It’s not quite on a par with finding out that Santa isn’t real or that you’re adopted or, perhaps, finding out that those smiley dolphins beloved of hippies and teenage girls everywhere are really murderous pack-rapists. Or that penguins are rampant sex fiends and otters are “disease-ridden, murderous, necrophilic aqua-weasels”.
Still, the revelation that Hello Kitty is not in fact a cat has managed to shock and disappoint a great many people. But Sanrio Company is adamant.
The moon-faced creation that adorns everything from pencil cases to pajamas the world over is, in fact, human.
“Hello Kitty is a cheerful and happy little girl with a heart of gold,” brand owner Sanrio says on its website.
Perhaps it’s one of those things, like tentacle porn being a thing; well known to Japanese but which Westerners have long lived in blissful unawareness of.
The shocking revelation came to light when a Hawaii-based academic specializing in the epitome of “kawaii” (“cute” in Japanese) asked Sanrio to fact-check captions for an exhibition she was curating to mark the 40th anniversary of Hello Kitty.
Christine Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii, told the Los Angeles Times that she “was corrected — very firmly” by Sanrio that Kitty was not a cat.
But does that mean that Hello Kitty is just an ordinary human? It might seem so.
“Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature”[…]
“It is a 100-percent personified character,” a Sanrio spokesman told AFP in Tokyo. “The design takes the motif of a cat, but there is no element of a cat in Hello Kitty’s setting.”
Sanrio certainly has a wealth of biographical information about Hello Kitty.
Her real name is Kitty White, he explained, and she was born in southern England on November 1, 1974. She is a Scorpio and blood type A.
She has a twin sister, Minny White, and lives in an unnamed suburb of London with father George and mother Mary, according to her profile on the web.
Despite her whiskers and pointy ears, just like the rest of her family, Kitty has her own pet — a “real” cat named Charmmy Kitty.
Her life story has always been there, the spokesman said, adding the personification is meant to make her fans feel closer to the character “as a friend”.
“Personified character” might be the clue. It seems that Hello Kitty is an anthropomorphic character: a human-like character with animal characteristics. Like, you know, whiskers and pointy ears. A “catgirl”, perhaps, without the ecchi (“naughty”) associations. Rather, Hello Kitty is perhaps the most famous icon of Japanese kawaii (“cute”, “adorable”) culture.
The first Hello Kitty animated outing, Hello Kitty’s Furry Tale Theater, features an anthropomorphic supporting cast including penguins, bunnies, seals and mice.
Hello Kitty was designed by designer Yuko Shimizu (who, tellingly, also went on to design another feline creation, Angel Cat Sugar).
Although it is speculated that Hello Kitty has origins in maneki neko, the “beckoning cats” or “lucky cats” so familiar in Asian shops and restaurants, Shimizu’s immediate inspiration was Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and Alice’s cat, Kitty.
Aside from her whiskers and cat’s ears, Hello Kitty’s most notable feature is that she lacks a mouth. According to Sanrio, that is so that people can “project their feelings onto the character [and] be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty”. Kitty’s mouthlessness also means that she “speaks from the heart” and communicates friendship to people across the world without being bound by any language.
Certainly, Hello Kitty has become a cult phenomenon around the globe: besides girls’ accessories and shojo (girls’) manga, there’s Hello Kitty clothes, jewellery and airliners. The Hello Kitty Fender Stratocaster guitar is a much-sought-after item, played by musicians from Zakk Wylde and Slash to Dave Navarro and Courtney Love.
Just don’t mistake her for an actual cat.
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