What can you say about a high-powered exec with an Elmo charm on his cell phone? He gets it.
Over the last year and a half, the Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways spent upwards of a million dollars in licensing fees and paint to decorate the exterior of three Boeing 747s with colorful, 20-foot-high Pocket Monsters from Pokémon, the Nintendo Game Boy phenomenon-slash-hit cartoon-slash-just released Warner Bros. movie-slash-merchandising blitz. The assumption is that Japanese men and women will line up for the opportunity to ride a jet whose fuselage, headrests, and beverage cups are decorated with the adorable yellow whatever-he-is, Pikachu.
To anyone who knows Japan, the assumption seems apt. There, the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force. The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up to save money with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), to have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey, a condom stretched over his body, entreating, "Would you protect me?").
They see backhoes painted to look like giraffes and police kiosks fixed up like gingerbread houses. Each of Japan's 47 prefectures has its own adorable mascot, as do the Tokyo police and the government television station. Home-run-swatting ball players are handed a plush stuffed animal when they cross the plate. Well-heeled city women are dropping yen by the millions on a Kansai Yamamoto couture line called Super Hello Kitty. Teenage boys tattoo themselves with Badtz-Maru, the Sanrio company's mischievous, lumpy-headed penguin. Salarymen otherwise indistinguishable with their gray suits and cigarettes buy novelty cell phone straps adorned with plastic charms of their favorite cute characters: Thunder Bunny, Cookie Monster, Doraemon the robot cat. Cute is everywhere. They're soaking in it.
At the intersection of Japan's consumer-electronics powerhouses and its character-goods industry lie the rare examples of global cute - billion-dollar sellers like Tamagotchi and Pokémon, which combine appealing aesthetics with an addictive computer-game experience. Though in Japan you may be able to convince high-functioning, self-respecting adults that they can't live without a toaster that browns an image of Barbapapa into their morning slice or that a Hello Kitty wedding is a swell idea, in the rest of the world, thus far, it takes a high tech hook.
This may change. Fueled by Internet subcultures, ecommerce (Hello Kitty alone has hundreds of entries on eBay), and the globalization of large corporations like Sanrio, cute is making planetary inroads. Hello Kitty and other Sanrio perennials are selling briskly in more than 30 countries, including Argentina, Bahrain, and Taiwan, where a recent merchandising tie-in with McDonald's caused scuffles among diners waiting in line to buy Hello Kitty plush toys. A Nintendo press release titled "It's a Pokémon Planet" informs us that worldwide revenues from the computer game and its merchandising peripherals are closing in on $5 billion - thanks in no small part to the Internet. US fans regularly visit Japanese Pokémon Web sites to download new Pocket Monsters, which typically appear Stateside a year after they debut in Japan.
The maiden voyage of ANA flight 007 leaves for Tokyo from San Francisco International Airport in one hour. On board the plane, a half-hour delay is atoned for with free terry-cloth Pikachu beanie-stuffies. The Japanese man in the seat beside me, who does something involving industrial drill bits, has unwrapped his Pikachu and set it in his lap, so it appears to be resting contentedly on his balls. From my seat I look out a window situated within the giant Pikachu that wraps around the plane's nose. If you stood on the tarmac and looked up, it would appear as though I am inside the giant cute thing. That - kind of - is the plan.
The Japanese word for cute is kawaii. You often hear it spoken alone, a sentence and a sentiment unto itself. I heard it first in a Tokyo train station in a small shop devoted almost entirely to a penguin named Pingu, a superstar of cute who began life as a Swiss clay animated figure and in Japan exploded into a diversified line that includes pens, washcloths, and toilet-paper covers.
"Kawaiiiiiiii!" The sound came from a girl of perhaps 14, a plaintive, drawn-out keening, equal parts joy ("Look how cute!") and desire ("I want him!"). Minutes later, I heard it again, from a twentysomething OL ("office lady," a uniformed corporate secretary/beverage server). This time it was more of a low groan, as though the longing to possess was causing a tangible ache.
The Japanese teen magazine CREA called kawaii "the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese." According to Sharon Kinsella, a Cambridge University researcher who has written on the subject, the cute craze began around 1970, when a fad for writing notes and letters in rounded, childish characters began to catch on among teenage Japanese girls. Scholars who studied the phenomenon dubbed it Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting. Kids called it burikko-ji, translated as "kitten-writing" or "fake-child writing." At one point in the mid-'80s, some 55 percent of 12- to 18-year-old girls were using it.
