Hello Kitty Not a Cat, Company Says

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http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/08/28/hello-kitty-not-cat-expert-says/ said:
Hello Kitty not a cat, company says


Published August 28, 2014FoxNews.com


For 40 years, her face has adorned backpacks and lunch boxes, jewelry and theme restaurants, TV shows and even laptops.

Hello Kitty has long been a staple of Japanese pop culture, but for decades, one expert says, the world has been under a false impression.

Hello Kitty -- despite having a name that's 50 percent devoted to the term that refers to a young cat -- is no feline.

She is, rather, a little girl, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"She's never depicted on all fours," Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist with the University of Hawaii who is curator of a Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in October, told the newspaper. "She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat."

Say it ain't so!

It's not a matter of opinion, either, Yano said. When she was preparing written texts for the museum's exhibit, she made the mistake of referring to Hello Kitty as, well, a cat.

Wrong answer.

"I was corrected -- very firmly," Yano told the Times. "That's one correction Sanrio (the company that owns the character) made for my script for the show."

Some other facts about Hello Kitty, according to Yano:

• She's British.

• She is a Scorpio.

• She loves apple pie.

• She has a twin sister, and is a perpetual third-grader.

• Her actual name is Kitty White.

"Hello Kitty emerged in the 1970s, when the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain," Yano told the Times. "They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time."

Wikipedia, for what it's worth, refers to Kitty as a Japanese bobtail cat, though her species isn't made clear on Sanrio.com, where a page devoted to the character's 40th anniversary says she was created "to inspire happiness, friendship, and sharing across the world."

But regardless of whether she's a girl or a cat, she remains vitally important to the Japanese identity, Yano said.

"In talking to Japanese Americans who grew up in the 1970s, they say, 'That figure means so much to us because she was ours,'" she told the Times. "It's something they saw as an identity marker. This is why the exhibition is being held at the Japanese American National Museum. It's about reconnecting her to this community. It gives the whole thing a certain poignancy and power."
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What?
 
This is one of those things where canon trumps fanon and there's nothing anyone can do about it. One could argue that she's not shown on all fours because she's an anthropomorphic cat, but if the people who own Hello Kitty say she's not a cat, then I guess she's not a cat.
 
Now we also know Micky Mouse is not a mouse because he has never been depicted on all fours. Logic.
 
Most of the Hello Kitty White details from that article are from her biography on the Sanrio home page; there's some more there, too, if anyone's interested. Eh, I think it's kind of a silly distinction to make, but if that's how Sanrio wants to see it, it's their right to make that call. The best thing about this is that it explains why Hello Kitty herself has a pet cat name Charmmy Kitty. That always kind of confused me as a kid.
 
Maybe she has a strange disorder were she has cat ears, and looks like a cat. #FindACure
 
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My reaction.
 
As a Sanrio fan I already knew everything except that's she's not a...cat.
My favorite Sanrio character is a puppy named "Cinnamoroll" and he looks like a bunny, so I guess lots of the characters are messed up.
 
It is probably a little Girl in a cat costume but it is still Hello Kitty XD.:)
 
omahanime said:
I have been misled for decades. Time for a lawsuit.
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Sadly, I'm sure there's people out there who really do think this.
 
Haha chill as my link says they meant she is not a "real" cat but a gijinka character, which makes perfect sense. Like in-universe Pluto is a REAL dog while Goofy is what they would call a "gijinka dog" in Japan, but not an actual, REAL dog that behaves like a real dog would/could.
 
Okaayy...

Its strange that the creators think of it as being 'British' as I've never associated the two at all before :p
 
"Hello Kitty emerged in the 1970s, when the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain," Yano told the Times. "They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence.
Click to expand...

Uhhh....why? How does 70's Britain remind Japanese people of the "quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence." Island nations with a history of strong imperial maritime power and school uniforms?
 
Hello Kitty is not a cat?

...

Well, it makes sense to say that she is a Gijinka Cat.
 
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