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CroniconO P E N A C C E S S EC PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY

Research Article

Japanese Mystique or Western Myopia? A Mass Culture Shock with Japan

Ray T Donahue*

Department of Intercultural Studies, Nagoya Gakuin University, Japan

Citation: Ray T Donahue. “Japanese Mystique or Western Myopia? A Mass Culture Shock with Japan”. EC Psychology and Psychiatry 8.4 (2019).

*Corresponding Author: Ray T Donahue, Department of Intercultural Studies, Nagoya Gakuin University, Japan.

Received: February 20, 2019

Abstract

Background: Japan has long been a perceptual puzzle in the Western mind. Such is evinced by a recent mass culture shock with Japan when media news reported that a commercial symbol, a stick-figured cat, was actually seen by Japanese as a human girl. This cognitive dissonance triggered hate speech against Japanese by some readers using established stereotypes already in the collective conscious, matter ripe for study by cultural psychologists and other interculturalists in revealing a mechanism of prejudice and how even experts can succumb to ethnocentrism.

Aim: To determine how accurate netizens were in viewing Japanese illogical in thought due to this perceptual puzzle and what role had mass media in it, if any; as well as, to demonstrate how easily lay person and expert alike can fall prey to ethnocentrism.

Method: Critical discourse analysis of the extant major news media reports at the time of the incident in 2014 and selected commen-tary by the reading public in response, as well as surveys of Japanese as to their perception of the aforementioned stick-figured cat.

Results: Surveys revealed that Japanese and Western perceptions of the stick figure were quite similar except a small number of the former did indeed perceive a human girl. However, such is reasonably explained by a unique feature of the Japanese orthography (not translation per se) permitting a finer distinction between animal/human than does in English, as well as the fact that the “stick figure” of a cat in recent years morphed from being a simple trademark to become an animated star in the roles of Snow White and Cinderella, facts apparently unknown even to the experts behind the related news reports.

Conclusion: Japanese were no less logical than Westerners in their view of the stick figure; and Japanese everyday discourse refer-encing pet animals is similar as in English. Journalists and related experts unwittingly colluded in hyping a non-story into headline news. This case study shows that society has yet to enter a “post-racial” age given the hate speech found, as well as offering, even to the experienced professional, means for reflection and perhaps heightened cultural awareness.

Keywords: Culture Shock; Stereotyping; Perception; Miscommunications; Media

Introduction

Somewhat recently, the Internet was struck by a culture shock1 with Japan that, as the Washington Post put it, “[sparked] many out-raged tweets reflect[ing] a kind of mass hysteria, the sound of a million people having the rugs pulled out from under them” [2]. This outrage came because Sanrio, the maker of the fabulously successful commercial trademark Hello Kitty, purportedly announced that this cat was not a cat but a girl. It would be like the Disney Company saying that Mickey Mouse was actually a boy. Swift and pointed was the response across the blogosphere: “Dumb logic,” “perverted logic,” “retarded logic,” soon turning to slurs or stereotypes such as, “Oh, those wacky Japanese and their logic,” “Dats rite” referencing Japanese supposed difficulty with English, or the indelicate “Hello Nuke People,” a veiled complaint about Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster2

1 According to the definitional study by Furham [1], culture shock is essentially “a disorientating experience of suddenly finding that the perspectives, behaviors and experience of an individual or group or whole society are not shared by others” (p. 11). Perceptual differences between Japanese and Westerners about whether a stick-figured commercial symbol was a cat or a human girl would consequently apply as culture shock and on a mass scale as described by Dewey [2] and by other observations as reported herein.

2 At separate websites, GrammarNazi82 [3] makes the “wacky Japanese” comment, Anton DiRamos [4], “Dats rite,” and Personification of Radiation [5], “Hello Nuke People” while discussing the Hello Kitty matter.



Noteworthy here is that such commentary relies on a collective’s fund or stock of stereotypes held about an out-group. An undercur-rent view of Japanese as peculiar, mysterious, or strange exists within Western culture and can become a prescription for Othering, trig-gering stereotypes at a moment’s notice [6]. In this instance it reveals more about the ethnocentrism of these observers than the so-called illogic of the observed, the Japanese, for on the contrary Sanrio’s view is not as “wacky” as it appears. For good reason Sanrio said what it did but cultural blindness prevented much of the world from appreciating this fact.

Originally, the expert on the scene, an American museum curator and Japanologist, took Sanrio’s message too literally, which was then twisted by some mass media into falsehood. Sanrio eventually retracted, ending media coverage of the affair but without correcting the miscoverage and the needless ethnocentrism emitted against the Japanese. Ignorance won out, and the gulf between East and West made that much larger. Herein is an attempt to bridge the gap and illuminate how language, discourse and communication play pivotal roles in intergroup relations, as well as using this case as a learning vehicle for cultural awareness.

First, and at some length, this paper unravels the conundrum about the identity of Hello Kitty showing that the controversy was less the fault of Sanrio’s and hardly a matter of Japanese illogic. For a unique feature of Japanese orthography--even absent in Chinese-- per-mits a finer distinction between animal and human in this case than does in English. Without such appreciation, some mass media twisted fact into fiction that could incite ethnocentrism from their readers. Second, analysis reveals further how the original curator/Japanolo-gist and the news-breaking reporter neglected to contextualize Sanrio’s message and to confirm their own understanding of it, a breach of basic communication principles. And third, analysis illuminates key tenets in comparative culture or the observing of other cultures. Analysis begins by determining that the culture shock occurred, then onto identifying the intervening events and media news coverage; followed by showing how a unique feature of Japanese language turns Sanrio’s words into logic, a heretofore unreported fact, and lastly, by clarifying how media misrepresentations and miscommunications between the principals exacerbated the problem.

