“Hello Kitty is not a cat” stretched across a Student Union Theater screen in wide letters on Thursday.
The Kazuki Fukuda-Abe endowed lecture welcomed Christine Reiko Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, and her lecture on “Kawaii Diplomacy: Hello Kitty, Innocence, & Politics of Scale.”
In her presentation, Yano demystified the misconceptions about Hello Kitty and deconstructed the character’s diplomatic power as a Japanese icon of cuteness.
A fan in the crowd waved a pink, compact Hello Kitty mirror as Yano analyzed how the character evokes more human qualities than feline ones.
“Looking at that mirror, you see both reflections of yourself and Kitty, and maybe the interconnections between selves and kitties,” Yano said. “So that even when Hello Kitty’s popularity in Japan waxes and wanes, as it will, it’s the popularity outside of Japan that can become a rebounded kind of mirror upon how great we are, upon ‘kawaii.’ ”
“Kawaii” is Japanese for cute and is often used in context to describe aesthetics that are adorable and lovable.
Yano was curating an exhibit called “Japan’s Empire of Cool” at the Japanese American National Museum when Sanrio explained that Hello Kitty is more than a cat.
Yano explained how she gained insight into Hello Kitty’s true identity after corresponding with Sanrio, the Japanese company that created the character, and focused on producing kawaii stationery, gifts and accessories.
“Sanrio came back and said, ‘You know we’d rather not emphasize that and we rather people think of Hello Kitty [as] not necessarily a cat, but more like a best friend or little girl or something like that,’” Yano said.
In addition, Hello Kitty is a perpetual third-grader who is three and a half apples tall and grew up with an all-white family in London, Yano said.
“If you have, like, Hello Kitty as, like, a Japanese figure, but in reality, her identity is not. She’s basically, like, from London, which is pretty interesting,” English senior Brix Aguinaldo said.
Despite Hello Kitty’s fictional heritage, she remains a cultural icon to Japan, placed in the center of politics to secure a more unified, diplomatic appearance.
Hello Kitty is the official tourism ambassador of Japan to China and Hong Kong since 2008 and cultural ambassador since 2017, Yano said.
“This kind of soft power around innocence, around Hello Kitty is effective even within Japan, because . . . She becomes a source of Japanese pride for themselves,” said Yano.
Students in the crowd reflected on their own experiences being a Hello Kitty fan and how Hello Kitty’s symbolic innocence affected their social interactions.
“They always held a different type of, I don’t know . . . There was different treatment because people knew that because I liked Hello Kitty, because I was really girly, not to hurt my feelings,” liberal studies junior Gillann Mae Buena said.
Yano further emphasized Hello Kitty’s marketing is a way to encourage empathy, giving her a socially universal power.
“In all of our cynicism, in this day and age, of a kind of dearth of empathy, in which we might find it difficult to connect with each other,” Yano said. “Maybe by way of cuteness is not a bad resource.”
