into one. . . . The feeling I get is a sense of reality that is very nearly a physical sensation. The reason I have lined up both the high and the low of Japanese art in this book is to convey this feeling. (2000:5)

Five years later Murakami continues the Superflat discourse: “So what is ‘super flat’? The words denote a flattened surface, the working environment of computer graphics, flat-panel monitors, or the forceful integration of data into an image. The flat reality left when Pop fizzled; a flattened, self-mocking culture. . . . I needed to look at what was flat, and why it had to be super” (2005b:153). The inchoate admixture of elements in Murakami’s grab bag of Superflat is deliberate and eclectic: popular culture, consumerism, art, technology, future, visuality, immediacy, physicality, Japan.

The links between high art, consumer culture, and cuteness came to a noteworthy apex in 2003, when Murakami collaborated with the Louis Vuitton label and created a spring line that featured smiling daisies and eyes in bright, saturated colors on a white or black background, intermixed with the company’s familiar logo. In April 2005 Takashi Murakami curated a major exhibit of Cute-Cool entitled Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture at the Japan Society in New York. The exhibit included works by Murakami’s coterie of artists and designers, as well as items of Japanese popular culture such as Hello Kitty (including a two-page spread in the exhibit catalogue, showing the “History of Hello Kitty” production designs from 1974 to 2004; Murakami 2005b:44–45, plate 17a), Godzilla, the robot Gundam, the action-hero Ultraman, and the robot cat Doraemon. Little Boy refers to the code name for the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Murakami’s choice of “Little Boy” as the title of the exhibit references what he believes Japan has become in relation to the United

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States—that is, a forever emasculated “little boy” by virtue of Article 9, Chapter 2, from the Postwar Constitution promulgated under the American Occupation, with its denial to Japan of the right to a military force.6

Calling Japan a “castrated nation-state” (2005a:141), Murakami believes that Japan has anesthetized itself through two contradictory but intertwined aspects of popular culture: (1) hyperviolence, such as monsters, explosions, Armageddon-like scenes of ultimate destruction; and (2) hypercuteness, in kawaii products and figures, such as Hello Kitty. Murakami finds the conjoining of these twinned tendencies in the figure of the otaku, a much-maligned, nihilistic misfit-geek who fetishizes schoolgirls. The otaku is the “deformed monster,” Japan: “We are deformed monsters. We were discriminated against as ‘less than human’ in the eyes of the ‘humans’ of the West” (Murakami 2005b:161). Japan’s global Cute-Cool, then, is the revenge of the otaku nation of Japan. Japan’s global Cute-Cool, according to Murakami, is nothing less than Japan crawling out from under the hegemony of the West and reasserting its own power. Marilyn Ivy comments: “Murakami advances the aesthetic implications of digital technologies and hypercommodification (whether East or West) but then maps it onto an older, well-worn politics of the nation-state and postwar history. That is, aesthetic possibilities mutate but the historico-political narrative stays the same” (2006:502). Thomas LaMarre agrees, pointing to Murakami’s oppositional structure between Western geometric modernism and Japanese “superflat” postmodernism: “What drops out is the possibility of Japanese modernity. . . . Evidently, superflat theory wishes above all to avoid dealing with questions about Japanese modernity and its relation to Western modernity. As such, superflat theory risks becoming yet another discourse on Japanese uniqueness (Nihonjinron), which celebrates Japan as always already postmodern” (2009:114).

Murakami’s Cute-Cool pushes the envelope of kawaii and Hello Kitty into alarming political undercurrents. As the Japanese art critic Sawaragi Noi writes of Neo Pop (and Superflat) in the Little Boy catalogue:

The true achievement of Japanese Neo Pop . . . is that it gives form to the distortion of history that haunts Japan—by reassembling fragments of [pop cultural] history accumulated in otaku’s private rooms and liberating them from their confinement in an imaginary reality through a critical reconstitution of subculture. In doing so,

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these [Neo Pop] artists have refused to take the delusional path of resorting to warfare like Aum [Shinrikyo, cult group who masterminded the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995]; instead, they have found a way out through the universal means of art, transferring their findings to the battlefield that is art history. In essence, Japanese Neo Pop [and Superflat], as exemplified by the work of Takashi Murakami among others, visualizes the historical distortion of Japan for the eyes of the whole world. (2005b:205)

That “historical distortion,” according to Sawaragi, Murakami, and aligned others, is the ongoing national emasculation, the not-so-hidden struggle of Japan coming to terms with what is construed as its own impotence vis-à-vis the United States. In Murakami’s hands, kawaii— whether approached straight on or ironically—takes on the mantle of Cold War divides.7 Hello Kitty and the pink globalization she enables straddle those divides.