The culture shock

How is it that a normal girl could have whiskers and a tail? Could it be true that Japanese have a unique logic if not an “out of this world” one? How is it that Japanese see such a simple drawing so diametrically different? If ever a culture shock, it was this. People were confounded because being familiar with the iconic Hello Kitty, they could point to not only its whiskers, pointed ears, and tail as feline but also to its original trademark image as being seated between milk and a goldfish, clear signs of it being a cat (a photo of it as of this writing can be seen at: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/963039-hello-kitty). This trademark has been a big part of children’s lives, being imprinted on products A to Z from aprons and backpacks, clothes, eating utensils, various accessories and toys-- “over 50,000 Hello Kitty product lines in over 130 countries” [7]meaning that generations of children worldwide have literally grown up with Hello Kitty in frequent sight. Sanrio also stated that the fact of Hello Kitty being a girl was widely understood by the people of Japan [8], bringing Japanese logic into question.

Understandably, some people felt unsettled when hearing Sanrio’s denial of Hello Kitty being a cat. We can grasp this anguish by how this woman describes it: “I grew up with Sanrio. Maybe you did too. In the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, there wasn’t a single school supply I owned that didn’t have a Sanrio character emblazoned upon it. Okay, whatever, I may have had, like ONE Lisa Frank Rainbow-Dolphin-Unicorn binder. But [most of it was] the grand dame of Sanrio, Hello Kitty herself. So I (along with every other woman who was once in third grade in the early 1990′s) was shocked, absolutely SHOCKED to recently learn that Hello Kitty is not, in fact, actually a cat” [9].

One need not have been a fan to be shocked. Thinking the news was absurd, I asked a Japanese about it, who on the contrary affirmed it. I was stunned. For a moment I had the eerie feeling we came from different planets: A culture shock to be sure. Fortunately I pressed the matter and found this to be a classic case of miscommunication all because of one word, neko (cat). Words don’t “carry meaning”; we construct the meaning in our heads. Neko at that moment meant different things to us conditioned by our past learning and our expected

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/963039-hello-kitty



or assumed meaning held by each other. We negotiated the meaning and soon reached resolution. Alas, I became convinced that this seemingly trivial event could yield insights to comparative culture, a process for negotiating meaning between cultures. That I hope to achieve as we proceed forward but I digress.

Thus the headlines of the day were these:

• Hello Kitty bombshell: “She’s not a cat”. New York Post [10].

• Hello Kitty is not a cat. Everything is a lie. The Washington Post [11].

• Hello Kitty Is Not a Cat! “My Whole Life Has Been a Lie”. Parade [12].

• The Cat Is A Lie: Hello Kitty Is A Little Girl, Not A Cat [13].

• Hello Kitty is Not a Cat and Sanrio Has Ruined Childhood [14].

Several of these headlines come from major media and while some humor lie behind them as might be expected, disbelief and conster-nation about Japanese logic is more the story, as some termed it “twisted” and so on. A cartoon figure of a being with whiskers and pointed ears bearing the name Kitty naturally is taken as a cat in the same way Mickey Mouse is a mouse and Donald Duck, a duck. How could Sanrio the maker of Hello Kitty deny the obvious what people apparently perceive by claiming it was not a cat but even more startling a claim, it was human [15-20]. Further, Sanrio suggested that this was a cultural difference by asserting that Japanese people readily had understood this as fact [8]. If true, then indeed Japanese would be in a class by themselves perceptually and perhaps cognitively as well. We now know that this is not the case, at least not with Hello Kitty, and that the trouble lie in miscommunications.

Origin of the news story

The eruption of news about Hello Kitty originated from a Los Angeles Times story [21] about an American museum curator, a Japanolo-gist, who was planning a Hello Kitty exhibition in LA and had received a correction of sorts from Sanrio. She had referred to Hello Kitty as Sanrio’s cat, which it is, but was reportedly told by Sanrio that Hello Kitty was not a cat; it was a “little girl” [21-23]. This denial was said a “mind blow” by the original LA Times reporter, who grew up herself a fan of this cat character [21]. She did not, however, explore the matter more with the museum curator to determine how much Sanrio had really meant this. Couldn’t Sanrio be motivated by pride and wish to enhance this brand name, which now is an industry worth billions of dollars [7]? Apparently, the news reporter and the curator did not consider this question; nor did they apparently consider the implication that if Sanrio’s contention were true, then this would set Japanese apart from the rest of humanity about how they see the world.

Are the reporter and the curator ready to think that Japanese people have unique brains, which is the crux of the matter and inciden-tally not the first time the idea has been seriously floated by even Japanese themselves [24]? When Sanrio communicated to the curator-“Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character” [21-23]-did that mean that they were doubtful that she knew Hello Kitty was a cartoon character? Sanrio might have been posturing because not only the original designer had a cat in mind at its creation [25], but its various cat-features make it overwhelming feline. In fact Sanrio already had it described as a cat on its Japanese and European websites respec-tively as a neko (cat) classification [26] and by the words “the world-wide beloved small cat…”3[27].

So Sanrio’s posturing implies they have a different or special view they wish understood. Surely when Sanrio next said, “She is a little girl,” this is a stretch of imagination because no one of sound mind would take it literally. How could people think of Kitty as anything other

3 Sanrio uses the word cat or neko (cat) in its respective websites for Europe (as of August 30, 2014) and Japan (as of September 2, 2014): http://www.sanrioeurope.com/about.asp; http://www.sanrio.co.jp/character/?feature=902



than a cat? Did the news reporter consider that Sanrio did not mean it as literally true? Apparently not. As sometimes it happens, media will “take the news and run with it” before all the facts are known. As we will see, this case becomes more involved because of semantic complexities and related matter. While Sanrio may have been merely posturing by questioning if the curator understood Hello Kitty to be a cartoon character, in fact its multi-media manifestations make it a reasonable question but I get ahead of the story.

