The review below is very well written and most importantly, from an objective perspective.
Hello Kitty's Silent March toward World Domination: 'Pink Globalization'
By
Scott Elingburg
Here’s the truth: I never gave much thought to Hello Kitty until my
young daughter became aware of her. Then, without warning, I was buying
Hello Kitty t-shirts, bedroom slippers, band-aids, toothbrushes, and
almost any thing else that bore her cherubic face and yellow nose. Then,
and only then, did I realize that Hello Kitty was so ubiquitous, so
unavoidable in popular culture, that she rivaled the pinnacle of Western
culture in presence: Disney.
Despite her omni-presence, however, I still don’t see her in
public; Hello Kitty has melted into the background, another part of the
landscape of our culture along with Walmart and Nike. And I’m no closer
to understanding how that happened than when I first began reading
Christine Yano’s Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific.
The fanaticism that surrounds Hello Kitty on all sides, from blind
hatred to unquestioning loyalty, is unfathomable. Yano, for all of her
meticulous research and personal communications with fans, Sanrio
employees, authors, and others, does an exceptional job of mining the
Hello Kitty multiverse. Despite her persistence, however, by the end of
the book, the surface has only been scratched. Yano, too, gets sucked
into the gravitational pull of the kitty and explores areas of lesser
interest or importance. For example, while it’s hilariously unsettling
to read about the Facebook user group, “I hate Hello Kitty”, and a few
outlying Christian churches that believe Hello Kitty is influencing
young children to deliberately disobey their parents, it hardly moves
the discourse of Hello Kitty’s worldly domination into a new light.
In other respects, Yano, has moved Hello Kitty into a new light by
digging below the surface and giving the pop culture icon her full
academic due. If popular culture is prone to disposable (mostly Eastern)
heroes and fads (e.g., Pokemon, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, etc.),
Hello Kitty is the exception to the rule. She has dominated from East to
West, in her native home of Japan all the way to Africa, Europe, and
the Americas. Integrated as part of Japan’s “cute” culture (kawaii), Hello Kitty has a history all her own.
Her changes have been minuscule—the removal of black outline, the
addition of a red bow—and Sanrio has basically kept with a formula of
non-branding: they don’t make waves, but consistently keep Hello Kitty
at the forefront with new items, they adopt a publicity model where
“finding out that a punk group has begun sporting Hello Kitty
paraphernalia does not necessarily cause excessive handwringing at
Sanrio; rather this maybe the cause for celebration, generating product
lines that build and extend Sanrio’s brand,” and they maintain that
happiness is what Hello Kitty is all about. Their mantra is their
slogan, “Small gift, big smile.” It’s almost enough to believe that Hello Kitty isn’t actually consumer product, but a self-defining icon with real feelings. Almost.
At her core, Hello Kitty is still a product on various levels—a
product of the “cute-cool” Japanese culture that borders eerily on the
realm of pedophilia, a product of innocence and appeal to sex workers
and children alike, and a product in the absolute literal sense, where
collectors and fans obsess over new Hello Kitty merchandise because “it
makes [them] feel happy.” (Much to Sanrio’s delight, because happy
customers spend money.) Yano hears the “happy” mantra over and over from
personal interviews she conducts, which, it should be noted, she
transcribes and includes rather than piecing them together in an
academic jumble. The personal interviews give Pink Globalization
an intimate feel, mimicking the personal connection that fans speak of,
instead of the cold, distance that academic theory brings to such an
intimate subject.
All of which point to one undeniable fact about Hello Kitty: no one can articulate exactly what it is about Hello Kitty that they are drawn to. Her’s is an unconscious connection, a subversive draw.
With any force as strong as Hello Kitty, this subversion is both
celebrated and reviled—a theme that Yano examines over and over, in a
multitude of examples. And yet, Yano’s book hits a big stride when she
explores the ripple effects of Hello Kitty among cultures and groups
rather than individuals. The positive and negative effects on
cultures—especially Asian-Americans and the gay community—are almost
palpable and expressed in outrageous ways. The ways that Hello Kitty
empowers and subverts the identities of others is an exploration that
deserves wider attention. And Yano, a chair of anthropology at
University of Hawai’i, Manoa, is in comfortable terrain to be our guide
to Hello Kitty’s effect (and affect) across her lovers and detractors
alike.
There are quibbles that I have with Yano’s book. It has a 40 page
introduction that can tedious. Though it’s a question of audience that I
don’t feel academia has successfully addressed: the net of popular
culture is cast wider than on insular academic topics, but its appeal is
made more narrow by stuffy elements of the text (i.e., academic
theory). Additionally, some of Yano’s personal communications with Hello
Kitty fans seem superfluous, not advancing the discussion beyond
collective recollections of personal experiences with Hello Kitty. And
the beginning and ending chapters of her book are the ones that sink
beneath their own queries, not the middle chapters that can be glossed
over for intro and conclusive punch.
Pink Globalization isn’t a primer for Hello Kitty lovers, it’s
a deep dive into the tale of the small feline that has dominated
culture from East to West—all without saying a word or making a sound.
Not every icon can make that claim, but, then again, not every icon is
Hello Kitty.
Source: here
