The globalization of Japanese culture through Hello Kitty
Hello Kitty is on stationary, pajamas, backpacks, food; there is even a USC X Hello Kitty merchandise line featuring lanyards and enamel pins of Hello Kitty mixed with our school logo in various designs. She is a simplistic, mouthless, humanoid cat who has become an internationally recognizable character adopted by children and luxury brands alike. Hello Kitty was created in Japan by Sanrio Company in 1974, and became the face of Japan’s kawaii aesthetic. Kawaii refers to the Japanese pop subculture of being cute. Despite being consumed in different cultures, the reason why Hello Kitty as a product translates globally is because her novelty is appealing to capitalist culture. To narrow the scope of this essay, I focus on the development of the kawaii subculture in the context of Japanese escapism. Then, I compare the cultural context of American consumers of Hello Kitty, and how the global audience uses Hello Kitty to distort the perception of Japanese culture and people. Japan’s post-war escapism that were the origins of kawaii products like Hello Kitty did not globalize alongside Hello Kitty. Instead, capitalist cultures gravitated toward her novelty and led to a blind consumption of kawaii, creating stereotypes that led to sexualization of school uniforms and fetishization of youth and submissiveness.
Escapism is the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities — in post-war Japan, there were economic and social forces that pushed people to feel a need to escape from the realities of life. The general sentiment toward Japan in once-Japanese colonies is negative, and propaganda causes people to associate Japanese people with their country’s history. Even nowadays, in 2019, a Korean province wanted to place the label “This product was produced by a war crime company,” on certain Japanese-produced products (Kang). When Japan rebuilt its economy after WWII, global trade exposed exposed Japanese citizens to anti-Japanese sentiment that was previously filtered out through closed-door policies. Japan’s unique identity as an East Asian imperialism country led to a unique form of racism towards Japanese people. The Japanese public had no agency to change the global sentiment against Japanese people or government, thus creating a desire to turn away from this harsh reality. Furthermore, Japan’s 1973 oil shortage created a workplace restructure, resulting in “worker fatalities, most often from heart failure, stroke or suicide,” from working 60 or 70 hours a week (Hunt).This work culture led to Japan’s cultural approval of hard work, and the term karoshi emerged: death due to work. The monotony, bleakness, and stress from expectations to sell one’s soul to work was another push to find refuge. Finally, more geared towards individuals, is the increase of responsibility as one comes of age, and the unpleasant reality of failing to meet expectations. This touches upon the Japanese sentiment mono no aware, a bittersweet sadness associated with transient beings — for example, youth because aging and time cannot be reversed. In many cultures, youth is perceived as beautiful because it is fleeting, and people often desire to relive or recreate a period of blissful ignorance and no responsibility — especially when people fail to meet mature responsibilities. An example of societal expectations are the expectation for women to do housework or bear and take care of children when they mature. These unpleasant realities in Japanese life made it so when kawaii gained popularity, it could also help people escape from their life and find refuge in kawaii.
The seed for kawaii began with student protests in 1968 against the government. Educational institutions banned an illegible round and cutesy handwriting style, so it gained popularity as a protest against authority — especially since students disliked the government’s aggressive imperialist image that paved way for global racism towards Japanese people. Students further protested by reading manga (comics) and watching anime (cartoons) rather than consuming academic readings. By the 1970’s, the kawaii subculture had taken root in Japan — it started from consumption of children’s media, and extended into dressing more childish, using childlike stationary, and purchasing everyday products emblazoned with childish colors and characters. Kawaii represented youth, innocence, and charm, but on a darker flipside, is “brutally applied to frailty and even physical handicap as a marker of adorability” (Kerr). These ideals appealed to a society looking for refuge from the darkness of war, politics, racism, and societal pressure to work and bear unwanted responsibility. Consuming kawaii products satisfied a desire to relive a blissful youth, thus appealing to mono no aware. Kawaii also fulfilled a subconscious need to feel innocent and blameless — not perpetrators — of imperialist violence, as it associated innocence and helplessness with the consumer. When Sanrio Company introduced Hello Kitty in 1974, she was primed for success as the epitome of kawaii and capitalism. A cat with infantile proportions was easily placed on household items, stationary, and packaging. Japan’s globalizing economy led to increased disposable incomes, and people purchased novel Hello Kitty items to fulfill their escapist desires while engaging in capitalism.