Magazines, ads, even computer software picked up the style, which soon broadened into a general fashion for talking, dressing, and acting like a child, a practice that spawned a new verb: burikko suru, "to fake-child-it."
Sanrio's Hello Kitty character, which first appeared on accessories for kitten-writing, has grown into a 50-creature line of in-house characters and goods grossing more than $1 billion a year from sales and licensing. Though the company faces competition from firms that crank out Japanese goods bearing foreign cutesters (Mickey, Pingu, the Teletubbies) and from a handful of smaller character-design houses like San-X and Super Planning Company, it continues to hold its place as top dog in the empire of cute.
The most obvious appeal of cute to the Japanese is, in large part, the appeal of childhood. "There seems to be this feeling of always wanting to be at that level, of never wanting to move on, to grow up and leave it behind," says Yuuko Yamaguchi, assistant general manager of Sanrio's character-design department. Small wonder. Japanese adulthood is, perhaps more so than in most cultures, a time of onerous responsibility and pressure to conform.
"Childhood, in Japan, is a time when you were given indulgences of all kinds - mostly by your mother, but by society too," says Boston University anthropology professor Merry White, author of The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America. "We in the US are said to be a youth society, but what we really are is an adolescence society. That's what everyone wants to go back to. In Japan, it's childhood, mother, home that is yearned for, not the wildness of youth."
Japanese men, on whom the pressure is strongest, also feel the cuteness tug. Takeshi Ochi, vice president of planning, products, and licensing at Sony Creative Products in Tokyo, spoke of the tendency of Japanese men to suffer from Peter Pan syndrome and referred to the common practice among businessmen of reading manga on the subway. There is, he told me, a common Japlish expression for arrested-development grown-ups: adaluto chiluduren. Ochi did not exclude himself from this category, and made no attempt to hide the Elmo on his cell phone strap or his passion for the national broadcasting company's new fuzzy TV-head character, Mr. Hi!
Some Japanese men are drawn more to the typical owner of cute merchandise than to the merchandise itself. The cuteness of a giggling girl clad in a Hello Kitty jumper isn't entirely innocent. It ties in to what is well known in Japan as Lolicom, the Lolita complex. The phenomenon of the little girl as sexual object abounds in Tokyo: Vending machines sell schoolgirls' used panties, which the girls sell to middlemen. "Image bars" specialize in escorts dressed in school uniforms. Telephone clubs feature bored adolescent girls earning spending money by talking dirty. Sex shops sell a porn magazine called Anatomical Illustrations of Junior High School Girls.
The cute characters themselves often display elements of passivity and little-girl helplessness. They frequently lack a mouth, for example, and have tiny, rounded stumps for limbs. According to Sharon Kinsella, the connotative meanings of kawaii include helplessness and vulnerability.
This is not to say that cute is an elaborate front for girlie porn - an estimated 90 percent of Tokyo's character designers are women, so a lot of it is about cute for cute's sake - but designers of cute seem to have an innate sense of the titillation factor. "It's not just being cute. There is something different - a relaxed look, powerless," says Hikaru Suemasa, head designer at the Tokyo character-goods company San-X. Suemasa is the creator of Tarepanda ("droopy panda"), a genderless sandbag of a bear so weak that it cannot walk, but has to roll slowly from place to place (at 2.75 meters per hour, according to company literature).
"At first we worried because it doesn't look like it's alive," Suemasa recalls. "But this turned out to be one of the elements that made it sell." Earnings from Tarepanda will likely top $3 million by the end of the year. And one of San-X's latest designs is a huddled, visibly quivering puppy with the slogan "Anoko dakewa nigatenano" ("That kid is hard to deal with").
Cute appeals to product manufacturers as a form of window dressing for the uncute. Children's prescription-drug bags and dentists' offices usually have a cute character somewhere in evidence. Sanrio licensed rights to make Hello Kitty children's fireproof evacuation gear and first-aid kits. In a similar vein, Hello Kitty miniwieners have the appealing little cat head branded into the casings. Cuting up the icky and the scary seems to work equally well with Japanese adults. I bought yogurt one day that had drawings on the label depicting adorable acidophilus-bacteria guys (in white) chasing evil, horned-but-still-adorable fecal germs (in black) out the end of a winding Chutes and Ladders colon.
