Hello Harvard!

Hello Kitty—Japan’s most collected character and the star of elementary school lunchboxes everywhere—doesn’t look a day past seven. It may come as a surprise that she’s no longer even a twenty-something.

To celebrate Kitty’s thirtieth, the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations sponsored a conference last Saturday to find out exactly what makes Japanese cute culture—embodied by characters such as Pokemon, Sailor Moon and of course, Kitty—such an enduring phenomenon.Co-organizer Samuel H. Lipoff ’04 says that while “cuteness is everywhere in Japan,” it has hardly been recognized as a serious subject in academia. Lipoff says that, in the West, there is a great amount of cynicism and myth surrounding Hello Kitty and Japanese cute culture, as evidenced by the debate surrounding Kitty’s lack of mouth. Some believe it’s symbolic of the patriarchal silencing of Asian women, though the Sanrio Corporation explains that it is because Hello Kitty speaks from her heart, not her mouth.The western assessment of “kawaii” (roughly translated as “cute” in English) is largely negative, often described as a shallow interest based on avoidance of adulthood.

However, Associate Professor in the School of Cartoon and Comic Art at Kyoto Seika University Matt Thorn disagrees. As president of the Parent-Teacher Association at his son’s public Japanese elementary school, Thorn has first-hand experience of Japanese cuteness, which gives him the authority to refute a cynical view of cute culture. He describes his comic art students as “talented and intelligent...as well as cute,” and argues that they do not use cuteness as a form of escapism.

Koichi Iwabuchi, a professor visiting from Waseda University in Japan, spoke about the social uses of cute. Iwabuchi described the social atmosphere of Japan as “very dark, very tough,” offering an explanation of the popularity of kawaii as a reaction to this toughness. Meanwhile, Thorn suggested that kawaii is used as “a playful parody of a patriarchal culture.” Hello Kitty as the face of resistance? Maybe so.

Yuichi Washida, a consumer researcher and M.I.T visiting scholar, discussed the important influence that cute culture has on technology. Young women, labeled “kogals,” are the driving force behind the Hello Kitty genre as well as cell phone culture—the market size for “chaku-melo,” or trendy ring tone services, has reached one billion dollars and is poised to compete with annual cd sales revenue.The range of conference attendees reflected Hello Kitty’s mass appeal. Among those in attendance were anthropologists and market researchers as well as a number of undergraduates. Barbara M. Savat ’07 came to the conference out of a strong interest in Japanese culture, describing how the Sanrio phenomen hit her Puerto Rican middle school hard. “I liked it as a child and I still like it now,” she says.