Perhaps Sanrio and/or the LA Times have more responsibility for the culture shock that erupted, for there is much unknown. We do not know with whom in Sanrio the curator had dealt and how (spoken, written?); nor the language(s) used; nor what was exactly said; and nor do we know if the LA Times gave the full story as the curator saw it. News editing will of course alter details, but it also might slant the news such that different or unintended meanings emerge. With that said, we will consider how miscommunications led to the culture shock involved. Whereas the culture shock was widely attributable to Japanese “twisted logic,” the intent of this paper is to show that was not the case at all. And in fact, it cannot even be pinned on mistranslation, a factor that many might immediately suppose. This matter goes well beyond mistranslation such that it involves critical concepts for classifying the nature of Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s organizational culture, its relationship with the curator, and the change of popular culture brought about by IT technologies. All of these factors contributed toward eruption of the Internet firestorm over Hello Kitty in August 2014. By demonstrating that this firestorm was not due to Japanese illogic but miscommunications among the principals involved, I hope to show how people, as cultural observers, tend to attribute cultural difference to illogic by the observed, an age-long phenomenon. I further hope to illuminate certain key principles in doing comparative culture-- the process of understanding culture and how it impacts behavior and communication.

A surprise take on the conflict

Generally cartoon characters are considered as anthropomorphism (i.e. animals are bestowed with certain human-like attributes) [28-30]. Some Japanese informants, however, tried to make sense of Sanrio’s “not-a-cat” claim by putting what would be anthropomor-phism in reverse: They wondered if Sanrio meant that Hello Kitty is actually a cat-like human: Cat characteristics imputed onto a human. Indeed that would be entirely a separate category but also irrelevant because Sanrio, as mentioned, terms Hello Kitty as a cat (neko) on its websites (or at least at the time of Sanrio’s reported claim). Moreover, its original designer began with the idea of an anthropomorphic cat, a fact that Sanrio does not deny. Yet now Sanrio’s seemingly troubled announcement may be rooted in just such a notion that Hello Kitty is really a cat-like girl. Perhaps Sanrio has taken the character too seriously, but it is enormously large an industry worth billions as mentioned. What could be a new genre, or at least a re-invention of one, is something to keep in mind for when we consider Sanrio’s later statement of clarification.

In sum, anthropomorphism to denote Hello Kitty necessarily means that Hello Kitty is non-human (but animate) and therefore a cat. Technically, this cat is not a personification--making a person metaphorically out of an abstract idea or other inanimate entity4. Such application needs caution to avoid necessarily describing this cartoon character as a human girl as some mass media erroneously did. Perhaps Sanrio fell into this conceptual trap, or they wish to enlarge the scope of Hello Kitty by which to strengthen the associated name brands. In Japan, Hello Kitty is widely known as Kitty-chan, a name of endearment by use of the intimate address term, chan, commonly used for one’s siblings and friends-as well as pets. This endearment for Hello Kitty may be what Sanrio hopes to engender by pushing her “little girl” status. The whole affair, however, seems an organizational dysfunction at Sanrio because while websites for Sanrio Japan [35] and Sanrio Europe [27] refer to Hello Kitty as a cat, the USA branch does not (as of this writing). And it may have been Sanrio USA with whom the curator had dealt. She was also associated with an American university and was planning the Hello Kitty event for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, not far from Sanrio’s offices (in San Francisco). Perhaps why the LA Times, who first broke the not-a-cat news about Hello Kitty, was particularly interested in the story.

4 That anthropomorphism and personification are not synonymous finds support from those advising the careful writer, such as these: Alizadeh [31]; “Anthropomorphism,” [32]; Moore [33]; Temple University Writing Center [34].



Later clarification by sanrio

Clarification about Sanrio’s position was pursued by some media reporters but apparently not by either the LA Times reporter or by the curator in question. The latter may have been reluctant, so as not to jeopardize her relationship with Sanrio, whose help she acknowl-edged in her previous publication about Hello Kitty [36] as well as for her curated Hello Kitty museum event in Los Angeles. Being cor-rected by Sanrio seemed to impact this curator by how she related it: “I was corrected-very firmly,” suggesting a sensitive situation [21]. Such fieldwork does not happen in a social vacuum. As Dell Hymes indicated, fieldwork often involves a social exchange relationship be-tween the seeker and the studied for the privilege of access to the community studied. This relationship is somewhat symbiotic, meaning a constraint by which the subject has their own needs in the relationship5. Further additional constraints for this curator were dealing with 1) an “artist” (Sanrio), who automatically becomes the authority about their work; and 2) a likely traditional cultural context in the case of Japanese formal relations. These constraints have associated protocols to observe in social relations, particularly hierarchical ones. The seeker, in gaining benevolence or cooperation from the knower, realizes the importance of giving deference. She likely had less latitude in challenging Sanrio in this case than did the news reporter, lest putting the cooperative museum project with Sanrio at risk. Moreover, journalistic principles dictate that the LA Times should have sought confirmation from Sanrio about their controversial statement.

For whatever reason, confronting Sanrio was left to others, and so within hours of the LA Times report, Kotaku [37], Rocket News 24 [18] and the Wall Street Journal [38,39] each contacted the Sanrio Tokyo office directly for clarification. Each found Sanrio retreat from their previous stand by saying, for example, “It’s going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat” [37]. Perhaps that was not with whom the curator had dealt; perhaps she had dealt with the Sanrio USA division as I have suggested. Nevertheless she apparently had not ques-tioned Sanrio and if she had, the controversy might have been averted, indicating how much the issue was rooted in miscommunication rather than a so-called Japanese logic.

Unique feature of the Japanese language

As pointed out, Japanese as do English speakers, use terms of affection or endearment for their pets. Referring to a pet or favorite cartoon character as “girl” (onna no ko) therefore should not be a surprise. Various media, however, falsely asserted that Sanrio Japan had on its website that very appellation as proof positive Sanrio indeed viewed its star character as being human. Actually these media misread the special way onna no ko was written. They overlooked a unique linguistic feature about Japanese-its multiple writing systems (even different from Chinese). By mixing these systems, as Sanrio Japan did, a message can take on new or special meaning. Until at least recently, Sanrio’s Japan website referred to Hello Kitty as a “girl” in an informal manner of writing: 女のコ. This rendering is an informal mixing of three scripts with the third one a marked or non-standard use for this combination. This rendering would never be used, for ex-ample, on an official school or hospital or government record for a girl. In such cases, the formal, standard way would be 女の子, the third character being a kanji, a character of Chinese origin. The formal written form would almost never be used for an animal or non-human being. The informal written form, usually indicating a “cute” or playful sense, has had increased use in related contexts for not just human reference but also for pet animals or cartoon characters. Thus the informal use of 女の子 signals a special nuance, such as “this may be a (cute) pet or cartoon character”.