When Hello Kitty came to the US in 1976, she stood out in the US’s vast commercial toy industry, and continues to be successful due to her foreign origins and adorable design. She was originally marketed towards young girls due to her childlike and pink aura, though any American could easily engage with Hello Kitty-branded objects because she has no mouth and therefore no associated language. There was no language barrier; her minimal appearance was unassuming and was palatable to Americans. Users projected their feelings onto her ambiguous expression, an advantage over Barbie who forces her users to feel happy because of her smile. Americans had little exposure to Japanese culture previously, so Americans were engrossed by the novelty of Hello Kitty as a representation of a “mysterious” culture. Besides her adorable appearance, Hello Kitty was “made by an Asian company, so unlike Barbie, it was cool [for Asian Americans] to have this Asian cartoon” (Wong, for Time). As Hello Kitty moved beyond the boundaries of Japanese consumerism and escapism, she transitioned from a Japanese cultural demand to a market strategy throughout commercial industries: a capitalist appeal to the positive connotations of youth. Hello Kitty was branded on Cup Noodles, EVA Air passenger planes, and Nike Airs. She is ubiquitously recognized across social classes, but consumers no longer see the original context in which Hello Kitty was created. Of course, she provides a sense of representation and pride for the Asian American minority, yet this representation is still rooted in capitalism rather than educating about Asian American culture. Hello Kitty is blindly consumed for novelty, which projects and generalizes kawaii onto Japan, similar to how Asian countries generalized government imperialism onto Japanese people. Hello Kitty’s commercial success in America has negative implications for Japanese culture and stereotypes.
Capitalism pushed Hello Kitty away from her origins, which furthers stereotypes and misunderstanding of Japanese — and extensively Asian — culture through kawaii. In America, and the global stage, consumers of Hello Kitty and other kawaii products do not recognize the darkness in Japanese society that pushed them towards reliving their youth. Her globalization increases her experience as a cross-cultural and societal icon, but this creates a perception that kawaii is Japan. Through Hello Kitty, people could believe that Japanese culture is encapsulated in kawaii: consumption, cuteness, helplessness, innocence, physical handicap, and charm. A song by American punk singer Avril Lavigne called “Hello Kitty,” references kawaii: “Kawaii/Hello Kitty, Hello Kitty, You’re so pretty/ Hello Kitty, you’re so silly” (Lavigne). Although the song and music video were not intended to be malicious, she used imagery that reinforced stereotypes about Asian women and kawaii, including the western stereotype that Asians look similar, or that Asian women are submissive. Online forums showed that Japanese listeners and viewers of this video were not offended by the images portrayed — the complication occurs when the American public consumes this media with no education about Japanese culture. Americans could twist the idea of physical handicap in cuteness and generalize it to Asian women, leading to microaggressions and racism towards Asian people in workplaces and other public scenarios. These stereotypes could also lead to fetishizations of youthful references, such as school uniforms, which could lead to dangerous and racist actions towards students. There is no perfect way to prevent capitalist cultural distortions, since as Americans we still enjoy Hello Kitty branded products — however, we can take steps to recognize these implications of cultural globalization and prevent the racism that could ensue from misconceived perceptions of foreign cultures.
Hello Kitty represents globalization of Japanese culture. As Hello Kitty ages, she collects the culture that people place onto her, and gains a global cultural depth that she would never have gotten if she had stayed in Japan. Hello Kitty’s reception in Japan now is more than an avenue of escape from the dark undertones of the post-war society — Japanese people take pride in her success of bringing Japanese culture to the world. In the United States, Hello Kitty picked up the persona of an icon of representation for Asian Americans who felt lost and disconnected, but capitalism also rebranded Japanese escapism into another product that furthers stereotypes and racism in the United States.
Works Cited
Lavigne, Avril. “Hello Kitty” Youtube.
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Kang, Tae-jun. “One South Korean Province Wants to Tag Japanese Firms as ‘War Criminals’.”
The Diplomat, The Diplomat, 22 Mar. 2019,
https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/one-south-korean-province-wants-to-tag-japanese-firms
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Kerr, Hui-Ying. “What Is Kawaii — and Why Did the World Fall for the ‘Cult of Cute’?” The
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https://theconversation.com/what-is-kawaii-and-why-did-the-world-fall-for-the-cult-of-cute-67187.
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