Japanese companies will also resort to cuteness when they can't otherwise gain an edge over the competition. This is perhaps the reason ANA painted Pocket Monsters on its 747s. ANA's prices and service closely match those of Japan Airlines, and JAL has Mickey. Banks are another good example, because interest rates - in other countries a bank's main selling point - are controlled by the Japanese government. "If there were a difference in rates, no one would go to a bank just because it has Snoopy on the bank statements," says Takeshi Ochi of Sony Creative Products. Or maybe they would. When Taiwan's Makoto Bank put Hello Kitty on its checkbooks and ATM cards, lines of new depositors outside the bank grew so long that other customers panicked, fearing the bank was about to fold.
Many of the stubby little figures that wind up megalicensed got their start not on the sketch pads of hired character designers but in the heads of Japanese anime artists. They come from comic books, television cartoons, animated films - art that appeals aesthetically to a broad demographic. All age groups in Japan watch anime. Animated shows air not only on Saturday morning but also during prime time. The appetite for manga also spans generations. Tokyo bookstores typically have three separate sections for manga: men's (sex and violence), women's (romance and sex), and children's.
While the normal life span of a designer-drafted Sanrio or San-X character runs only a few years - 15 or so core characters have hung on much longer than average - some anime-spawned characters endure for decades. Hayao Miyazaki's animated classic My Neighbor Totoro came out 12 years ago, but the character Totoro still appears in character-goods shops, adorning chopstick cases and socks. In some cases, the character endures because its TV show endures. Doraemon has been a weekly cartoon since the days of black-and-white TV. Loopy superhero Anpanman, so named for the breakfast bun that is his head, stars in a children's cartoon that counts hundreds of episodes. Though Pokémon began as a Game Boy title, it was the weekly TV cartoon that powered its hydraulic surge in popularity. Even the mighty Hello Kitty was juiced by recent appearances on the popular Tokyo TV series The Love Generation.
Sanrio Company Ltd. occupies the top nine floors of an uncute office tower five minutes from the Osaki train station in central Tokyo. Things don't start to get cute until the 18th floor, where the design department is. To get to their desks, Sanrio's staff designers must walk through "Kitty's Room," a mock-up of a studio apartment furnished with Hello Kitty appliances, foods, and toiletries - almost all of them pink.
At the moment, Kitty's Room is sublet to a pair of live, caged hamsters. These arrived last year, when hamsters were very big. After hamsters came butterflies; next year dragons and possibly fish will be big again. Character designers follow trends in movies, fashions, news events. Tarepanda, for instance, came after the Tokyo Zoo's panda acquisition brought on a nationwide craze a couple years back.
Each of Sanrio's 50 staff artists is expected to come up with one or two new characters per year. Odds are they won't be used, though, for only a couple of new product lines are introduced each season. Designers spend the bulk of their time making products to showcase existing characters. With the exception of some of the original sketches and drawings, almost all of this work is done on computers - Apple G3s. Designers sit at desks, not drafting tables. At all three of the biggest firms I visited - Sanrio, Sony Creative Products, and San-X - the look is that of a (cluttered) high tech office, not a design studio.
"Six hundred new items go out the door every month," Doug Parkes, a manager in Sanrio's international-licensing department, told me. About two-thirds of Sanrio's profit comes from the products it designs and then subcontracts to a factory to produce (Sanrio owns no manufacturing plants). The remaining third comes from royalties paid by licensees who manufacture their own products with Sanrio characters on them. The design staff also spends time working with licensees. As Parkes puts it, "They may know how to build a bicycle, but they have no idea how to put Hello Kitty on it."
Sanrio's main competitors in the Japanese character industry - Walt Disney Enterprises Japan and Sony Creative Products - differ from Sanrio in that they don't design their own characters, but rather act as brokers for existing imps, managing the licensing of dozens of US and European characters. Sony Creative handles Sesame Street's denizens (who enjoy phenomenal popularity among Japanese adults), Pingu, Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit, and Thunder Bunny and other characters by New York illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat, as well as a couple of domestic designs - most notably (for now, anyway) Sony's Momo the PostPet.