The point is that this signaling by orthography, which is comparatively absent in English, is an additional way for Japanese to distin-guish the human from the non-human. If the journalists in question were cognizant of this linguistic difference, they surely would have treated Sanrio’s statement much differently. If a speaker of American English says to his pet dog, “C’mere, girl,” we would not try to argue that that pet dog is really a girl (other than the meaning of its sex). Thus Sanrio’s original statement must be viewed in new light as having a wider scope of meaning.

5 According to anthropologist Dell Hymes in his Lectures in ANTH540: Linguistic Anthropology, University of Virginia, 1992.



Media misrepresentations

Mass media further made the situation worse by mistranslation and misinterpretation of the Japanese language, as demonstrated by the Wall Street Journal’s bi-lingual news coverage in “Harōkiti” [38] and in Hongo [39]. The WSJ Japanese version missed the distinction about 女のコ while its English version falsely reported details in an WSJ interview with Sanrio in Tokyo that sought clarification about Hello Kitty. Linguistic and semantic errors in translation from Japanese6 work to present wrong information in English as well as wrongly emitting a confused image of Sanrio.

Consider the gist of the translation by WSJ of its interview in Japanese with Sanrio Japan found in the English version [39]:

1 [Hello Kitty] is a character, a hundred percent personification done in the motif of a cat….

2 We [also have] Kero Kero Keroppi, [which is]… a frog because it has elements of frogs [sic] in what he does.

3 Hello Kitty doesn’t [have elements of a cat]. It is more of an anthropomorphism….

4 …[D]ifficult to answer… but… Hello Kitty is a personification of a cat…

The translation creates contradictions absent in the original Japanese message (though evasive): Point 3 is voided by Point 1 having already stated the character is a hundred percent personification; and Points 3 and 4 are mutually opposed because as tropes anthropo-morphism and a personification cannot be operative at the same time (see Note 4). A misuse of pronouns in English (Point 2) adds further confusion by using both it and he in reference to the frog. Contrarily in the original Japanese-language version, Sanrio classifies both the frog and cat characters as the same--anthropomorphic:

• Japanese (Point 3): Dochira ka to iu to gijinka shita mono da.

• Whichever [one] [you] say, [it] is (an) anthropomorphic object. (lit. trans. mine).

Parentheses here (e.g. an) show an English-specific structure; whereas the bracketed items here indicate ellipsis--omissions--a normal as-pect of language. And lest ellipsis divert us unnecessarily, consider that John Hinds, who studied Japanese speech extensively, found “little unintended ambiguity” [40] or miscommunication [41] for such features. The form of this sentence in Japanese is fully comprehensible.

Here, Point 3, Sanrio in Japanese said quite firmly that they make no real distinction between the frog and Hello Kitty characters (both are anthropomorphism)--yet the WSJ English removed this steadfastness (the underlined initial clause in Point 3), replacing it with some wavering by the words, “more of anthropomorphism.” In effect Sanrio in English is made to classify the two characters separately between anthropomorphism and personification in a seemingly contradictory way. This diminishing of Sanrio’s steadfastness about the characters being anthropomorphism stirs controversy by twisting the words of Sanrio to mean something entirely different. WSJ (English) ends up calling Hello Kitty a personification, an error in American English because the term is restricted to inanimate entities according to both the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries.

As maintained herein, cartoon characters are typically animal and have traditionally been classified as anthropomorphism not personi-fication. WSJ’s error is particularly unfortunate because the cognate, personify, may lead people to wrongly infer that Sanrio had claimed Hello Kitty as a human girl or person, already widely exaggerated by various mass media. Although one could translate Point 3 to say “personified object,” Sanrio was consistent with terms using gijinka shita kyarakutaa (anthropomorphized character here) or its deriva-tive throughout. Translation of gijinka will always be problematic if the technical meanings for the terms are ignored as in this instance, perhaps due in part to a difference between American and British conventions for personification. Moreover, WSJ seems fixated on the old Hello Kitty trademark without due regard to the newer Hello Kitty as an animated star. Given that Sanrio has said they have always viewed Hello Kitty as a cat in one way or another and that a cartoon animal in most cases is anthropomorphic by definition, then my pres-ent treatment seems on safe grounds.

6 WSJ does not report the language used in the conversation or interview with Sanrio in Tokyo. Although the Japanese version appeared later than the English one, there are good reasons to believe that Japanese was the original source language, and is so treated here.



Before passing, one last look at the interview dialogue just discussed: It immediately becomes comprehensible by inserting anthro-pomorphism for each personification found. Why this effect? Both words have the same gloss in Japanese, gijinka, and in English, they often are used interchangeably (though inappropriately). Then why did WSJ apparently apply the words as they did? Perhaps because the interview seems to have failed: The Sanrio representative evaded any direct questioning. Yet Ashcraft [37] and Phro [18] report opposite results with the same Sanrio office. They received straight answers. For WSJ, Sanrio avoided answering unambiguously whether Hello Kitty was a cat and whether, human. WSJ applied honorific language style (i.e. teineigo/formal or polite) inconsistently (once out of four times) [38].

Generally, Japanese newswriting eschews honorific style in print but not in speech: The same printed report would be transformed into honorific style if for a televised news broadcast. Guest interviews in a print newspaper, if originally face-to-face, will likely use hon-orific style. Because of the heightened sensitivity--an “artist” has his credibility and competence questioned--it would have behooved the Japanese interviewer to fully use honorifics (i.e. teinigo language) so as to gain Sanrio’s cooperation. It was not that WSJ was impolite; they used plain level (kudaketa) of Japanese rather than more socially polite expressions that Sanrio’s high standing could expect. Afterall, Japanese are reputed as the world’s politest people [42-45], so this lukewarm respect by WSJ could have been enough to beget Sanrio’s evasive answers.

