Hello Culture

Everybody is entitled to a least a couple of feather-brained obsessions – like beer-mat collecting, cloud watching, all manner of compulsions related to furniture positioning or actually watching Formula One. So don’t think me a complete twit when I reveal that pretty stationery is the one bourgeois extravagance that I cannot do without.
Maybe it’s just the whiff of the adhesive at work, but my heart skips every time I open the pristine, unsullied pages of a (typically pink) note-pad. My longstanding hands-down favourite kind of pretty paper, though, the one that thrills me most, the one that kick-starts the song Dylan wrote for Orbison on my internal jukebox, bears a small Japanese kitty-cat logo.
Now entering her thirty-first year, Hello Kitty, the unbearably winsome cartoon feline with a bow, has long since come of age as a brand. Happily, my own pussy-worship begins and ends with the stationery but a quick, unsavoury jaunt around e-bay confirms that it’s a kitty’s world out there. (It also confirms that you can indeed get twenty dollars for worn knickers in the adult section, but that’s a story for another day.)Hello Kitty fetishists can pleasure themselves by getting up in the morning to the strains of their mewing Hello Kitty alarm clocks, setting their Hello Kitty toaster to four, texting their mates on their Hello Kitty mobile, pulling on their Hello Kitty leopard skin legwarmers (yes, they do exist), watching Hello Kitty erotica with famed Hello Kitty pornstars, Kiko Wu and Bianca Lee, or get their own slice of the action with Hello Kitty vibrators.
As this last option suggests, this camp, kiddie-friendly cat is a guilty, girlie indulgence for many females far older than Kitty’s original kindergarten audience. Presumably with this demographic in mind, the official authorised Kitty biography makes no mention of sex-toys, preferring to dwell on Kitty’s home in London, England and her rather fainthearted hobbies, which include reading and “eating yummy cookies baked by Kitty’s twin sister, Mimmy.”
Of course, the truth is rather less warm and fuzzy. Kitty actually hails from Japan’s Sanrio Company Ltd. and she makes around a billion dollars annually for her creator, Shintaro Tsuji. According to Ken Belsan and Brian Bremner, the authors of Hello Kitty – The Remarkable Story Of Sanrio and The Billion Dollar Feline Phenomena, much of the brand’s gargantuan financial success can be attributed to Tsuji’s exceedingly good timing.
For one thing, Hello Kitty’s appearance in 1974 happily coincided with the birth of Japan’s kawaii culture – the national obsession with all things super-cute. Bored housewives stuck out in the new suburban sprawl of the ‘70s, while their salarymen husbands toiled on Japan’s economic miracle, were immediately seduced by Kitty’s homey charms, as were their daughters, who could always afford the pocket money prices.
Meanwhile, in the West, Kitty’s totally kitsch aesthetic and melting adorability gained her a hip, ironic following. No surprise that she’s adorned the arms of more female celebrities than Colin Farrell. Gwen Stefani, mad old Mariah Carey and the Destiny’s Child threesome have all been witnessed teetering toward award ceremonies carrying $15 Hello Kitty sequined purses.
In the face of such unrivalled success and dodgy celebrity endorsement, one rather creepy question remains. How can we all find a cartoon creature so cute when it doesn’t have a mouth? Oh, the hours of sleep I’ve lost pondering this issue.
There’s something sinister about the notion of a mouthless kitten, yet every time you gaze at her little button eyes and whiskers, you still feel all gooey inside.
Maybe, just like with Kylie, it’s the blankness we like, but I’m not alone feeling freaked out about it. Conceptual artist Takashi Murakami dismisses all kawaii culture as part of the Japanese obsession with surfaces and etiquette, and has created menacing versions of Kitty to illustrate his point. Elsewhere, performance artist Denise Uyehara has critiqued the submissive image of Asian women in her show Hello (Sex) Kitty; Mad Asian Bitch On Wheels. Not exactly the stage role Kitty was born to play.
Of course, if you have lots of time on your hands, there are any number of eccentric academic papers out there, which variously explain away Kitty’s lack of mouth with reference to a post-colonial propensity for mimesis, patriarchal brutality, and cultural infantization. My personal favourite theory, though, comes from Taiwanese Professor, Yu-Fen Ko. According to his ripping paper, ‘Hello Kitty And Identity Politics in Taiwan’, written shortly after a McDonalds Kitty promotion provoked riots, the enigmatic cat lacks a mouth because, as Baudrillard had it, ‘All consumption is founded on a lack that is irrepressible.’
Yep, that’s just what we were all thinking. Well, that and how totally cute the stationery is.