Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific Christine R.Yano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific Christine R. Yano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.In 1960 Tsuji Shintaro founded a silk and gift company in Japan, later renamed Sanrio, that in 1974 unveiled what would become its most famous design, Hello Kitty. Forty years later, thousands of pink-infused Hello Kitty products remain ubiquitous across the world, leading to what Christine R. Yano calls globalization. Hello Kitty-who has no mouth- never starred in a television series or movie, but as an international symbol, she speaks volumes. In Pink Globalization, anthropologist Christine R. Yano explores the diverse meanings inherent in Hello Kitty as she moves through time and place, both attracting and repulsing consumers. Some people associate Hello Kitty with sweet, childish, and cute products for little girls, but Yano argues that her image is much more complex, sophisticated, and transnational.Yano begins her book with a discussion of what she calls Cute-Cool. The Japanese have a predilection for the cute, which they call kawaii, and it has been successfully marketed worldwide, especially in anime and manga. In the popular imagination, Hello Kitty merges cute with cool-sexy, subversive, rebellious-creating the wink on and making her an iconic figure. Yano writes that Hello Kitty's recognizability in parts of the global, industrial makes her a shorthand for irony, humor, girl power-and sometimes, though not always, (8). More than a plaything, Hello Kitty functions as an international ambassador that bridges cultures and generations, yet challenges traditional themes.Sanrio categorizes the development of Hello Kitty into three parts: (1) her birth and growth from 1974 to 1986, (2) her popularity in Japan, especially among women from 1987 to 1997, and (3) her global explosion from 1998 to the present. The last of these is Yano's focus, as she is most interested in the path, meanings, critiques, and subversions of pink globalization by way of Hello Kitty, from Japan to different arenas of the industrial world (40).Yano fashions her book with excerpts of interviews, many transcribed at great length, to showcase people's feelings about and interpretations of Sanrio's famous cat. As one interviewee, K.B., a nineteen-year old Long Island native and student, declares, can make Hello Kitty into whatever you want it to be, essentially (206). This flexibility has served Hello Kitty well. She represents the important ritual of gift giving that is inherent in Japanese culture, leading to Sanrio's slogan small gift, big smile. Yano sees Hello Kitty as an enabler of intimacy, a way of bringing people together. The proliferation of Hello Kitty products takes buyers through the consumer life cycle, defined by Bill Hensley as Introduction, the Change, Rediscover, and Nostalgia (103-04). …