WSJ, however, disrespected Sanrio in a surer way elsewhere in the same article (Japanese): WSJ negated to quote Sanrio correctly the orthography for writing “girl.” Instead of the orthography found on the Sanrio website (女のコ), WSJ misquoted the website by rendering it as 女の子 [38]--not once but twice--apparently refusing to use the marked or non-standard form even in a direct quote of the Sanrio website (e.g. 「優しい女の子」 for 「優しい女のコ」 “gentle girl”). Remember this marked form signals for readers “a special entity, an animation character”7. This is not a simple lapse by WSJ but likely a conscious decision. If they quoted correctly, then they would have had to explain its meaning, thereby quashing the story and their take on it. By Sanrio’s orthography, Hello Kitty is called a “(cute) girl (charac-ter),” not a human girl. Whether intended or not, WSJ’s breeched etiquette possibly reveals bias: It already had had the view that Sanrio claimed Hello Kitty was a human girl. The disrespect of Sanrio may have shielded WSJ from having to correct their erroneous view, but perpetuated the falsehood about Sanrio. Hello Kitty is surely a cat but special in some way-not quite human but almost. Without conveying this special nuance in both language versions, WSJ adds to the confusion of the whole affair.

However parsed, WSJ goes beyond the bounds for translation of a news event by appreciably changing important details. The WSJ English version presents Sanrio as if in a confused state, wrongly presented as vacillating between categorical terms for its frog and cat characters, allowing Hello Kitty to be wrongly termed a personification. Furthermore, even after Sanrio publically retracted its purported claim of Hello Kitty as being a (human) girl, WSJ’s misquote of Sanrio’s special orthography for “girl” misrepresents the matter. Indeed, this marked orthography is the key to the whole affair, but readers in both languages are kept in the dark about it. I hasten to add that the indelicate comment about Japanese people by Personification of Radiation [5] mentioned earlier was in response to the WSJ English article. Is it just coincidental or could the misreporting by WSJ have triggered the racist comment?

Miscommunication between the principals

The root of the affair actually lies more within miscommunications between Sanrio and the museum curator, herself. The “cat-ness” was really never the question, for prior to this firestorm, a Sanrio executive, Wai-Yee Lee, co-authored a paper in which Hello Kitty is called

7 Although 女のコ is not uniformly recognized in Japan, especially by older people, two online Japanese dictionaries (jisho.org and tango-rin.com) include it as a variant for girl. (By recognized, I mean having seen it, but they still of course can read it.) In fact a Google search comparing the frequency for at least five ways of writing girl (onna no ko) in the Japanese syllabaries results in 女のコ having the third highest frequency (as of September 18, 2015).



a cat multiple times [46] and as seen, Sanrio Japan noted that the company has long maintained it as a cat since its creation [38,39]. Thus when Sanrio had told the curator that Hello Kitty was a cartoon character, one must wonder why such an obvious fact was pointed out. Some other intended meaning seems likely. Earlier it was suggested that Sanrio was posturing, that is, wanting to present a certain view-point about Hello Kitty. After all, this curator’s research work about Hello Kitty [36] surely became an important basis for the exhibition in Los Angeles that she directed in cooperation with Sanrio. Her work is scholarly, anthropological in dealing with how the image of Hello Kitty has impacted people in their lives through consumption and use of Hello Kitty products by which a “cute-cool” culture has evolved throughout the world. Her main focus is necessarily on young adults and older, certainly commercial markets that Sanrio targets by now, particularly because of the decline of births in Japan [46]. As she herself reported, “Hello Kitty’s core customers [are] adult women be-tween the ages of 18 to 40, buying Kitty-branded products including vacuum cleaners, scooters and jewelry” [47].

Yet in recent decades this trademark graphic morphed to became an animated star character in various movies, games, TV animation shows and so on for young children. These enterprises are largely what has developed Hello Kitty as an animated (lively) character quite apart from the original static trademark image underlying much of the “cute-cool” culture she investigated. Perhaps Sanrio’s message to the curator was trying to encourage her to take a broader view of Hello Kitty in the LA exhibit, such that it could show the wide range of Sanrio/Hello Kitty enterprises.

Sanrio and the curator were likely viewing Hello Kitty differently. In Japan, Hello Kitty besides being known by that and an affectionate nickname, Kitty-chan, as previously mentioned, it is also called by two other names: Kitty, and Kitty White. Compare with Mickey Mouse, which has just two names as far as I know. In Hello Kitty’s case these names refer to at least three different entities or embodiments: 1) a trademark; 2) Hello Kitty, a cartoon character (e.g. as Cinderella, Snow White, etc.); 3) Kitty White, a cartoon character set in London. Judging from the media reports during the Hello Kitty firestorm of August 2014, people outside of Japan were unaware of the animated Hello Kitty and the fact of a related backstory. As one observer notes, “it’s amazing that something can be so universally popular yet the average buyer of Hello Kitty merchandise doesn’t have a clue as to what it’s about or what the story behind it is” [61]. Perhaps Sanrio was mindful of this difference of views when referring to Hello Kitty as a “little girl” and saying the fact of this animation was shared by the people of Japan.

The point is that for many people overseas, especially older ones, Hello Kitty is associated as an appealing trademark and less so as an animation character with a backstory. This applies also personally to Miranda [21], the LA Times reporter, and the curator [36] as they describe having grown up with the Hello Kitty icon on consumer goods apart from Hello Kitty’s other cartoon, storybook, movie [48], video game, and theme park parade productions [49]. These productions came on the heels of the success of the trademark graphic on consumer goods. Thus when speaking about Hello Kitty, if the curator visualizes the static, Hello Kitty trademark graphic, but Sanrio visualizes a 3D humanoid by the name of Kitty White, then misunderstanding will likely ensue. These are essentially different characters while the second one bends the boundaries between anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Sanrio may have been pushing the cartoon character rather than the trademark graphic and so naturally wanted to emphasize its human-like dimensions for the benefit of the cura-tor. However with the backlash against the Hello-Kitty-is-not-a-cat claim, Sanrio backtracked and denied it. As indicated above, Sanrio already had had categorized Hello Kitty as a “cat” on their own websites, so some backtracking was inevitable by them.

Surveys of Japanese about the image of hello kitty

Although the people of Japan are well aware of the wide scope of Hello Kitty productions, some evidence shows that they generally view Hello Kitty as a cat; not as a girl or human. According to an informal survey I made of Japanese people in Japan from university students to working adults who had not heard of the news story, few saw Hello Kitty as something other than a cat. And why did they in-terpret mere whiskers and pointed ears as a cat? Because the Sanrio trademark, at least originally, had additional cues-Hello Kitty seated



between a bottle of milk and a fish-unmistakable cues for a cat. Similar results were found by the AFP [8] among their Japanese staff, and by an online survey by the Wall Street Journal. Here are the WSJ results for polls in English and in Japanese by the respective language websites.

8 For example, within the section of Yano [36] titled, “Preface and acknowledgments: Grabbing the cat by its tail, or how the cat grabbed me,” she writes, “During well over a decade of thinking, talking, and writing about Hello Kitty, I have taken a bit of ownership of the cat and its many, many lives in as much as I fear that the cat has taken ownership of me” ([36] P. viiii).

First the results clearly show that most respondents in either language view Hello Kitty as a cat. Second, Japanese respondents, likely knowing more than English respondents about the wide range of Hello Kitty characterizations, probably had more reason to consider the “human girl” (ningen no onna no ko) a possibility. Moreover, some of the Japanese respondents choosing the non-cat options pos-sibly were influenced by the WSJ Japanese news article using the formal written form 女の子 for girl, creating some dissonance. Third, use of the term human/ningen in the poll likely had some real but unknown effect. Fourth, the true composition of the poll participants are unknown. Fifth, the poll results also may have been affected by the participants’ prior exposure to media coverage of the Hello Kitty controversy. Nevertheless, combining the surveys mentioned, it is reasonable to conclude that Sanrio was likely misled in thinking that their purported assertion about Hello Kitty not being a cat was “how [Japanese] people have understood it” and that hardly anyone in Japan would be surprised by it [8]. On the contrary, I found many Japanese people in Japan who were surprised and could not agree with Sanrio’s assertion.

An about-face

Perhaps these various Japanese respondents are misguided or the related surveys flawed, but the curator in question took an about-face from calling Hello Kitty a cat to apparently going the opposite direction. In so doing, she removes doubt that the LA Times may have originally misrepresented her story while implicating certain issues about comparative culture. In a radio interview after the Hello Kitty “storm,” as referred, she states: “[Hello Kitty] doesn’t look cattish to me” [50]. This refuted her view in her book8 [36] and why the initial Sanrio “correction” came. Again, her prior view of it as a cat was quite reasonable and warranted. Could Hymes’ point about social ex-change relations apply here? She was curator for a major exhibition of Hello Kitty in cooperation with the Sanrio company. Hardly would anyone in her position wish to jeopardize such an exhibition. Sanrio on the other hand has its own aims, so it might not be easy to balance their different purposes. Implications emerge related to how the cultural observer positions between the cultures being observed. More on this later but for now we consider the rest of the interview.

In the interview, the curator was called on to explain how Hello Kitty was not a cat and also about other unusual manga characters found in Japan. The interviewer suggested that Japanese have a relative taste for the surreal compared to the literal sense of Americans, such as with Anpanman, a whimsical sweet bun cartoon character. “Whoever thought of a bun, right, running around?…[Or] a blue robot cat,” the curator exclaimed and then said that for the Japanese, everything [need not] make perfect logical sense. But things can be done in the spirit of play. In Japan they call it asobi, play. I think it allows them a certain kind of creativity which is wonderful and that’s what Hello Kitty represents [50].

She does well in expressing delight for the culture, which can likely increase positive regard and interest in Japan. Doing more would be unreasonable in only a five-minute interview as this one. Explaining Japan in just a single sound bite is hardly possible. So the concern raised here is more toward the interview than this curator herself. On the whole, the interview emphasized cultural difference, and im-plies that Sanrio’s stance about Hello Kitty comes from the Japanese fondness for the surreal and comfort with illogic. That may pertain to Sanrio, but not to Japanese people, if again the surveys mentioned have any validity. And now even less so to Sanrio by its retraction of the not-a-cat statement.

HumanWebsite N Cat Girl NeitherEnglish 801 73% 10% 17%

Japanese 553 57% 15% 29%⨥

Table 1: Wall Street Journal Poll Results [38,39]. ⨥The information here is as provided by WSJ and who evidently rounded the figures.



Do interviews like this one serve any purpose other than dealing in cultural curiosities? Without guidance, such curiosities likely enlarge cultural difference, possibly inviting stereotyping to take place. Although seemingly innocuous, and we repeat that the interview constrained what the curator possibly might have done otherwise, talk about the surreal and the illogic in reference to Japanese seems reminiscent of the age-long view by Westerners of Japanese as being mysterious. On the surface this is fairly what Westerners see. The rub is that we see through the lens of our own culture. This is the great challenge for the cultural observer: How can we avoid being locked-in to this default for viewing other cultures?

