How Hello Kitty Conquered the World; The cutesy Hello Kitty character came to be popular with everyone from small children to motorcycle gangs

April 12, 2013, 2:11 p.m. ET

How Hello Kitty Conquered the World

The cutesy Hello Kitty character came to be popular with everyone from small children to motorcycle gangs.

By MEGHAN KEANE

Hello Kitty, Japan’s most recognizable cartoon cat, prefers to be seen and not heard—a consequence of being drawn without a mouth. Created by Japanese merchandiser Sanrio in 1974, Hello Kitty is made up of nothing more than a few simple strokes: a black circle with ears, two button eyes, whiskers and a lopsided bow. Yet those features have been imposed on millions of products in the decades since, and millions of fans around the world use the image as a canvas for their personal expression. Hello Kitty has served as a mascot for adult women, gay men and punk enthusiasts. While most cartoon characters have a distinctive personality—Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald, Garfield—Hello Kitty is a cipher.

Pink Globalization

By Christine R. Yano
Duke, 336 pages, $24.95

Initially marketed towards young girls, by the 1990s Hello Kitty had tapped into a tide of tongue-in-cheek adult nostalgia. Today Hello Kitty’s image and products can be seen in the hands of everyone from small children to motorcycle gangs. Hello Kitty products range from stationery to stuffed animals to miniskirts, as well as a surprisingly popular “personal massager.” It’s often difficult to tell when Hello Kitty fans are being ironic, or even post-ironic: A website called Hello Kitty Hell, which mocks absurd Hello Kitty paraphernalia, ended up enticing flocks of Hello Kitty fans as readers.

In “Pink Globalization,” Christine R. Yano tries to explain how all this came to be. A professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, she has spent a decade conducting research and interviews, and “Pink Globalization” is a text-heavy tome defined by long blocks of winding interviews and statistics, as well as much exploration of the ways that Sanrio exploits its top moneymaker. Unlike litigious American megabrands like Disney, DIS 0.00% for instance, Sanrio takes a much more laissez-faire approach: Since 2004, the company has allowed a cadre of modern artists to have their way with Hello Kitty’s visage without any mediation from the corporate giant.

Many feminists find Hello Kitty to be an example of a submissive, infantile undercurrent of Japanese culture. Other detractors see her simply as an example of manufactured corporate sweetness. Perhaps the best explanation for her popularity, however, was inadvertently provided by an overheated religious website called Hell of Kitty, which warned that the cat “invades children’s vulnerable hearts exactly through the weaponry of cuteness.” And who can resist that?