The naughty-sweet pink bear - a sort of hypercute version of the Eudora rooster - is the first Internet-spawned character-licensing success story. He has of late made the leap to fax memos, mousepads, and, of course, cell phone straps. Sanrio used to handle Japanese licensing of Betty Boop and the Pink Panther, among others, and if Hello Kitty hadn't proved to be the juggernaut she is, no doubt Sanrio would have continued doing so.
I've come to Sanrio to meet Yuuko Yamaguchi, the designer in charge of Hello Kitty for 19 of the character's 25 years. We are not meeting in her office, for she has no office. No one on her floor does; nor do they have cubicles. As is typical of Japanese corporations, employees work in clusters of open desktops, the elbow of one woman jutting into the airspace of her neighbor. Whatever space remains after the G3 and the mousepad take their bite is given over to an eye-assaulting welter of cute-character stuff - some of it practical (staplers, erasers), most just cute. They are stuck on monitor frames, crowded three deep on shelf edges, hung on strings from desk lamps.
Yamaguchi and I are talking in a small conference room, accompanied by Doug Parkes, who serves as our interpreter, and a blue-suited man from the General Affairs office, whose role is unclear to me. The atmosphere is a good deal more sober than I'd anticipated. I take solace in the chair cushions, which are red and printed to read, "Hello, lovely to meet you. I'm Kitty. I've invited all my best friends to come and play."
I have asked Yamaguchi why so many cute Japanese characters have no mouth. At Sanrio alone, the muted legions include Hello Kitty, Pochacco, Cathy the bunny, Nutz, Chococat, and Cookie-Bau. Might this fit in with the helpless aspect of kawaii? If submissiveness is part of the appeal of cute, what better than to have no mouth at all?
"Kitty has a mouth," Yamaguchi states flatly. Spread open on the table is an issue of the glossy magazine/catalog Kitty Goods Collection. I look again: The damn cat has no mouth.
"It's hidden in the fur," Yamaguchi insists.
"But -"
"She has one."
The women who create cute are nothing like the women you see buying it. San-X's Hikaru Suemasa, when we meet, is dressed in black bell-bottoms and a T-shirt, her bare feet slipped into plastic sandals. Yamaguchi, easily 40, is wearing kneesocks, but they're black. Her hair is infused with strands of a deep Goth red you will find on no Sanrio product. She doesn't giggle. Beneath her skirt, she wears a kind of black woven pantaloons, a fact I am privy to because she sits with her legs planted well apart.
Satoshi Tajiri, 33-year-old creator of Pikachu and pals, is apparently cut from the same cloth. (Nintendo bought rights to the Pokémon story from Tajiri's Tokyo-based company, Game Freaks.) Officials at Nintendo of America's corporate affairs office describe Tajiri as "reclusive," which is their way of saying I can't talk to him. Tajiri grants no interviews, but is generally reported to have drawn his inspiration for Pokémon from monster movies and an insect-collecting hobby in his youth. A Nintendo flack says Tajiri is "probably the most creative person in the world" and "equally eccentric."
Yamaguchi and her bland, benign Kitty make a decidedly odd couple. And a couple they clearly are. She describes a phase several years back during which "Kitty and I were basically parts of each other." Whatever Yamaguchi did or dreamed of doing - she briefly wanted to be a model, for instance - Kitty would also do, and vice versa. "At one point, Kitty started collecting teddy bears. I found I had to, too," she says. These days, Yamaguchi sees the relationship as one of idol and manager.
Indeed, teenage girls in Japan treat characters the way they do celebrities, writing them fan letters and covering their walls with the icons' images. Yamaguchi tells me she modeled Kitty's boyfriend, Dear Daniel, after 16-year-old Japanese pop cover boy Takizawa. Apparently it worked. Saleswise, since his launch in April, Daniel has been coming on strong. "The girls are idolizing him," Yamaguchi says.
Yamaguchi explains why Sanrio characters tend to lack necks and mouths and sport near-vestigial arms and legs: Cute is as cute does. If a character needs to do nothing more than increase the appeal of a hair clip or wallet, it has no need for legs or neck or anything to dilute the basic elements of cute: round, little, simple, lovable. The current look of Hello Kitty merchandise takes this basic formula a step further, reducing the feline to a bow-bedecked head.
