CHAPTER 1

KITTY AT HOME

Kawaii Culture and the Kyarakuta 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, butit is impossible to get the dream. Kawaii gives me some hope. Ialso think kawaii products or persons let me express my maternalinstinct. 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 withan expressionless face. I used to like Hello Kitty and Miffy [a DickBruna character] when I was still in junior high school. I especiallyliked Miffy. She had a no-expression face, but I still thought shewas really cute. Stuff I really thought cute all had in common thatthey have no smile or other expression. Hello Kitty also has nosmile or anything.

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

There is some notion of obedience or weakness in the concept ofkawaii. We [Japanese] often use the word kawaii for babies andpuppies 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 ofthe need to protect the object. In other words, kawaii is a symbolof dependency. However, girls started to describe so many thingsas kawaii recently, so my definition of kawaii changed to includethe 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 commercialkyarakuta (character) in Japan, and kawaii is the most common descriptorof her. The Japanese women in their twenties and thirties quotedabove whom I interviewed may have different definitions of kawaii, butall agreed that Hello Kitty falls squarely within the concept. She representsvariously fantastical dreams, hopes, expressionless faces, maternalinstincts of protection and nurturance, weakness, docility, dependency,childhood, and, more recently, trendiness.

Although Hello Kitty has had her ups and downs in popularity inJapan, she is definitely not a fad and seems destined to stay for thelong haul. This is just as Sanrio would have it. According to Sanrio officialsI spoke with in Tokyo, what the company wants is a product withhigh recognition, broad placement, and long-lasting staying power(Toh matsu, personal communication, May 30, 2002). In this, Sanriohas succeeded superbly. If one seeks a national source and hub of pinkglobalization, then one must begin here. Over three decades after her"birth" by designers at Sanrio, she has become so recognizable in Japanthat 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 iconin her entirety. Increasingly, Sanrio itself pushes for this kind of visualshorthand, abstracting the cat, enlarging the bow, and making her referentialityever more subtle. Reducing her elements to greater abstractionhas given her even more visual power.

Hello Kitty can be found in department stores, gift shops, subwaykiosks, toy shops, and souvenir stores throughout Japan. One can purchasehigh-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 ofone's pocketbook, there is a Hello Kitty item to buy. And this availabilityhas expanded and continued for well over three decades. Consumers seeHello Kitty as much an icon of the 1970s as of the 2000s, with a devotedmultigenerational fan base in Japan.

In other countries, times, and contexts, such ubiquity might run therisk of oversaturation and critique. However, this is far less the case inJapan, where more is better—at least for marketers and a significantnumber of consumers. The appetite for consumerism and tolerancefor sheer commercialism runs high as public symbols of prosperity andachievements of middle-class modernity, even considered Americanstyle (Yano 2004:132–33; Yoshimi 2000:221). Within this framework, tobe modern is to identify with a class position that allows one to purchasewith measured ease, if not abandon, especially given Japan's extendedeconomic recession since the 1990s. This backdrop to consumer culturehelps explain the relative lack of critique of Hello Kitty, Pokémon, andother figures of popular culture in Japan—at least when juxtaposedwith very vocal and public critics in Euro-America (see chapter 4). Consumptionin Japan works as a public performance of status, achievement,knowledge, and identity, banking on the myth of middle-classhomogeneity that increasingly faces dismantling in the wake of recessionaryexigencies. The resulting "ambivalent consumer" finds herselfcaught between historic moralities of frugality, progressive cooperativemovements, what is labeled "American-style" excessive buying, and theludic pleasures of exuberant consumerism (Garon and Machlachlan2006:14–15). Our background look at the development of Hello Kittyconsumption in its country of origin must take these elements of thechanging Japanese market and consumer culture into consideration.

This is not to say that Japan is unique or that Sanrio's clever marketingis universally beloved there. Neither of these is true, and somecritics in Japan, as elsewhere, decry...