Cool Japan and Soft-Power Kitty

Murakami is not the only one looking to Sanrio’s diminutive cat to accomplish big things. Michal Daliot-Bul notes the following sequence of events in 2002 that resulted in a governmental project known as “Cool Japan,” which emphasized youth-oriented, media-saturated popular culture, including Hello Kitty (2009:250–51). In February 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro, seeking new directions to deal with the decade-long recession and possibilities for leadership in the East Asia region, gave a policy speech emphasizing national development of intellectual property focusing on innovative and creative products. Capitalizing on what Douglas McGray labeled as Japan’s “gross national cool” in May 2002 that incorporated the Joseph Nye’s “soft-power” buzzword (see the introduction), the Japanese government officially and opportunistically jumped on the bandwagon, giving birth to what is called (after McGray) “Cool Japan.” In 2003, the Japanese Cultural Agency proclaimed: “In the twenty-first century, ‘soft power,’ which is the capacity to attract foreign nations by the appeal of lifestyle and culture of the nation, is more important than military power. Japan as the nation rich in attractive cultures is expected to make an international contribution through international cultural exchange and actively display the 21st century model of soft power” (quoted in Iwabuchi 2010b:142). Here is

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an answer to Murakami Takashi’s concerns of Japan’s emasculated, defanged state: relying on soft-power seductions, Japan does not actually need a military force. Cool Japan, aka Cute Japan, provides its own power—that is, influence, leadership, control. In this way, the Japanese government’s position coincides with that expressed by Murakami, both linking what I have been calling pink globalization to critical national and international realms.

Part of that power is economic, attempting to attract foreign tourists. Therefore, some of the governmental iterations of this Cool Japan as soft-power policy coincide with the “Yokoso! Japan” [officially, “Visit Japan”] campaign launched in 2003 by Prime Minister Koizumi.8 Such efforts call upon kawaii icons, including Hello Kitty, to represent Japan, as listed chronologically below:

January 2006—Japanese pop girl duo Puffy AmiYumi (Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura) appointed as goodwill ambassadors for the Visit Japan Campaign in the United States. With the slogan

“Come see our Cool Japan,” posters depict the two singers with long bleached hair, wearing multiprint bright red-and-pink kimonos, multiple black accessories, and cowboy boots, against a composite backdrop of famous Hokusai (1760–1849) woodblock prints featuring Mount Fuji and waves. March 2008—Ministry of Foreign Affairs created a new position of anime ambassador, naming the blue robot cat Doraemon to the position. In a media-saturated ceremony in Tokyo, Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura addressed the robot cat, “Doraemon, I hope you will travel around the world as an anime ambassador to deepen people’s understanding of Japan so they will become friends with Japan,” to which Doraemon (actor in costume) responded, “Through my cartoons, I hope to convey to people abroad what ordinary Japanese people think, our lifestyles and what kind of future we want to build.”9 May 2008—Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism named Hello Kitty as Japan’s official ambassador of tourism to China and Hong Kong. March 2009—Ministry of Foreign Affairs unveiled the new position of kawaii taishi, (ambassadors of cute), and named the models Misako Aoki, Yu Kimura, and Shizuka Fujioka as the first of these ambassadors. Appearing in official capacity at Japanese

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global events, they represent, respectively, “Lolita,” Harajuku, and schoolgirls-in-uniform fashions (see chapter 1).

In these efforts by the Japanese government, Hello Kitty shares company at the highest level with other kawaii icons to promote the nation. Tourism, nation branding, soft power, “gross national cool,” and kawaii coalesce as linked buzzwords of pink globalization. How do we interpret such actions on a national scale? What kind of nation branding is this? To what extent do we take the winking iconicity of Sanrio’s cat as Japan writ small?

