Thinking Deep about Hello Kitty

A review of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific, by Christine R. Yano, Duke University Press, 2013

Japanese pop culture is not just a consumer fad or a passing attraction. It has become a research topic worthy of academic lectures and scholarly publications. This interest for new things Japanese was demand-driven and linked to transformations in North American and European universities in the past twenty years. Students enrolling in Japanese language classes or Japanese studies departments grew up alongside anime figures and manga characters coming from Japan. Their early exposure to Japanese popular culture and commercial products led them to request teachings that would reflect their childhood experience and teenage interest. Anthropologists and cultural studies scholars were better equipped to address this new demand than the literature scholars and historians or political scientists that have traditionally dominated area studies departments. Rather than working on texts and archives, they use ethnographic fieldwork as the preferred means of data collection. They are interested in the production and circulation of cultural objects as bearers of meaning and values. They do not draw a sharp distinction between high and low culture, between marketized commodities and authentic creations. For these new scholars, observers of the contemporary should not reject the mundane, the commercial and the transient. Rather, they should pay attention to everyday objects and popular productions as “goods to think with.” By doing so, they are able to notice emerging trends and societal changes that have broader implications for the understanding of contemporary societies.

Can Christine Yano prove she’s a real anthropologist?

Even so, choosing Hello Kitty as a research topic may have raised some eyebrows in Asian studies departments. Sanrio’s merchandising icon is the archetype of what scholars usually brush off as irrelevant for their studies. The commercially-driven, superficial and childish phenomenon of this kitten figure adorning various consumer products surely cannot be taken as the topic of a serious academic study. It can at best provide a case study for a business class on brand marketing, or an illustration in an introductory course on Japanese culture’s global reach. But certainly no book can be published on such a mundane topic. Or can it? Christine Yano is aware she took risks in choosing Hello Kitty’s reception in the US—what she calls “pink globalization”—as the focus of her study. As a nasty comment gleaned over Twitter puts it, “some years ago anthropologist Christine Yano proved #hellokitty wasn’t a real cat, which made many readers doubt she was a real anthropologist.” Such remarks may have been inspired by the jealousy of colleagues who saw Yano reach popular success, not really in terms of book sales, but through invitations to give lectures, attend fan conventions, and curate exhibitions—all activities that usually lie beyond the ambit of most anthropology professors. Critics may also point to some flaws in the methodology—this is a research-lite, easy-fieldwork book that is overly reliant on Internet sources—, lack of fact-checking—Yano takes at face value the anti-Hello Kitty rant found on a satirical parody website based around a fake fundamentalist Baptist church—and writing style that mixes professional jargon and journalistic catchwords.

How can the author prove she is a real anthropologist while at the same time remaining true to her chosen topic? Her first impulse is to take Hello Kitty very seriously. Her book won acceptance in a prestigious university press series by showing all the trappings of serious scholarship—the footnotes, the bibliography, the references to theory and drafting of new concepts. At the beginning of every chapter, Christine Yano raises theoretical issues by way of rhetorical questions, and then purports to answer them based on accumulated data and complex reasoning. She pays tribute to past scholarship and quotes from all anthropologists who have studied Japanese popular culture—Anne Allison, Laura Miller, Thomas LaMarre, Brian McVeigh, Jennifer Robertson, Marc Steinberg—as well as from many cultural critics and feminist scholars. She discusses key concepts in detail, presenting the genealogy of popular notions such as pink, cute, cool, and kitsch, as well as exotic words such as kawaii, asobi, fanshii guzzu, kogyaru, shôjo, and kyarakutâ. She offers her own theoretical constructs: “pink globalization”, “Japanese Cute-Cool”, “the wink”. She knows that in doing so, she loses some readers along the way—some Internet comments lambast her book as “a boatload of jargon”, and particularly resent her savant references to Adorno and to Marx. But this is the price to pay to gain admission in the exclusive circle of cultural critics and anthropology scholars.