"What's happening is, it's becoming more of a logo," interjects the General Affairs man, Kazuo Tohmatsu. "We are using this for the new line of Hello Kitty um ..." He blinks. I lean closer, eager to hear what the newest line might be. Having burned through the kitchen (Hello Kitty eggs, ice-cube trays, coffeemakers), the office (Hello Kitty laminators, postage scales, paper shredders), the bathroom (Hello Kitty toe-jam brushes!), the beach, and the boudoir, Sanrio has made its way to the outer shoals of character merchandising: Hello Kitty condos, cars, and large appliances.
"And what is the new line?" I ask.
"Um ... Hello Kitty um ..."
Doug Parkes interrupts. "He's saying homme. As in French for man." Hello Kitty Homme is Sanrio's new line of menswear and accessories in navy blue, burgundy, gray, and black, with Kitty's decapitated noggin shrunk to the size of a polka dot. Kawaii! I will bring home boxer shorts for my homme.
You do not have to look carefully to find the cute in Shintaro Tsuji's life. The Sanrio CEO's office windows are papered with giant, peeking-in Hello Kitty heads that block the view of Mount Fuji and make it appear as if the poor feline had been thrown outside and had clawed her way up 20 floors of concrete in an attempt to get back in. The back half of Tsuji's desk is blanketed with Sanrio paraphernalia, a thick, pastel moss of cute. In among the rabbits and pandas and frogs is the planet's one and only Hello Kitty ashtray - a handmade gift; cigarettes and hard liquor are no-fly zones at Sanrio. Each month, under the pen name Strawberry King, 71-year-old Tsuji writes the opening message to subscribers of the Sanrio fanzine The Strawberry News.
Along with Tsuji's office, the 20th floor contains - I don't know why - a suite of rooms laid out like a house. Doug Parkes and I wait in the "living room" for Tsuji to arrive. Visible through an open doorway is the "bathroom," wherein a Victorian claw-foot tub, a sink, and a toilet have been set down on the carpet, but not installed. "Don't use it, please," says Parkes in a tone that suggests that someone, at some point, did.
Like the characters he has shepherded to market, Shintaro Tsuji is small and charming and difficult to dislike. He wears a dark blue business suit with a Hello Kitty pin in the lapel. This afternoon, he wants to talk about "social communication," invariably the topic of his Strawberry King essays. This preoccupation is the reason "Hello" was tacked onto "Kitty." (Hi Kitty, Tsuji's first choice, "didn't quite click.") Sanrio products were originally intended to be given as presents that say, "I like you. You're my friend."
A smart move on Tsuji's part, given the Japanese penchant for social gift-giving. Some journalists in Japan, I recently learned, by custom present their interviewees with a little token that says, "I like you. You're my material." I had picked up a Felix the Cat T-shirt for Tsuji, thinking he would enjoy seeing an American kitty-cat character. When I learned that Sanrio used to license the rights to produce Felix the Cat merchandise in Japan, I gave the shirt to the woman at my hotel desk, who said "Pussy!" and bowed deeply.
Tsuji explains why cute is always appropriate in gifts. "A formal gift makes you stiffen up," he says. "It may make the receiver feel a need to return the favor. Something humorous is like you're making fun of the person. It's hard to maintain friendships if you're giving them skeleton heads and silly things. Something cute," he pounds his sternum with his fist, "gets you right here."
Tsuji is quiet for a moment, and then he raises the topic of Kosovo. Parkes begins to look uncomfortable. "Mr. Tsuji says, 'If only I could come up with a Hello Kitty smart bomb.'" Then Parkes adds, "To put good feeling in the hearts of the soldiers." I can't tell whether it's Tsuji's addendum or his own.
Sanrio will grant licensing rights to just about anyone who applies, drawing the line only at guns, hard liquor, and "sharp or pointed objects." (A recent application to make a Hello Kitty paper cutter was turned down.) At the other extreme you have character-licensing houseDick Bruna Japan, trying desperately to sequester children's book hero Miffy the rabbit within the realm of children's goods and turning down a dozen licensee applications a month.
In between are companies like San-X, which picks and chooses according to some ineffable internal logic. Its Tarepanda graces the wrapper of a common Tokyo toilet-paper brand, but San-X rejected a condom company's application.