The literature on nation branding—replete with the language of marketing—makes clear the centrality of “brand ambassadors.” Francis Buttle, a marketing researcher, discusses the importance of “strategy for countries . . . to appoint a network of brand ambassadors whose role is to advance the nation-brand at every opportunity. . . . A key issue when appointing brand ambassadors is to . . . truly reflect the personality of the country and the positive attributes that the nation wishes to project” (2008:72). The “positive attributes” of Cool Japan may be interpreted as “Marketable, Youth-oriented, Feminine, Playful, Pop Japan”—in short, a government-fueled, top-down version of pink globalization in which Hello Kitty plays a key role. Nation branding relies on what Iwabuchi calls “brand nationalism”—that is, “uncritical, practical uses of media culture as resources for the enhancement of political and economic national interests, through the branding of national cultures” (Iwabuchi 2010a:90). Indeed, foregoing older masculinized images of Japan at work, the Japanese government is branding the nation through younger feminized images of Japan at play. What is key here is noting who is doing the work of imaging: in this case, the Japanese government attempts to take a key role in creating its own millennial Japonisme specifically for soft-power purposes. More importantly, here is not only Japan at play, but Japan as play. In other words, branding Japan as playful Cute-Cool glosses over economic downturns, international controversies, and other hard-core realities.

Although a nation’s self-image may be internally important for pride, patriotism, and identity, what nation branding typically focuses on is the image that others hold. This derives from the fact that the concept of branding comes directly from the field of marketing, whose chief interest lies in wooing buyers. In other words, the product to be sold in nation branding is the nation itself, whose global marketability boils

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down to what will sell, to whom, and under what conditions. The conditions of the 2000s suggest the central place of Hello Kitty as playful, brand ambassador of Japan.

This is not to deny the bottom-up popularity and appropriation of pink globalization icons, as I have been discussing in this book (chapters 3, 4, and 5); these constitute the very conditions of nation branding. But it is to suggest the limited life span of government-sponsored brand ambassadors as sites of coolness. The fundamental assertion of this particular version of Japan as Cool—that is, ahistorical, depoliticized, sanitized—in fact, has many of its critics on edge (e.g., Iwabuchi 2010b; Lam 2007; Leheny 2006). Further, the stamp of approval—even the official spotlight—by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs may spell the cooling “cool” of the ambassador.10 As Sugiura Tsutomu of the Marubeni Research Institute notes, “We . . . must be sensitive to the possibility that there might be a saturation point where excessive cultural popularity and monopolization bring about repulsion” (2008:149). This is part of the gamble surrounding government sponsorship of the project: it must constantly gauge market forces in order to ride the crest of popular culture. It is more than market considerations at work in the uncoolness of Cool Japan. As Michal Daliot-Bul puts it, “When used by government agencies, Cool Japan becomes an oxymoron. It is stripped entirely of its particular potential to question and challenge culture” (2009:262). She may be overstating the case, since “cool” in a Euro-American sense may imply far greater impetus of resistant, countercultural expression than that accorded by a Japanese borrowing—with the help of Douglas McGray—of the word (see the introduction). Nevertheless, as Cool Japan wears the governmental uniform, it looks and sounds increasingly like newly mainstreamed culture. Indeed, young, “cool” people in Japan join others in sneering at Cool Japan by government dictate. To complicate matters further, the spotlight of “cool” includes its own passing, shaped by both cultural and market forces. Cool Japan, in other words, harbors inherent problems in remaining cool. The government is not the only one at fault. Alarm bells from other corners have sounded the impending decline of Cool Japan. The journalist Roland Kelts criticizes Japanese companies for having websites that are not friendly for non-Japanese consumers (describing them as “amateurish, hard to navigate, . . . dull” and exclusively in Japanese), resulting in “Japan’s pop culture branding gap” (2010).

