Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. xiv, 322 pp. (B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5363-8.
What do you think of when you hear the word pink? A satirical pop star? Barbie? Breast cancer? Gays? When I saw the title of this book, I thought it referred to the last, as in the “Pink Dollar,” having something to do with tourism.
I was wrong: the subtitle gives the subject clearly.
The book is a series of essays, I suspect, topics compiled over a decade or more by a cultural studies-leaning anthropologist, but rounded into a coherent text about what the author calls “Japanese cute-cool,” with the linking theoretical theme of Joseph Nye’s (1990/2004) concept of “Soft Power” that bookends the volume. “Soft Power” may be a relatively new concept in the social sciences, but it has been a feature of international relations for some decades, whereby a country seeks to enhance its power position in the world through promoting elements of its culture. Typically, this is done through councils (i.e., the British), institutes (i.e., the Confucius) and a variety of other means such as sponsoring particular events.
“Hello Kitty” is a different matter as it began as a commercial challenge (by sonrio.com) to Disney’s mouse by a Japanese cat-like creature with a blank expression and, sometimes, a waving arm/paw. The core of the book’s argument is on page 32:
No longer only a part of children’s consumer culture, Hello Kitty serves less as a generational divide than as a shared bridge. How it manages to do so—that is, convincing consumers within a broad span of ages of the desirability of the global icon, of the irresistibility of Japanese Cute-Cool—is in large part the subject of this book.
Perhaps I am just unobservant in my travels, but I always associate Hello Kitty with Asia, Asian shops in Sydney where I live and Asian countries where I travel from time to time. When I think of Japan modern, I don’t think of it as being cute. I think of consumer brands like Sony, Toyota and Nikon: technically advanced and well-manufactured products, even if many of them are made far from archipelagic Japan. But Yano sees more than that through her over 300 (sometimes B&W illustrated) pages of text divided into 7 chapters, plus an introduction and two appendices.
Chapter 1, “Kitty at home,” uses “cute” (kawaii) and kyarakutā (character) to analyze Kitty in Japan, noting at the beginning that Kitty is the “perfectly affordable souvenir” (45), termed a “trinket seduction” (72) later in the same pages. “Marketing Kitty” (chapter 2) features insightful interviews with Sanrio employees and others from a few years ago, recording their thoughts on the development of the product, while chapter 3 (“Global Kitty Nearly Everywhere”) explores interviews with Kitty consumers and why some people like to have “the cat” around as a “best friend.” The emphasis shifts in chapter 4, “Kitty Backlash,” looking at those who repudiate Kitty’s “core message … [of] … friendship, happiness and intimacy” (163). Views about Kitty, expressed in more interviews, are perhaps not unlike, and for similar reasons, emotions encompassing other consumer cute kitsch, such as Barbie. Chapter 5, “Kitty Subversions,” has two long interviews and several quotations from informants to show how Kitty may be used to critique consumerism and branding. Chapter 6, “Playing with Kitty,” “mixing Hello Kitty into edgy art worlds” (231) continues the topic, though in contrast to chapter 4, the artists involved are often commissioned by Sanrio, with the intention of furthering their brand. The concluding chapter seeks to contextualize “Japan’s cute-cool as global wink” (252). Kitty launched in the 1970s according to the Sanrio narrative and Yano began her fascination in 1998, so the printed sources and interviews flow over those decades.
Yano minimizes the Gift element of Kitty, quoting “happiness tinged with pink” (118) and “small gift, big smile” (70, the Sanrio Company’s slogan). Marcel Mauss is in the bibliography, but little used when discussing the extensive Japanese gift culture: the index shows one citation on page 68, but no discussion. “Cool Japan” and “soft power” reappear, as you would expect, in the summary that mentions tourism’s “nation branding” (259). I think, like many international symbols and brands, Kitty is multivalent, negative and positive depending on context, Coca-Cola and McDonalds being other such examples. Even simpler in design is the dollar sign ($) that may be used to show success and desirability or greed and rapacity. The book finishes with a short postscript about the March 2011 tsunami, the effects of which continue to play out. In a cute kitsch and tacky kitsch combo, Sanrio joined with the crystal brand Swarovski to produce Kitty crystal figures, to be auctioned in support of the Japanese Red Cross. Appendix 1 is a Kitty timeline, with appendix 2 listing artists who participated in Sanrio’s Thirtieth Anniversary [of Kitty] Exhibit and Catalogue (2004), and 22 pages of notes, 14 pages of bibliography and a 10-page index complete the volume.
The core audience for Pink Globalization is that group interested in the culture of postwar Japan, with the larger constituency being those ruminating on prominent cultural symbols, the long-time terrain of us anthropologists and the core of more recent “cultural studies” writers. In spite of the documented arguments, I cannot see Kitty as “global.” I accept the argument of Kitty’s ubiquity in Japan, where the character originated. Hello Kitty can be found in North America, hardly South, rarely in Europe, and not at all in Africa; Kitty predominately is a pan-Pacific kyarakutā (character), but without much impact beyond. Of course, often for people in the US, if something is in their part of the world it is unquestionably “global.”
Grant McCall
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia