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BOOK
REVIEW
The cat who turned kawaii into cash
Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline
Phenomenon, by Ken Belson and Brian Bremner
Reviewed by Gary LaMoshi
 According
to her official biography, she was born in London on November 1, 1974, but
she's still in the third grade and remains a quintessential Japanese icon. She
weighs the same as three apples, has a twin sister named Mimmy (who wears her
hair ribbon on the right side instead of the left), loves to play in the
forest, practice the piano and bake, and she has no mouth. Hello, Kitty.
More prosaically, the simple image of the white cat with the oversized head,
created by Sanrio Inc designer Yuko Shimuzu, has been plastered on 20,000
products from baby bibs and book bags to vacuums and vibrators and generates
about half of Tokyo-based Sanrio Inc's US$1 billion in annual sales, along with
counterfeit revenues in the tens of millions. Even then, a crackdown on pirates
in Singapore generated the headline "Hello Kitty pounces on copy cats", proving
that whatever Kitty touches comes out cute.
In Hello Kitty, Japan-based US journalists Ken Belson and Brian Bremner
trace Kitty's roots to Sanrio patriarch Shintaro Tsuji. His friends in the
government of remote Yamanashi prefecture got him started promoting local silk
and vegetables in the 1950s. But by 1962, Tsuji had expanded into rubber
sandals that featured a flower design, reportedly observing, "If you attach
added value or design to the product, they sell in a completely different way."
As a result, he began commissioning cartoonists to create designs, eventually
hiring his own to avoid paying royalties. Tsuji also obtained Japanese rights
to Snoopy from Peanuts for Japan and exclusive (money-losing) import deals on
Barbie dolls and Hallmark cards.
Kitty's face first appeared commercially in 1975 on a clear-vinyl coin purse
with the word "hello" written in red letters above it. With hardly any
storyline, Kitty's meaning remains solely in the eyes of the beholder,
embodying the 1970s mantra that "less is more". Hello Kitty products enjoyed an
initial success that petered out during the 1980s. But their resurgence in the
mid-1990s resulted from several factors, including the dawn of Japan's Parasaito
Shinguru No Jidai (Age of the Parasite Single), young adults,
especially women, opting to postpone adulthood and public testimonials from
Japanese and Western pop stars, including Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey.
A pair of gaijin with Japanese wives and one-time BusinessWeek
colleagues, Belson and Bremner start out their story strong, sharing rich
insights into Japanese urban living. For example, Japan uses visual images as a
means of expression far more than US society. And gift-giving is widespread,
even among Japanese youngsters, creating a large market for so-called fancy
goods (think of Hallmark's non-greeting-card items) that will delight and amuse
recipients at affordable prices. The authors propose that something in Japan's
water must foster a love for all things cute among females; even the Japanese
word for "cute" - kawaii - is a cutesied-up version of the more formal
term.
Unfortunately, insights quickly peter out after the introduction and opening
chapters, which would have been sufficient for a coffee-table book featuring
photos of Hello Kitty products and users. If subsequent chapters had been
submitted to a flinty magazine editor such as Bremner, they most likely would
have been kicked back with a request to find a unifying theme to drive the
material and do more original research instead of churning secondary source
material.
Absent that firm editorial hand, anecdotes passing for insight get repeated
without elaboration or analysis, such as the unsubstantiated claim that Bill
Gates offered $5.6 billion to buy the rights to Hello Kitty and the mad rush on
McDonald's in Singapore and Hong Kong during Hello Kitty promotions. The book
also veers into cool Japanese topics such as manga comics, anime, video
games and J-pop music without convincingly linking them to Hello Kitty.
Belson and Bremner also set out key benchmarks then fail to deliver. For
example, though they highlight the question of what will happen to Kitty and
the company when Sanrio's septuagenarian founder Tsuji retires, their final
conclusion is simply: gee, who knows? Similar insights are brought to bear on
the questions of why Kitty succeeds where other characters fail and how
Sanrio's marketing has been able to maximize Hello Kitty revenue without
turning the phenomenon into a fad.
In a further departure from journalistic best practices, the book includes 242
footnotes, more than one per page, placed inconveniently at the end of each
chapter. Nearly all unnecessarily and unhelpfully explicate items that
journalists regularly handle without footnotes - for example, by writing "In an
interview, Tsuji said ..." The footnotes seem to reach for gravitas through
form rather than substance. Where readers would welcome a valuable insight to
explain how someone named Brian J McVeigh became chairman of cultural and
women's studies at Tokyo Jogakkan College, for instance, that footnote merely
repeats a reference citation already given in the text.
Sadly, beyond the first couple dozen pages, Hello Kitty emulates the
same formula Sanrio has used with its ubiquitous feline: here's something on
the surface, and don't ask us for deeper meaning.
Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline
Phenomenon by Ken Belson and Brian Bremner, John Wiley & Sons,
Singapore, 2004. ISBN: 0-470-82094-2. Price: US$24.95. 210 pages.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our
sales and syndication policies.)
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