An editorial in the Japan Times from August 15, 2010, and entitled

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“Promoting ‘Cool Japan’,” notes the government’s stepped-up efforts through the establishment of a Creative Industries Promotion Office in June 2010 within the Manufacturing Industries Bureau of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Kondo Seiichi, head of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, suggests that such governmental promotion works domestically and internationally: “While a bureaucratic-led push for creativity has its problems, any soft-power contribution Japan can make to the world will surely be welcome, especially if it can also stimulate renewed self-confidence and vitality within Japan itself.”11 It is this rebounded soft-power function that makes the government’s Cool Japan program—whether in ascension or decline—important for our analysis. The popularity of Japanese Cute-Cool goods abroad works to engender international influence, on the one hand, and national pride, on the other (Daliot-Bul 2009:259–60). This makes for an interesting twist upon Nye’s original concept. In stating “If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes” (1990:167), Nye did not take into account the case of Japan, which often looks to foreign others as a source of legitimation and thus pride in its own culture (see Monji’s remarks below). This says as much about Japan’s self-image as it does about any object—including Hello Kitty—seen as a source of national pride. Do all Japanese want to be known as members of a Hello Kitty nation? Probably not, but this kind of spotlight upon Hello Kitty (and other brand ambassadors) is less about numbers and more about a generalized positioning within and outside of the country of origin in the name of soft power. Pink globalization thus doubles as a strategic mirror upon Japan both to consumers abroad and to Japan itself. Hello Kitty as brand ambassador occupies a busy position, wooing both foreign others and Japanese themselves to the cultural sphere known as Nihon Burando (Brand Japan).

Globalization and Its Strange Bedfellows

The governmental agency directly responsible for “Brand Japan” in the 2000s is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with its director general of the Public Diplomacy Department, Monji Kenjirō, taking particular credit for nominating and promoting the kawaii taishi (cute ambassadors). Monji spoke publicly in response to a talk I presented at the International House of Japan on June 1, 2009, on Hello Kitty and pink globalization (Yano 2010b).12 A few days later, Monji reiterated his position on

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the government’s incorporation of popular culture in their soft-power diplomacy during an interview with me, saying much the same thing. When I spoke with him, Monji’s future plans were to extend the kawaii taishi program, identifying and adding new icons to the roster. In his mind, Cool Japan was going strong. Monji’s four main points in his public and private remarks were (1) contextualizing the Cool Japan program financially; (2) affirming Cool Japan as only one part of the government’s soft-power program of national promotion;13 (3) recognizing the role of overseas consumers, rather than the Japanese government, in fueling the popularity of Japanese pop culture; and (4) the governmental role in policing international copyright infringements and other legal issues. Monji concluded his public remarks about Japanese pop culture by saying, “It’s getting very popular overseas, and importantly, not many Japanese know about this phenomenon. We [Japanese] are quite surprised when they show the news that Japanese pop culture is so popular [overseas]. Many of us [Japanese] do not believe it. . . . It’s just like ukiyo-e [Japanese woodblock print]. We [Japanese] didn’t recognize the value of ukiyo-e until the Impressionists [Western artists] discovered it” (personal communication, June 1, 2009).14 And regarding who—Japanese government or foreign consumers—is in the driver’s seat, Monji asserts, “So it’s not that we [Japanese government] are exporting “Cool Japan.” It’s done by foreign countries [consumers]” (personal communication, June 1, 2009).

In a sense, Monji is right: Sanrio and Hello Kitty do not really need the Japanese government to gain global success. In fact, some people within Sanrio’s overseas branches do not see Cool Japan—or Superflat— as part of their purview. When I visited the South San Francisco offices in 2010, I asked a number of employees about Cool Japan. They had never heard about it. Although Murakami Takashi’s Superflat and the Japanese government’s Cool Japan tie Hello Kitty to the larger wave of popularity of anime, manga, and other elements of youth Japanese pop culture, those closest to production and consumption do not always share this assumption. A 2004 Anime News interview with Bill Hensley, the marketing director at the time of Sanrio, Inc., separates Hello Kitty from Cool Japan:

A. N.: The Japanese character industry has been increasing in it’s [sic] popularity in the American market in recent years. . . . [But] I’ve always seen Hello Kitty and Sanrio as existing out-

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side of this sphere of influence that is commonly associated to anime’s boom here which began growing in the 1990’s. Has Sanrio watched this phenomena and how has it affected your company’s approach to marketing Hello Kitty given it’s [sic] Japanese roots?