A multi-sited ethnography

More specifically, Christine Yano, who is identified on the book’s back cover as Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, anchors her research in the discipline of cultural anthropology. Her book is what scholars describe as a “multi-sited ethnography”: she didn’t do fieldwork in a single community or location, but collected data and observations in various places, mostly in Hawai’i and in San Francisco, but also in other cities where her professional assignments took her. As she describes it, “Hello Kitty became a research hobby: whenever I traveled to another city, I searched Sanrio stores and fans… Every year when I taught the course on Japanese popular culture, I surveyed students about their knowledge of Hello Kitty.” She also scanned the Internet for testimonies and contacts on her research topic. She conducted structured interviews (thirty-one in total) with various informants: Sanrio managers in Japan and in the US, shop salespersons, Kitty adult fans, goods collectors, and artists. She includes long excerpts of these interviews in her book. Again, this is standard practice in anthropology, where the notes and recordings of the ethnographer are often reproduced in extenso. But this may rebuff some readers, for various reasons that the author herself acknowledges in the following: “some readers may feel that the fan interviews I quote here represent an overload of sentiment, a barrage of capitalist frenzy, a besotted attachment to a commodity. Without apology, I agree, and suggest that these readers skip over the interviews themselves and head to the conclusions I draw from them at the end of the chapter.”

This curious self-denial points to another discursive strategy by which the author affirms her credentials as a serious scholar. At many junctures, she tries to distance herself from corporate lore, marketing ploys, and naive adherence to what Hello Kitty represents in order to offer her own critical interpretation. She responds to critics by incorporating their viewpoint and giving them a voice within her own analysis. For instance, she concludes her chapter on Sanrio’s corporate strategy with the following: “a company ethos of happiness tinged with pink sounds like a hugely naive, manipulative enterprise, and that, in fact, may be exactly what it is.” She devotes a whole chapter on “Kitty Backlash”, reflecting the views of Hello Kitty’s detractors which she mainly found on the Internet. This leads her to her enormous blunder when she takes at face value the discourse of a parody Baptist church that reads the word “Hell” in “Hello Kitty”. Although Sanrio’s cat is primarily a child’s character, Yano focuses exclusively on adult consumers of Kitty products—and even on adult products, such as the infamous Hello Kitty massage wand. She also devotes much place to cultural productions and artistic expressions that play with Hello Kitty in creative and imaginative ways. Art, like anthropology, has a complex and troublesome relationship with commerce and capitalism. In her way, her whole book structure reproduces her ambivalence with Hello Kitty as a scholarly pursuit—from finding Kitty at home in Japan, to following her through global marketing strategies across the Pacific, describing her ubiquity, giving voice to Kitty detractors, and then showing that subversion and, ultimately, art, essentially “get it.”

We find this mix of adherence and critical distance in the juxtaposition of fan testimonies and anti-Kitty hate speech, in the contrast between interviews and commentary, and even in the author’s own writing style, which mixes scholarly jargon and popular expressions. Christine Yano claims for herself the right to write at times like the editor of a girlie magazine, while in the next paragraph using difficult words and complex reasoning like a tenured professor. Like her character, she can be both cute and cool at the same time, and she writes with tongue-in-cheek humor. Her sentences often mix the serious and the playful, the elaborate and the obvious, the obtuse theorizing and the plain reasoning. Even her main theoretical concepts (cute, cool, kitsch, pink, kawaii, etc.) are borrowed from plain language and everyday expressions. This makes Pink Globalization an easier and more pleasant read than most anthropology books published in the same publisher’s series. This also makes it risky business: her theoretical apparatus and critical commentary may lose plain readers along the way, while scholars of a more classical bent may be put off by her choice of topic in the first place. But again, there is a market for critical analysis of Asian pop culture, as evidenced in the many publications that now address the topic, and cultural anthropologists are better placed to claim this market segment for their discipline.

The philosophy of “the wink”

Beyond Hello Kitty, is there anything that non-Kitty fans can take from this book? I mentioned the creative use of simple notions such as cute and cool, the way they relate to ordinary people’s lives, and the value added that theory brings. More than pink globalization, the key concept Christine Yano wants to offer as her personal contribution to social theory is the “wink”. This is, of course, a Kitty gesture: Hello Kitty, in some of her modern renderings, winks at her viewers, thereby complicating the blank stare and expressionless face she is so much remembered for. The wink defines the very fetishism of Hello Kitty. It is a symbol of friendship, playfulness, and intimacy. It creates the possibility of two-way interactions, of double meaning, and second degree. The wink resolves logical inconsistencies—between cute and cool, child and adult, kitsch and art, pink and black. It allows for subversive uses of Hello Kitty. The wink also includes the viewers into the circle of those who “get it” and assume what Kitty stands for. More importantly, “wink as play” holds the power to silence or incorporate Kitty’s critics. In turn, adult consumers wink back at her and use Kitty in minimalist acts of subversion, performing feminity or sexiness. For Christine Yano, the wink is also a theoretical gesture. It is her personal answer to those in faculty committees and scholarly associations who raise eyebrows at her research topic and question her credentials as an anthropologist.