Christine R. Yano

Reach Out and Touch Someone: Thinking Through Sanrio's Social Communication Empire

Hello Kitty (b. 1974) in the year 2009 was all grown up. Indeed, Sanrio, the mouthless felines maker, took the opportunity for a year-long celebration of her 35th anniversary that extended into 2010. Thirty-five: the year marks the standard end of young adult promise in Japan, after which traditionally new employment opportunities close, scholarships for post-baccalaureate education end, and fertility rates in women decline. But what does 35 years mean for a product? More specifically, what does it mean for a product that has achieved iconic status as a symbol of youthful innocence dubbed kawaii (cute) in ever-widening, global settings? Among other things, 35 years suggests the possibility of true trans-generational appeal, especially with mother-daughter pairs of Hello Kitty fans. In the case of Hello Kitty, 35 years also signals a sufficient time span from which nostalgia may be considered viable and ultimately marketable. In this paper I use Hello Kittys 35th anniversary as a lens upon kawaii – Japanese Cute – by which we might look backward and forward to the consumer culture surrounding this now ‘middle-aged’ object, primarily in Japan, but extended through its global applications.

Covering Disclosures: Practices of Intimacy, Hierarchy, and Authenticity in a Japanese Popular Music Genre

This paper analyzes cover songs and other forms of repetition in the Japanese popular music genre enka, a sentimental ballad form. The performance practices in the enka world are not only enterprise driven, but also embedded within cultural values and aesthetics. The paper argues that covering in a Japanese context poses a challenge to Walter Benjamins concept of aura through kata (patterned form), which derives authenticity over time and by way of repetition.

Monstering the Japanese Cute: Pink Globalization and Its Critics Abroad

The year 2004 marked significant anniversaries for two of Japan’s prominent global icons: the fiftieth of the monster Godzilla and the thirtieth of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty. The two, posed side by side as monumental phenomena on a global stage, provide intriguing contrasts. Godzilla stands tall as a Japanese creature on (primarily) Japanese soil; Hello Kitty sits small as a Brit (full name Kitty White, birthplace London) on turf that can only be described as nebulously global. Whereas the Godzilla of postwar Japan makes his mark through gigantism on the big screen, Hello Kitty of the economic bubble era creates a consumer niche based in the symbolic and actual miniature, her blank face adorning school bags, lunch boxes, and coin purses. Godzilla occupies a public adult world of superheroes and supermonsters. He threatens, destroys, and wages fierce battles. Kitti-chan—as she is affectionately known in Japan using the diminutive term of endearment “chan”—occupies a private world of gingham check, apple pies, and twinkling stars. She comforts and cheers by simply being there. The one subscribes to extraordinary masculinist domination, whereas the other creeps her way in to everyday feminine passivity. Godzilla roars as Kitti-chan silently stares. Consider their mouths: Godzilla expresses himself through a gaping mouth from which radioactive breath acts as a major destructive force; Hello Kitty expresses herself through disarming, benign mouthlessness. Their names provide subtle contrasts: both use the English language, but Godzilla’s is a ponderous, newly coined recombinant, whereas Hello Kitty’s is straightforward, playful Japlish. Behold their bodies. Godzilla’s is dark, reptilian, scaly, and oversized; Hello Kitty’s is white, mammalian, furry, and undersized. Both of these figures have become iconic of not only Japan on a global stage, but a particular kind (or kinds) of camp/cool that define that stage in the twenty-first century.

Plucking Paradise: Hawaiian `Ukulele Performance in Japan

This article examines historical and contemporary Japanese attitudes toward the `ukulele (and Hawai`i) configured as paradisical objects of yearning and utopian desire. This is desire in the form of what I call a ‘plucked paradise’ – a form of music-making upon a stringed instrument, as well as the image of a flower being harvested for one’s use. Plucking a string produces a relatively delicate sound that decays quickly; plucking a flower is a small act of aesthetic appropriation. Both of these reference a paradise that is temporal, sensual, and aestheticized. This research asks, what kinds of meanings do participants give to the `ukulele and its music in Japan? How do infrastructural components, particularly Japanese Americans, facilitate the development of `ukulele culture in Japan? By analyzing multiple dimensions involved in the creation of that ‘plucked paradise’, I bring to bear the tensions, conflicts, and creative forces that shape the interaction.