Returning to Anpanman, the Japanese sweet bun character taken up in the interview: Indeed, Clements and McCarthy [51] report that Japanese have traditionally exploited anthropomorphized food as cartoon characters. Doubtless the interviewer and the curator had this fact in mind, for it appears relatively much more in Japan than, say, in the U.S. Yet Americana has its fair share of similar figures such as the Gingerbread Man and its variants; the VeggieTales cartoon series; not to mention the commercialized Oscar Meyer Weiner and Mr. Peanut for the Planters Peanut Company from among many examples of those. Hardly do Americans have some sort of gift or special creativity for anthropomorphizing some of their food into characters. Surely creative in some way but it probably does not set them apart from people in other cultures. The invoking of a native word in Japanese, asobi for play, does not make Japanese food creations anymore special than they are. The mention of asobi probably was a shorthand way of saying that Japanese practices of play likely differ from those in the U.S. Surely so in the same way that baseball is found in both countries, but there are subtle differences how the sport is played. Nevertheless, essential aspects of the game are the same; otherwise, the sport would be unidentifiable as such.

In both cultures anthropomorphized food (made cartoonish) is produced, consumed, and enjoyed. It may be that in a homogenized society as Japan’s9 [54-56], everyday life tends to be a bit “standardized,” such that Japanese seem to be relatively conformist10 in do-

9 Aware of a popular Western trend to highlight the “multicultural” about ethnicities in Japan, I hasten to point out that homogenized here is meant in relative terms or degrees; surely I do not mean that 100% of the people in Japan or its elements are all the same. Nor do I mean that Japan has been unchanging over history; nor do I mean that Japan is absent of co-cultures and other socio-economic differences; and nor do I mean that Japanese are absent of individuality. According to Gören’s [52] calculations for cultural diversity, Japan is among the countries with the least diversity in the world and the lowest for any of the developed countries, as found also by Fearon’s [53] country rankings for diversity.

While granting that minorities or Others exist in Japanese society, a fact remains that they form a relatively small, if not miniscule,

portion of Japanese society. Many Japanese can and do go through life without ever knowingly having direct contact with a non-Japanese. Until hair coloring and blue-colored eye lens became fashionable, Japanese lived in a society of people phenotypically much the same-dark hair and dark eye color along with Japanese or East Asian facial features. Coupled with this is a common belief of the Japanese, rightly or wrongly, that they share among themselves a high degree of similarity.

Numerous Japanese have remarked to me about the sameness they felt with other people while living in Japan. The approximately two

percent of Japan’s population that is non-Japanese is hardly enough to question the homogeneity of Japan, especially when a large seg-ment of the non-Japanese are East Asians, many of whom are practically indistinguishable phenotypically between themselves, including ethnic Japanese. I appreciate that at the same time people of different ethnicities or cultural backgrounds exist, some more noticeably than others. While it is useful to point out that it is not perfect homogeneity, for some Japanese people can be rather insensitive about people of difference, it is highly impractical to ignore the sheer fact that not only most Japanese live in a sea of ethnic or racial sameness, they perceive themselves that way--as being a pure race.10 Conformity defined is “the alteration of someone’s opinions, behaviors, or evaluations in accordance with (i) other people’s behaviors, opinions, or evaluations or (ii) the typical morals and regulations of a societal or cultural group or scenario” [57]. Conformity is necessary in any society for it to cohere and function. Japan, having the highest population density (based on arable land) among major countries in the world, requires people to be cooperative in the use of public space: In major cities, roads are typically narrow with few sidewalks G both pedestrians and motorists must proceed with caution. Young children are required to walk to and from school on a prescribed route; if not, it possibly could nullify their accident insurance. For nearly all car types, the purchaser must prove having a parking space; otherwise the person cannot get a permit for it. Until recently, many apartment rentals have been strict in requiring a guarantor to ensure



that one exercises care in using the apartment space. Death virtually means cremation because if not, a grave would be nearly impossible to find or exorbitantly expensive. In such cases, Japanese options are limited or prescribed as compared to many Western societies.

Although a mid-sized country in size, Japan has limited space for its large population; thus people must exercise restraint throughout their daily lives. This means being conformist and is reflective in how Japanese are known to be reserved in public about their feelings (honne vs. tatemae/real vs. official), reluctant to directly share their opinions or challenge authority in formal situations, and in general avoid calling attention to themselves; standard advice for children to avoid trouble of all of kinds at school: have a shirankao (lit. a know-nothing face or poker face). Japanese office workers have a custom of after-hours drinking together (tsukiai) which functions to provide an informal setting for the letting off of steam, including sounding off to the boss (while drunk). Doing so during the formal hours of work would be flagrant. Nearly any society has nonconformist individuals; Japan is no exception in this regard. So simply because there are Japanese co-cultures or subcultures or individuals who display nonconformist or bizarre behavDior does not negate the fact that Japanese generally make considerable effort to avoid social friction or being out of step with the people around them.

ing the same things as others. Various Asian visitors to Japan have remarked to me how very orderly and similar life appears in Japan. Chinese, Indians, and Thais described noticeable lack of ethnic diversity in Japan. In the milieu of social conformity or low diversity, the widely popular Anpanman sweet bun character stands out as if “standard issue” for preschool children, such that the character can be a conversation opener that delights nearly any child. Aside from popularity of such anthropomorphic characters, study of the drivers of Japanese conformity would contribute much to understanding the culture. Because no comparable food character of such universal popularity presently seems to exist in the U.S. does not mean Americans confine themselves to the strictly literal or logical or cannot enjoy or appreciate the whimsical, surreal or whatever. And assuredly not, can the so-called surreal nature of the Japanese be used to account for the original “misstatement” by Sanrio, for not only their retraction but also the readjustment by the curator two months later by her describing Hello Kitty as both cat and girl [58], a change that seems in step how Sanrio’s communications progressed about classifying Hello Kitty during the controversy.

In the end, the audience for the interview likely comes away thinking that Japanese have a unique sense for the surreal, the term used. While anthropology is strong for having an emic view of culture-the insider’s view-and acquiring such a view is necessary, but at the same time one must not forget their own culture and its values. Even taking a relativist approach, which probably did the most in anthropology to develop the insider’s view on the part of the observer, one must be careful not to take relativity to the extreme. For example, extreme relativity would have one accept headhunting, genital mutilation, or suttee (Hindu practice of widow immolation). One need not forgo their native values or perception in order to observe and study culture. Indeed the skilled observer will not lose sight of their own culture, if for no other reason than to monitor and manage possible ethnocentrism. If not, how can we know that our own culture influences our perceptions?

