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Pink Globalization
HELLO KITTY'S TREK ACROSS THE PACIFIC
By Christine R. Yano Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5363-8
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
KITTY AT HOME
Kawaii Culture and the Kyarakuta Business
I define kawaii as things that could make me a fantastical world. For example, there are always great dreams that I want to get, but it is impossible to get the dream. Kawaii gives me some hope. I also think kawaii products or persons let me express my maternal instinct. It is limited to girls and women. It is part of our nature.
—M. Y., twenty-eight years old, personal communication, February 10, 2005
I personally think that kawaii concept has something to do with an expressionless face. I used to like Hello Kitty and Miffy [a Dick Bruna character] when I was still in junior high school. I especially liked Miffy. She had a no-expression face, but I still thought she was really cute. Stuff I really thought cute all had in common that they have no smile or other expression. Hello Kitty also has no smile or anything.
—S. N., thirty years old, personal communication, March 17, 2005
There is some notion of obedience or weakness in the concept of kawaii. We [Japanese] often use the word kawaii for babies and puppies that are smaller, weaker, and thus need to be protected. Kawaii has lots of components of femininity, such as obedience, dependency, and weakness.
—T. M., twenty-seven years old, personal communication, March 8, 2005
Basically, kawaii is associated with infancy that covers feelings of the need to protect the object. In other words, kawaii is a symbol of dependency. However, girls started to describe so many things as kawaii recently, so my definition of kawaii changed to include the meaning of "trendy."
—K. A., in her thirties, personal communication, February 8, 2005
Hello Kitty in the 2000s is one of the most widely known commercial kyarakuta (character) in Japan, and kawaii is the most common descriptor of her. The Japanese women in their twenties and thirties quoted above whom I interviewed may have different definitions of kawaii, but all agreed that Hello Kitty falls squarely within the concept. She represents variously fantastical dreams, hopes, expressionless faces, maternal instincts of protection and nurturance, weakness, docility, dependency, childhood, and, more recently, trendiness.
Although Hello Kitty has had her ups and downs in popularity in Japan, she is definitely not a fad and seems destined to stay for the long haul. This is just as Sanrio would have it. According to Sanrio officials I spoke with in Tokyo, what the company wants is a product with high recognition, broad placement, and long-lasting staying power (Toh matsu, personal communication, May 30, 2002). In this, Sanrio has succeeded superbly. If one seeks a national source and hub of pink globalization, then one must begin here. Over three decades after her "birth" by designers at Sanrio, she has become so recognizable in Japan that one need take but a few synecdochic parts—two ears and a bow, for example, or just the tilted bow itself—to conjure up the cute icon in her entirety. Increasingly, Sanrio itself pushes for this kind of visual shorthand, abstracting the cat, enlarging the bow, and making her referentiality ever more subtle. Reducing her elements to greater abstraction has given her even more visual power.
Hello Kitty can be found in department stores, gift shops, subway kiosks, toy shops, and souvenir stores throughout Japan. One can purchase high-ticket items such as Hello Kitty diamond-encrusted jewelry, customized cars and scooters, and computers, as well as low-priced erasers, cell phone straps, chopsticks, and facial tissue. No matter the size of one's pocketbook, there is a Hello Kitty item to buy. And this availability has expanded and continued for well over three decades. Consumers see Hello Kitty as much an icon of the 1970s as of the 2000s, with a devoted multigenerational fan base in Japan.
In other countries, times, and contexts, such ubiquity might run the risk of oversaturation and critique. However, this is far less the case in Japan, where more is better—at least for marketers and a significant number of consumers. The appetite for consumerism and tolerance for sheer commercialism runs high as public symbols of prosperity and achievements of middle-class modernity, even considered American style (Yano 2004:132–33; Yoshimi 2000:221). Within this framework, to be modern is to identify with a class position that allows one to purchase with measured ease, if not abandon, especially given Japan's extended economic recession since the 1990s. This backdrop to consumer culture helps explain the relative lack of critique of Hello Kitty, Pokémon, and other figures of popular culture in Japan—at least when juxtaposed with very vocal and public critics in Euro-America (see chapter 4). Consumption in Japan works as a public performance of status, achievement, knowledge, and identity, banking on the myth of middle-class homogeneity that increasingly faces dismantling in the wake of recessionary exigencies. The resulting "ambivalent consumer" finds herself caught between historic moralities of frugality, progressive cooperative movements, what is labeled "American-style" excessive buying, and the ludic pleasures of exuberant consumerism (Garon and Machlachlan 2006:14–15). Our background look at the development of Hello Kitty consumption in its country of origin must take these elements of the changing Japanese market and consumer culture into consideration.