B. H.: Sanrio is a character brand developer and designer. We’re happy that many fans of anime are also fans of Hello Kitty or other Sanrio characters, but the Anime phenomenon has not affected the way we develop and market the Hello Kitty brand.15

According to Hensley and other observers in Euro-America, Hello Kitty may share some consumership with anime (and manga and other elements of Superflat and Cool Japan), but not necessarily the same spheres of influence and control.

That is why this book does not focus on Cool Japan or Murakami Takashi’s Superflat, rather taking as its subject matter the larger phenomenon of pink globalization, the spread of kawaii goods and images from Japan to other parts of the industrial world. Hello Kitty is an important nodal case study of that larger topic. Even when Japanese Cute-Cool loses its official cool, we can still discuss Japanese Cute and Hello Kitty within it as something that holds significant meaning in overseas consumer culture and fans’ lives. In short, I believe there is far more to say about Hello Kitty than the fickle status that Cool Japan might entertain.

Marketers, of course, always want to gauge the coolness factor, and with Hello Kitty and Sanrio the indicators are not always rosy. According to a 2009 ranking of Japan’s most popular characters by the Tokyo-based research firm Character Databank, Hello Kitty ranks a distant third to number-one Anpanman (character from television show) and numbertwo Pokémon (Tabuchi 2010). In fact, according to the Character Databank, Hello Kitty lost her number-one spot in 2002 and never regained that top status. This decline coincides with Sanrio’s overall shrinking sales since 1999. In fact, the bright corporate light for Sanrio may rests in its overseas markets—that is, specifically in pink globalization— accorded with approximately 30 percent of the company’s overall sales. As one analyst reports in May 2010:

The company’s overall sales in Japan fell 3.3 percent in the 12 months ending in March, Sanrio announced Friday, as both licensing and sales of goods slumped. Hello Kitty fatigue is hitting Japan first, and

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hard, the company indicated. But a one-time 28 percent jump in overseas sales—which Sanrio attributed to an accounting change, as well as several big contracts overseas tied to Hello Kitty’s 35th birthday celebrations—helped the company swing back to a net profit of 4.37 billion yen, in contrast to a loss of 1.50 billion yen the previous year. Sanrio now relies on overseas sales for 30 percent of its revenue, the company’s executive director, Susumu Emori, said Friday. (Tabuchi 2010)

News such as this sounds more alarming than the situation necessarily warrants for our study of pink globalization. A number-three position in character ranking in Japan still means that Hello Kitty can be found in abundance throughout the Japanese archipelago, even if two other characters may beat her out. An overall decline in sales does not necessarily mean that Sanrio runs the risk of going out of business, or that Hello Kitty will take that fatal plunge into obscurity. Our subject matter thus has a greater historical arc than last year’s sales, or even that of 2002; it takes a longer trajectory in commenting on a global trend without getting too caught up in the exact trendiness of it.

Winking Pink Globalization and Its Consumers

With the ongoing popularity as well as threat of precarious decline fresh in mind, let us consider some of the implications of pink globalization as a phenomenon that goes “the other way”—that is, from a country such as Japan to its overseas neighbors such as the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere. Throughout the book, I argue that Hello Kitty’s semantic flexibility rests not only in her often-commented, mouthless blankness, but also in the implications of her wink. Let me now embed that wink within decentered globalization as discussed in the introduction. I suggest that when the direction of globalization is reversed, certain kinds of power assumptions also shift. Therefore, Japan does not align itself exactly with the hegemons of the United States or Europe, or in quite the same way. In spite of the presence of Hello Kitty in shopping malls, toy shops, and boutiques outside of Japan, she does not raise the threat of cultural gray-out nor does she become a source of World Trade Organization protest (in spite of critics discussed in chapter 4). Although part of this reaction (or lack thereof) may rest in cuteness itself, a significant part also rests in an embed-

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ded “exoticization”: even when she is familiar, she is different. Hello Kitty does not enflame “wanna-be Asian” desirings in the same way, or at least to the same extent, that an American icon such as Mickey Mouse or Barbie might instigate “wanna-be whites,” primarily because of the parallel, supported images, ideologies, and global cultural capital attendant upon Mickey’s or Barbie’s presence that Hello Kitty does not share. The historical connection between modernity and the West (or in terms of popular culture, America) bypasses Sanrio’s cat, detaching it from larger bodies or images of power. Granted, there may be some wannabe Japan-lovers who latch onto Sanrio’s cat, as they do to other elements of Japanese popular culture, but these kinds of consumers do not define Sanrio’s fan base. Instead, Hello Kitty’s appeal is more typically contained within the boundaries of her constituency. Here are the limits of this version of Japan’s soft power.