Still, with some 15,000 products bearing Sanrio characters, market saturation threatens. When you have characters on eggs and digital pianos and bikini bottoms, it's safe to say you're nearing the last chapter. And so Sanrio is shifting its focus from things to places. Japan now has Hello Kitty batting cages, restaurants, condo-design packages, at least one karaoke bar, and, most of all, Puroland.
Sanrio built its first theme park in 1990 in the urban-suburban sprawl that surrounds Tokyo. It remains one of Japan's most popular attractions. My host is Eiji Ogiyama, Puroland's giddy, portly assistant manager of sales. He has Hello Kitty on his wallet, and I am about to see that this is not just an accessory, but a metaphor. Though the theme park lost money its first three years, owing to operational foul-ups and a temporary lull in Hello Kitty's popularity, it's making up quickly for its losses. An estimated 20,000 people visit the park each weekend, at $40 a head. Then there are concessions, souvenirs, and miscellaneous purchases, this last attended to with a thoroughness most impressive.
Our tour begins at the Wisdom Tree Stage, where boys and girls, wearing smocks patterned with their favorite Sanrio character, parade around a magic tree. The park loans out the smocks and paper crowns, takes a picture, and charges 300 to 400 yen for each child. That's $3 to $4 apiece. "Could be 500," says Ogiyama, "I forget."
From here, we move upstairs to marvel at the Hello Kitty Bell of Happiness. The bell's frame and the surrounding walls are papered with handwritten wishes. A nearby vending machine sells plastic capsules containing official Bell of Happiness wish-writing paper for 500 yen. Ogiyama is grinning, his hair flopping forward onto his forehead. "Five hundred million yen just from this!"
Back downstairs, we tour Hello Kitty's House, which the feline shares with her beau Dear Daniel ("separate bedrooms," Ogiyama assures me). The exit deposits visitors in one of four gift shops. "After you love Kitty, you come out here and buy so much stuff! You know how the young Japanese adults love the cutesy stuff!"
The Pokémon jet is flying low on its approach to San Francisco. Below us is the drab mosaic of warehouses that is South San Francisco's Cabot, Cabot & Forbes Industrial Park. One of them rivals a soccer stadium in square footage. This is Sanrio's distribution point for the Western Hemisphere. I'm told that it's one of the largest buildings on the West Coast.
Thus far, cute is kid stuff in the US, and even then it's not the candy-to-a-baby affair it is in Japan. American kids demand to be entertained; cute is a secondary selling point. Sanrio takes this into consideration in designing goods for the American market. "American girls like moving action-type characters," says Mari Yakushiji, Sanrio's Tokyo-based head of design for US products. Pochacco, Sanrio's "sports-minded pup," is a flat-liner in Japan but a top seller in America. If Pikachu had been introduced in the US simply as something adorable to gaze at on a notebook cover, rather than as a computer-game character, he wouldn't be the hit he is. And he wouldn't appeal to boys.
It's boys I see a few weeks later at the Bay Area stop of the 1999 Pokémon League Summer Training Tour, held in San Rafael, California's Northgate Mall. Just past the Piercing Pagoda and down the hall from the Pokémon Cable Club, where novices pick up game tips, are three folding tables set up end to end: the staging area for the Poké Cup Tournament. Eight pairs of competitors face off across the tables; only one player is a girl. A black cable links each pair's Game Boys. A woman behind me with a microphone headset is shouting, "You learned a new move! You learned Tail Whip!"
At the signal to begin, the boys (and token girl) drop their heads and fall silent, motionless but for their twitching thumbs. Watching a Pokémon tournament is like watching grace at Thanksgiving dinner. Nonetheless, it's clearly a battle. No one talks about how cute their Bulbasaurs are or how they love the pink curly horn (hair? trunk?) on Jiggly Puff's forehead. It's all Tackles and Cuts and Poison Stings and Tail Whips, the sorts of things that would send Miffy running for the rabbit hole.
The further you get from elementary school, I suspect, the heavier the American resistance will be to cute in its purest incarnation. It's hard to imagine US teenagers deeming it cool to own a Thunder Bunny cell phone case or a boogie board graced by Badtz-Maru's visage, and harder still to picture middle managers in Hello Kitty dress socks. (Sanrio is trying to hit that market all the same - the company opened its first US adult-merchandise store, Vivitix, in October in Berkeley, California.) For that you must go to Japan. And when you go, you must bring me back a Hello Kitty toe-jam brush.
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