This is not to say that Japan is unique or that Sanrio's clever marketing is universally beloved there. Neither of these is true, and some critics in Japan, as elsewhere, decry Hello Kitty's ubiquity. But it is to suggest that such sheer excess and pervasive commercialism have been normalized in Japan in the 2000s as everyday consumer culture. In large urban areas and even in small towns, no space is too small, no human arena too obscure to avoid the clutter of advertising and products. The jangling hyperactivity of marketers fuels this bustle of consumerism, even amid a less than robust economy in the 1990s and 2000s. Finding Hello Kitty everywhere is part of that bustle. In fact, Hello Kitty may be a sign of exactly the less-than-prosperous times as the perfectly affordable souvenir, as the purchase for oneself or another that reproduces the "small gift, big smile" company ethos as not only an economic necessity, but more importantly, a moral stance. In the 2000s, her purchase may signal that belt-tightening ways need not erode good cheer, social relations, or even intimacy. In short, Hello Kitty has become an expectation of the changing economic, political, and social landscape scattered throughout contemporary Japan.
But how did this come to be? What are the conditions by which a product once associated only with youth and females could be transformed into a viable part of the generalized marketplace? What is the changing context in Japan that could give rise to the phenomenon of Hello Kitty everywhere? What, in other words, are the elements of cute culture in Japan that have enabled the success of this product? In order to answer these questions, one must situate Hello Kitty first and foremost in the complex jumble of goods and practices of the 1970s and 1980s, a period of unprecedented growth, technological prowess, and cultural nationalism, otherwise known as the bubble period of Japan's burgeoning economy. The bubble allowed middle-class practices to become more than the norm; they came to represent an assumption and hallmark of national achievement as "homogeneous Japan." The unofficial public doctrine was that Japan had built a "classless" society by virtue of its widespread prosperity. Although this was far from the truth, the rise of Japanese cute culture, including Hello Kitty, should be seen within the discursive assumptions of a shared middle class and its unspoken aspirations.
Our discussion follows multiple strands from this period, beginning with the figure of the shojo (young unmarried female) as person, symbol, fetish, object, and, ultimately, consumer, from the 1970s on. The shojo and her "girl culture" marked the rise of kawaii as a galvanizing touchstone of female, youth-oriented, affective, aestheticized, commodified Japan. These qualities circumscribe a genre of products known as fanshii guzzu (Japlish; literally, "fancy goods," typically frilly commodities oriented to girls), of which Sanrio has been a chief purveyor. In fact, Sanrio's complete makeover in the 1970s from a dry goods business dubbed "Yamanashi Silk" to fanshii guzzu specialist with a linguistically ambiguous name has been the key to its corporate success. As a company, Sanrio shifted its target consumer from an older group of women engaged in practical household activities, such as sewing, to a younger group—that of the shojo—with discretionary income enabling the purchase of the frilly accoutrements to a not-yet-housebound lifestyle. The range of goods of Sanrio concomitantly shifted from the practical to the decorative (including the decorated practical), and from the sober to the cute, accompanying a new generation of consumers. Eventually, as the acceptability of cute spread to a wider age range, Sanrio's market extended back again to the housewife, who could purchase cute items for her kitchen as well as her young child. Although not seamless, this spread tended to skip middle school and high school years during which Hello Kitty was considered too infantile for teenage cool. Part of the story of this chapter lies in how Hello Kitty became acceptable once more to a group that temporarily shunned it. This chapter details the process by which cute became cool in Japan.
The shift to fanshii guzzu may be related to another group of commodities that arose during this period, kyarakuta guzzu (Japlish; "character goods"). Whereas fanshii guzzu were meant to appeal strictly to females, kyarakuta guzzu could appeal to both male and female youth. The development of kyarakuta as commodities for sale, as well as their proliferation in the public visualscape, lends an anthropomorphized sense of kawaii-based empathy to contemporary Japan. In this chapter I analyze kyarakuta as part of a new mode that mixes emotion and identity within a commodity aesthetic of kawaii. The rise of Hello Kitty in the mid-1970s, then, must be contextualized within several interwoven strands of cute: shojo, fanshii guzzu, kawaii, and kyarakuta. These form the shifting backdrop by which we may more fully grasp the pervasiveness of cute-cool culture—and Hello Kitty within it—in contemporary Japan.
Another strand important to understanding Hello Kitty in Japan is an older extant culture of gift exchange (including souvenir) and sociality. As Sanrio puts it, the company is a purveyor of gifting in Japan. Thus, assumptions of the central place of gifts in establishing and maintaining social ties fuel Sanrio's marketing strategies. The sociocultural premium placed upon these ties makes Sanrio's position as purveyor of gifts unassailable. Gifts form not only the rationale behind Sanrio's sales, but also guide the company's interactions with its customers. According to Sanrio, a successful transaction between customer and company is not purely a rational, economic practice; rather, it is part of an ongoing social relationship that accrues with each sale. This relationship generates future brand loyalty. The gift culture of Japan, then, seals the Sanrio deal—facilitating relationships between people, as well as between customers and the products they purchase.
