Hello Kitty: LA Events Celebrate 40th Birthday Of Sanrio Character (Who Is, Actually, A Cat)
It has been 40 years since the first coin purse featuring the Sanrio character of Hello Kitty has been sold — and the world is ready to celebrate. The Hello Kitty Con2014 will be held in Los Angeles from October 30–November 2nd, where a variety of events give fans a chance to praise the now iconic character.
For those not in the know, Hello Kitty is a fictional character created by the company Sanrio. Her full name is Kitty White, she’s British, and she is a small white cat whose outfit frequently changes, but she always wears a little red bow. Hello Kitty has expanded since those early years. According to NPR, some $8 billion worth of products bearing Hello Kitty’s image were sold in 2013.
Hello @Target! Check out all the supercute #HelloKitty40th items available now at a #Target near you! pic.twitter.com/YYHrI8UHBn
— Hello Kitty (@hellokitty) October 9, 2014
In downtown Los Angeles, the Japanese American National Museum recently opened an exhibit entitled “Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty,” which will run through April. The city is also hosting a Hello Kitty Hungry Hunt, where fans go on a scavenger hunt to a variety of restaurants to buy Hello Kitty menu items and collect Hello Kitty pins.
Wonder why the world was taken over by a tiny white British cat from Japan? Experts at Sanrio and the Japanese American National Museum credit Hello Kitty’s popularity to the time, 40 years ago, when there was strong anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment in Japan. Sanrio creators found that their products sold better if there were cute — kawaii — decorations on them. Originally marketing to young girls, experts feel that there was something essentially Japanese about Hello Kitty, and that young girls identified with her in a way that they didn’t in other products.
The fan world was rocked earlier this year when a newspaper reported that Hello Kitty was not actually a cat, but was in fact a girl. A variety of blogs and news aggregators picked up the story and ran with it, and fans reacted with surprise and upset.
Brian Ashcraft wrote on Kotaku in August to clarify that Hello Kitty was absolutely a cat. He never goes so far as to say that the April article that started the controversy was due to mistranslation, but he provides the Japanese words used by the Sanrio representative to discuss Hello Kitty’s status. It seems that Sanrio views Hello Kitty as a personification of a cat, but certainly not a girl. According to Ashcraft, the representative directly said that it would be going too far to call Hello Kitty a girl.
If LA is too far to go to celebrate the birthday of a favorite character, consider having a birthday party for Kitty White at home on November 1st!
[Photo used under Creative Commons 2.0 licensing, courtesy of Ted Eytan]