So being in touch with one’s own culture is a necessity, which may be what saves the cultural observer from blindly “going native” and forsaking the middle-ground in comparative culture analysis. Given her constraints, the curator may have too unquestionably accepted the Sanrio view in line with a patron or social exchange relationship. Realistically speaking, such a role is necessary to get the story or the fieldwork but there are limits. She and the LA Times reporter did not appear to query Sanrio as to what was meant by their initial state-ment regarding Hello Kitty. This lapse is abundantly clear not only by perusal of Sanrio websites, which treated the character as a cat, but also by Sanrio’s later reversal effectively saying that Hello Kitty is indeed a cat. Despite the scholar’s denial, she helped create the firestorm by apparently ignoring what she personally believed about Hello Kitty being a cat. It is admirable to take a relativist view by assuming the inside or emic view, but that is not the Japanese view but Sanrio’s view. According to the surveys mentioned, Japanese people do not



appear to share Sanrio’s purported assertion that Hello Kitty is a little girl, as opposed to a cat. In fact, even the backstory of the character living in London, etc. is a non-human world filled with other cat-like Londoners. No human figure is to be seen; not even zoomorphic figures (as of the time of this writing). So it may be that the curator was indeed fused to the Hello Kitty trademark character, surely a cat, without much attention to the animated character, Kitty White or other human character roles assumed by Hello Kitty.

The attention to the consumerism of Hello Kitty products, the trademarking or licensing, seems clear by the museum describing the exhibit as a “colorful history of Hello Kitty and her influence [that] includes an extensive product survey, with rare and unique items from the Sanrio archives” but without mention of Hello Kitty as an animation character [59]. By this description and a lengthier one [60], the exhibition appears solely focused on Hello Kitty merchandise and likely follows the scope of the curator’s book [36] on the consumption of these products and the creation of Japanese “cool fashion,” which again is laudable but perhaps by necessity limited to the merchandising of classic Hello Kitty products. As the curator states in her book, “I had grown up in Hawaii, and Hello Kitty was part of everyday commer-cial fare from Japan,” ([36], p. ix) which had to be before Hello Kitty became an animated character. Indeed she relates that the LA Exhibit was directed to the ethnic identity developed by Japanese Americans in the 1970s for the cat trademark [21]. And so, Sanrio’s words to her that “Hello Kitty is not a cat. It’s a cartoon character,” may have been quite natural in response to the Hello Kitty exhibition focused on the merchandising and consuming of Hello Kitty products without sufficiently allowing for the wide spectrum of the character that is Hello Kitty. If her view were so narrowly concentrated, that could not be helped considering that researchers must make choices and hers has been apparently tied to the trademarked licensing enterprises and their cultural impacts. In this light, hardly would I question the logic of Sanrio’s correction of the curator that led to the Hello Kitty controversy; but if taken out of context, it immediately becomes illogical-claiming that the classic trademark image of Hello Kitty is not a cat but a girl. That I believe was what Sanrio was probably reacting to, contrarily showing Japanese as having universal sentiments not a special illogical way of thinking that various netizens had concluded.

Conclusion

Having come back full circle to the original Sanrio stance of Hello Kitty being both cat and girl before the internet firestorm [46] shows this was a non-story to begin with. Miscommunications between the principals leavened by media hype actualized by media missteps: Ignoring the context of the original message by Sanrio to the curator, failing to confirm Sanrio’s apparent contradiction, the misreading of Sanrio’s Japanese website, and even twisting Sanrio’s later words on the matter. In its wake, stereotyping of Japanese was triggered including racial epithets by some showing how little it takes to trigger and perpetuate them--for mass media never corrected the false impression that Sanrio, and by extension, Japanese people, think illogically for purportedly claiming Hello Kitty was a human girl. San-rio’s Japanese orthography for “girl” in this case conveys not “human” but an endeared animated character, a profoundly logical use of language. Such went unreported by mass media, who quickly ceased coverage once Sanrio retracted their purported human girl claim. Mass media’s wrongly hyping this non-story helped instigate racist sentiment against Japanese and further perpetuate it by failing to address the related misperceptions in the minds of the public. While some mass media confronted Sanrio about their purported claim, these media did not go far enough. None asked why Sanrio had made its purported statement, for if they had, they might have learned that Sanrio was as logical as could be. At the very least, mass media revived the old saws within Western collective consciousness about the “mysterious” Japanese.

However “post-racial” some people would like to claim society to be, stereotyping appears entrenched in the human psyche or collec-tive consciousness and likely forever a challenge to harmonious intercultural relations. Culture shock--as a trigger of such stereotyping-- merits attention and ought not be lost in false philosophical arguments that try to diminish its importance. Sanrio’s push to view Hello Kitty as a “girl” is reasonable, for Hello Kitty progressively has become more human-like by undertaking human roles in movies such as Cinderella or Snow White. Given the human propensity to elevate pets to “honorable human” status by which they are called “boy” or “girl” and the change in the Japanese language, at least the use of the written form of 女のコ to be in such accord, we see in this glimpse how fitting the term “postmodern” is for Japan11. Sanrio’s “girl” may in fact be where we are all headed but don’t know it yet.

11 Postmodern here is in a post-industrial, economic or technological sense as how the Japanese nation early has had technology integrate much of their daily lives, such as automatic doors of taxis and most public entrances, special sounds at traffic signals for the blinded, ro-botics in factories and robot-staffed hotels, extensive public transportation systems that famously operate on time, electronically made purchases inside stores from cell phones; as well as an orderly society with a low crime rate yet in relatively free and liberal democracy.



Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to my NGU colleague Isao Yakame for his valuable consultation on the Japanese concept of gijinka and to Isabelle Bilodeau for her valuable help with manuscript preparation, as well as to the many people, too numerous to name, who so kindly engaged me about Hello Kitty and things Japanese.

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