As a case study in the ways in which these strands intertwine, I note some of Sanrio's activities surrounding Hello Kitty's thirty-fifth anniversary, celebrated from 2009 to 2010. These form a significant apex of kawaii goods and consumer-driven lifestyle that is Hello Kitty's purview in Japan. The corporate celebration activities glorify Hello Kitty as both a domestic and international icon, representing the ultimate in what might be known in a global setting as Japanese Cute-Cool. Hello Kitty as Japanese Cute-Cool signifies youth-oriented, feminine Japan, which has gained global popularity in the 2000s. In short, pink globalization finds peak natal expression as corporate culture in these carefully designed and publicly executed paeans to Japan's quintessentially CuteCool icon.
Shojo, Fanshii Guzzu, and the Creation of Girl Culture in Japan
Our discussion of the development of cute culture centers around the shojo as an actual consuming figure, as well as a complex symbolic space before the public eye. In parallel with Daniel Cook's discussion of the historical structuring of childhood through the market idiom of the children's clothing industry in the United States, so, too, might the development of the fanshii guzzu industry in Japan be analyzed as part of the structuring of the "girl" or girl culture in Japan, of which Hello Kitty is iconic (2004). Cook's analysis demonstrates ways in which a capitalist society develops a demographic category of person in part through marketing and consumption practices. In glib terms, if the "hat makes the man," then here the fanshii guzzu makes the "girl" or shojo. But how does that making through marketing take place? The steps involved in developing shojo consumers are threefold: (1) create a sense of the shojo symbolically, (2) ensure that the shojo is an active consumer, and (3) extend consumer citizenship—that is, a sense of national purchase as membership in the buying club of Japan—to her by offering goods that are attractive and affordable, such as Hello Kitty. This scenario, however, does not do justice to the role of the shojo herself. The development of shojo culture in the 1970s and 1980s includes the role of the shojo in developing her own expressive means dialectically, from the home and streets to the corporate boardroom and back again. Here, then, besides existing as a commodity, Hello Kitty acts as a highly manipulable symbol by which shojo may define and perform themselves. The historical structuring of the shojo in contemporary Japan suggests both growing "girl power" and public concern (even moral panic) for policing her limits (Kinsella 2005:145). This shojo web of ambiguity and ambivalence provides Hello Kitty with a broad range of meanings and uses.
Creating the shojo has been a historical process. Here, instead of focusing on her Meiji era (1868–1912) beginnings (see Robertson 1998: 63–65), I focus on her postwar configuration within the context of rising economic and national-global power of the 1960s and 1970s. The iconicity of the shojo developed through media such as books, magazines, plays, songs, film, television, manga, and anime. In many of these depictions, the shojo is simply a girl-child, often with infantilized facial features (not unlike Hello Kitty herself, except perhaps for the size of the eyes): large, round eyes, outsized in proportion to an inconspicuous nose and small mouth. The shojo as a girl-child functions as a nostalgic figure for adults who see in her a state of natural grace and immanent possibilities for the adulthood that lies just ahead. Quite simply, she is Japan's innocent girl next door.
Jennifer Robertson argues that historically the category of the shojo "implies heterosexual inexperience and homosexual experience" (1998:65). In other words, shojo innocence assumes intimate ties ("passionate, but supposedly platonic") with other girls and women, while relegating boys and men to a separate, more distant sphere (68). This kind of highly acceptable same-sex intimacy typically occurs in school among sports team or club members. However, in some depictions from the 1970s on and particularly by the mid-1990s, hints of heterosexuality fall within the realm of shojo purview, not so much as subject herself, but as object of voyeuristic fascination. During this time period, manga artists and others begin to draw her body as changed from that of flat-chested girl-child to the eroticized category of sex-child with womanly breasts, buttocks, and long legs (Masubuchi 1994:83). The erotic charge lies in the eerie, Photoshopped quality of the image: she has a child's face and a woman's body. Let me note here that the visual depiction of shojo eroticism only placed in bodily terms what some would argue was already there in unspoken heteronormative pedophilia (see Allison 1996:29).
The real or fictive nature of the sex-child image matters less than her public circulation as symbolic dream girl, at least for some men. It also lies in the purported fleetingness of the condition, as all too soon the child becomes an adult. The attraction, then, at least for her pedophilic admirers, is not for the woman but for the child. And it is as child that she becomes precious as a transitory figure threatened by impending adulthood. That threat can be performatively quelled through masquerade: adult women may dress as children, speak or act as children e.g., the figure of the burikko, the woman with high-pitched baby talk who feigns the child, primarily to appeal to men), or cling to symbols of childhood (e.g., Hello Kitty) (Miller 2004b:148). This masquerade sets the stage for performances of shojo-the-virgin, remade. Sanrio aids and abets this, especially with the development of goods for the adult female market from the late 1970s on. These include Hello Kitty stockings, makeup, sanitary napkins, and even condoms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pink Globalization by Christine R. Yano. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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