Exploring the cultural and commercial phenomenon of Hello Kitty, Christine Yano's work, Pink Globalization traces the inception of Sanrio's most distinctive product from a simple vinyl coin purse in the 1970s to an omnipresent staple of Japan's kawaii segment that has captured droves of consumers at home and abroad. Yano's style is at once academic and tongue-in-cheek, interrogating the concept of Kitty as a nexus of both performative and subversive femininity, but also an icon of hugely successful soft power whose worth is nearly $7 billion yearly, all but outshining and outrivaling her Western counterpart Mickey Mouse as a global household name.
Yano does not lose sight of the anthropological lens, particularly her analysis of Kitty as the cutesy, benign, "chibified" emblem of post-war Japan that is being deliberately (as she insists) posited abroad under the guise of innocence, sweetness and sincerity – all the while tipping a "wink" to her consumers about her dual and ambivalent nature.
Unfortunately, this discursive angle becomes a tad difficult to swallow the more Yano prolongs her analysis. Yes, there is no denying that the lurking behind Kitty's appeal may be an economic strategy cloaked in sweet rhetoric and visual playfulness. Yet the idea of her as being symbolic of postfeminist subjectivity – a girly-girl brand cleverly complicit in her own commodification and subtly exhorting her female consumers to juxtapose independence with coyness as a means of tweaking parochial power structures to her own advantage – is a troubling modality in and of itself, but also positively reeking of neoliberal narratives and lipstick feminism à la Sex in the City, with "girl-power" still entwined to male sexual codes.
More disquieting still is the idea of a sexual dimension to Hello Kitty's marketing, with innocence purportedly being consumed as yet another translation of marketized sexiness. Then again, perhaps this interpretative license is further proof of Kitty's success as a blank slate. Depending on who appropriates her, from children to adults, from academics to advertisers, she can take on any meaning we assign her – and within that cipher-like quality lies the secret to her value.
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