“Kitty's appeal is that she's an emotional blank slate. As one of her designers told me: ‘Kitty feels like you do,’” explains Roland Nozomu Kelts, the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US. “We project upon that mouth-less, expressionless kitten, making her the perfectly interactive toy or doll or marketing tool in an age where interactivity is not only desired, it's expected.”
Cat fancy
“Hello Kitty represents the deep desire among all people, regardless of nationality or race, to feel joy and happiness, without having to qualify it at any deep intellectual level,” Sanrio’s public relations manager Kazuo Tohmatsu tells BBC Culture. “Hello Kitty doesn't judge. She let's you feel how you feel without forcing you to question why.”
Sanrio made its fortune licensing the character to a slew of other businesses that produce merchandise. “Hello Kitty's many easily-accessible products make it easy to incorporate her into our daily lives and experience the ‘cute culture’ that her brand represents in different ways,” says Michelle Nguyen, who licenses the character for her Chubby Bunny Accessories. That’s why Forbes magazine has called Hello Kitty one of the best-selling licensed entertainment products ever.
So successful has Kitty been that she was chosen to be a Japanese diplomatic envoy, the official tourism ambassador to China and Hong Kong, in 2008. All part of Japan’s drive to bolster its soft power globally through a state-backed campaign dubbed Cool Japan. Promoting manga, anime cartoons and other aspects of Japanese pop culture, it’s an initiative that came about when Japan’s perennially uncool bureaucrats had a vision that cultural exports could help plug the economic gap created by the near collapse of Japan Inc in the 1990s.
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