Rather than a force field of influence, Hello Kitty is more readily taken as a wink—upon powerful culture industries, kitsch aesthetics, and fetishized consumption—even while participating in some of these same overlapping processes. Part of this wink rests in pinkness itself as girl culture incarnate by which “pink may become the new black”—that is, the position of power, here with an edginess seeking to overturn or at least challenge structures. The power of pink is the power of the “global girl,” whose sometime subversive intentions may be laid upon the Japanese paws of Hello Kitty as an alternative expression. Those paws rest in a rich consumer culture of meanings, appropriations, and aesthetic endeavors. Part of this wink rests in a Japanese corporation expert in straddling both sides of multiple fences, embracing contradiction, taking subversion as its own, maintaining stocked shelves in toy departments, teen fashion, and luxury boutiques.

The wink suggests the power of pink globalization, especially framed as play. A play frame raises out-of-the-ordinary possibilities: one may take license beyond expectation, beyond norms, beyond values, even while retreating into the shelter of jest. Here is where possibilities for edginess in pink globalization erupt. More important, “wink as play” holds the power to silence or incorporate one’s critics. One may do or say something reprehensible—but add the wink and one’s transgression retreats into the ludic realm of forgiveness. Alternatively, invite critics and fans alike into the fold to create subversions of the very kitschiness of the cat (chapters 4, 5, and 6). These kinds of actions shade cool as corporate expression. The tongue-in-cheek wink makes coconspirators

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of the viewer and the viewed, the critic and the fan, the child and the subversive adult.

One can see the politics of the play frame when asserted on a national scale. Branding Japan as kawaii—or even winking toward this position—raises serious questions of international relations and global responsibilities. Kawaii as the cute, the infantile, the feminine, and the sexual trivializes historical enmity and controversial realities of the nation Japan. “Cute-Cool Japan” thus serves up a frilly affront to responsible engagement with people’s lives. Granted, this brand of Japan may be but one of many simultaneously being promoted by the government; nevertheless, it is one that grabs the headlines globally. Performing Japan as a corporate, feminized wink highlights the contradictions of positioning pink globalization as both powerless (that is, linked to youth and females) and powerful (that is, having economic impact and some cultural influence). This gives “pink as black” an unwanted twisted presence more specifically as “pink co-opted by black.”

What becomes a commodity fetish most? Simply put, excess. I suggest, however, that this is excess that can productively lead us to examine semantic borders and their very movement, just as we might scrutinize national edges. In this way, the twists and textures of kawaii as Japanese Cute-Cool (including its anticute cuteness) challenge the saccharine flatness of American Cute. The “atmospheric density” (see Leika Akiyama’s statement in chapter 6) arises from cultural categories that embrace both children and female adults, rather than separating them into noncontiguous spheres. Some see this as enabling in creating such a malleable object as Hello Kitty. Others may see the sharing of boutiques by children and female adults as transgressive in its categorical ambiguity. Yet the wink defines the very fetishism of Hello Kitty. Rather than selecting from a slate of options, the wink allows us to embrace the slate as always and already contradictory, the tongue never straying far from the cheek.

If adult consumers and marketers may be said to be performing a Hello Kitty wink, I ask, whose wink is it? I contend that it is a wink of the contact zone, shared by various players—from adult consumers to designers, marketers, salespersons, bloggers, activists, artists, and the objects themselves—situated in particular times and places. Here is Henry Jenkins’s participatory culture, in which the boundary lines between producers and consumers are purposely blurred (2006). “Kitty Mama” (Yamaguchi Yūko) calls upon Japanese fans to help her shape the next newest trends for Hello Kitty. Sanrio calls upon cutting-

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edge artists globally to expand their vision of Hello Kitty as denizen of the edge. Further corporate tie-ups with heavy metal (also known as visual-kei, that is, a group known for its highly visual, radically stylish self-presentation) Band X Japan produces “Visual Brand Kitty” in 2009, complete with half-shaved, half-dyed-blond, over-the-top hair and a trademark Kitty bow. The blurring lends ownership of the product to consumers and artists and other artist-as-products, even as notions of exploitation and manipulation recede. Although global fans may not participate in this exchange as fully as their Japanese counterparts, their ownership rests in appropriations of their own making, from “ethnicized” identities to gendered ones to expressions of alternative sexualities (see chapters 3 and 5). This is a moving wink, shifting between margins and center, between girls and their audiences, between subversion and commodification, between Japan, Asia, and Euro-America. Pink globalization challenges us with its very mobility.

No one player holds complete ownership of the wink or its meanings. Rather, each partial owner contributes emergent and multiple meanings. As one set of meanings and uses may be asserted, others get poached, occluded, and subverted. The tumble of meanings is matched by the proliferation of new goods constantly emerging, official and unofficial. This plethora of meanings and goods destabilizes what one might assume about the object. Indeed, Hello Kitty as an all-encompassing symbol remains as elusive in her meanings and implications as her mouth, whose absence inspires these musings. Just when we think we have a handle on her, she slips into yet another corporate guise, or becomes appropriated in a novel way.

Yet she is always Kitty, even as her guises and appropriations slip and slide the semantic terrain. Indeed, the hypermeanings of Hello Kitty—that is, Hello Kitty as the uber-cute, the uber-feminine, and, for some, the uber-Japan—are part of her fetishization. She exists in her very excess, playing it multiply, exoterically. Throughout this tumble, she still manages to shock through the strength of her iconicity. The only way in which consumers might be continually shocked by a Hello Kitty vibrator or gun or tattoo is when these items overturn the image of the mouthless cat: the items undermine our expectations set in a mode of overdetermined market meanings. Each shock reconditions us to a new equilibrium of expectations, a newly calibrated zone of meaning. This gives new meaning to the name of several Sanrio stores in the United States, “Sanrio Surprise.”16 Such constant newness and shock

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cause one female punk admirer to declare, “Hello Kitty is rock ’n’ roll!” By that, she points to the edginess that rock occupied in its infancy, but her statement may have been more prescient than she realized. Indeed, as Hello Kitty wears hats both corporate and individual with equal panache, Sanrio’s cat shares the stage with many pop culture expressions who have moved from the margins to the center. Hello Kitty and the pink globalization she leads may be rock and roll to some, but she is inevitably, unabashedly, irreverently, celebratory Japanese Pop. Pure product, her logo appears seemingly everywhere. Look through the Hello Kitty lens—literally and figuratively—and every point of light transforms into Kitty. This is the wow factor, achieved simply as a lowtech wink that is both artful and artless. Moreover, as pop, she provides the ultimate shifting commercial wink upon ourselves. That wink of Japan’s mouthless cat provides important lessons on the politics, pleasures, and aesthetics of foreign-as-familiar commodity play in this age of global desirings.

Postscript: Headlining the Work of Happiness with a Conscience

In response to Japan’s catastrophic earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant disaster of March 3, 2011, Sanrio joined other groups internationally to assist in the relief effort. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary practices—or are they so extraordinary? On June 29, 2011, the company announced, in cooperation with the exclusive Austrian jeweler Swarovski Crystal, that it would auction nine specially designed, limited-edition Hello Kitty figurines, each standing twentycentimeters (7.9 inches) high, studded with 19,636 crystals, priced at 1.2 million yen ($14,800), with proceeds going to the Japanese Red Cross. The Swarovski ceo Robert Buchbauer explained, “She’s just a nice, cute, adorable character, . . . a symbol of happiness. . . . I think it’s very important these days to transmit some positive messages to the people, and I think Hello Kitty is perfect” (Oh 2011). Hello Kitty—icon of friendship and “happiness”—temporarily abandons her wink as she joins the ranks of global celebrities with a conscience. She does so by placing herself exactly in the infantilized position of cuteness—doing the adult work of disaster relief as a “symbol of happiness.” And in the process of doing such work, Hello Kitty grabs yet another headline.

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