The Toys That Made Us (2017) s02e04 Episode Script
Hello Kitty
Bangkok, Thailand, 2007.
The Royal Police force has come under increased scrutiny.
Charges of corruption and police brutality have forced the chief of police to take extreme measures to get his force into line.
You have shamed this uniform.
And you have shamed me.
For the last time.
Do you know what that means? That means you get the box.
And what's in the box? Pain.
Suffering.
Humiliation.
Now Put out your left arm.
I don't want to do this.
You made me do this.
Now get out of my sight! Don't ever be late to work again! Meow, meow.
The power of Hello Kitty's cuteness has shamed and delighted the world for over 40 years.
It was like Hello Kitty sensation.
Hello Kitty is a lot of things.
She's a toy, a toothbrush, a toaster.
Toys for kids, and toys for adults.
From plush dolls to passenger jets, Hello Kitty's unblinking feline face is there, watching your face go Aww.
Just looking at her can make you happy.
From the streets of Japan to the catwalks of Paris, a celebrity among celebrities.
Hello Kitty is so cute.
She's the queen of kawaii.
Kawaii! She's a toy.
She's a brand.
She's worth over $5 billion a year.
Welcome to the toy industry.
Raking in more than most toy lines could ever dream.
Hello Kitty is the most beloved cat in the world.
Hello Kitty is not a cat.
- It's not a cat? - It's not a cat! And it only gets cuter from here.
Hold onto your cats.
These are The Toys that Made Us.
Hello Kitty, one of the world's most recognizable faces, with two eyes, six whiskers, a cute yellow nose, and, well, no mouth.
She doesn't have a mouth.
They never made her with a mouth.
Or did they? To solve the controversies around Hello Kitty's occasional mouthlessness, species - She's like a person.
- country of origin Did you know Hello Kitty is British? and gender - She's a she.
- That's an easy one.
we need to travel back to Japan, in the 1960s, where a dissatisfied bureaucrat had a dream.
Hello.
I'm CEO of Sanrio Incorporated, Shintaro Tsuji.
Better known today as Papa Tsuji.
Not only did he have a dream to sell small, delightful things that make people smile, he also had a motto.
Small gift, big smile.
With this motto Small gift, big smile.
Tsuji quit his government job and put all his savings into founding a company that would ultimately become the birthplace of Hello Kitty: Sanrio.
Small gift, big smile But that motto wasn't just catchy, it was a careful strategy.
If you look at the Japanese culture, it is one of giving of small gifts upon social occasions.
So I come to meet you, and I bring a very small gift.
So, the Sanrio concept or philosophy that we call "Small gift, big smile" was at the very core of that merchandising strategy.
In the beginning, for Tsuji, it was more about small gifts than big smiles.
He was selling things like slippers.
- Flip-flops.
- Teacups Kind of basic, everyday items.
He found that by adding one little strawberry, it became such value added in terms of cuteness.
Here, I have the first hit product of Sanrio.
Papa Tsuji had made teapots and smelly, old rubber flip-flops cute, at a time when Japan wasn't really known for cuteness.
Oh, wait.
That's not entirely true.
There was traditional Japanese Kokeshi Dolls, and also something called shÅjo manga, comic books for girls.
That was pretty cute.
But Papa Tsuji saw something more in these comics.
A way to grow his business, and less strawberries.
I hired Ado Mizumori and Takashi Yanase, who were famous comic artists and illustrators back then, and created products with their art.
I put their designs on notebooks and teacups.
This worked well enough, but across the Pacific, in the US, Papa Tsuji noticed how cute and successful Peanuts merchandise had become.
So, he licensed it for Japan, and it was a great success for Charles M.
Schulz.
We had to keep paying royalties.
Pretty soon, Papa Tsuji got sick of working for Peanuts, as it were, and instead of paying licensing fees We thought it'd be better to create our own designs.
We hired in-house designers.
They created Patty and Jimmy, and Bunny and Matty.
This bear, Coro Chan, eats the croquettes on his cheeks when he gets hungry.
Aww.
Cute.
Kind of.
But definitely not a hit, and Papa Tsuji needed one, and fast.
We must make a big profit.
Otherwise, we'd be in the red.
So, he began a quest to find the world's cutest animal.
We learned, among all the animals that could be characters, the number one was a dog.
Some religions don't like dogs.
The second most popular was white cat.
Good enough.
So, in 1974, Papa Tsuji and Sanrio designer Yuko Shimizu worked on their first white cat product, a cuddly, adorable Coin purse.
And the coin purse read, "Hello," with an exclamation point.
Hello, exclamation point, white kitty.
A-ha! Hello Kitty.
Yes.
This is how Hello Kitty came to be.
Papa Tsuji gave birth to a kitten that would change the world.
Hello Kitty started from here.
The most perfect embodiment of cuteness ever created.
Hello Kitty's perfect.
But there was no steamboat kitty here.
Unlike other iconic characters, Hello Kitty then looks exactly like Hello Kitty now.
And it was that look that quickly filled Papa Tsuji's coin purse.
People like it, all the housewives or particularly, like, high school, college students.
They all have, like, files or bags, or They have everything with Hello Kitty.
As sales in Japan grew, so, too, did Hello Kitty's backstory and her height, for that matter.
According to details on early products, her real name is Kitty White.
Her parents are George and Mary White.
Her twin sister's name is Mimmy.
She's a Scorpio.
She's five apples tall and weighs three apples.
Her blood type is Red Delicious.
Just joking.
It's actually A.
She is, of course, sweet, and she loves school, loves music.
You would too if you had your own grand piano.
Kitty has a grand piano.
I wish I had one.
So, her life is set just above that of Japanese girls.
It's also set 6,000 miles away.
She's not even Japanese.
That's right.
Hello Kitty is English.
Around the time Kitty was born, England was the dream country of all the girls in Japan.
So, we fit her in English life.
When Hello Kitty took Japan by storm, in the mid-'70s, it might have been due to her enviable upper-class lifestyle.
But it's more likely because She's kawaii.
- What's that? - Kawaii.
- Kawaii.
- Once more.
- Kawaii.
- Right, kawaii.
Kawaii.
Kawaii.
It's a Japanese word that means pretty or cute.
It really isn't just cute as an American might look at cute.
It's cute with a whole different dimension applied to it.
It's a genetic trait we've evolved to help us protect our young.
Big, round heads and foreheads, big eyes lower on the face, combined with soft, squishy, round bodies, trigger an automatic Aww.
It's why we might look at a character like this one and say, "Aww.
That's pretty cute.
" But make a few changes, and we say Kawaii! Papa Tsuji had created a kawaii monster, leaving mountains of money in its wake.
Japan was devastated by cuteness.
But Hello Kitty's world domination had only just begun.
Their next target, the USA.
In 1976, Hello Kitty went to Hollywood.
Well, a bit north of Hollywood.
Further.
Yeah, further.
Welcome to Sanrio's first store, in San Jose, California.
Small gift, big smile.
More like small town, big challenge.
A lot of the product being created at the time, because the brand was based in Japan, were things like chopsticks and rice bowls.
And, you know, of course, now everybody knows what those are, but 40 years ago, Japanese culture wasn't as well-established in society in North America as it is now.
Initially, Sanrio and Hello Kitty really didn't seem to fit in.
Because, in Japan, everything is much smaller.
Houses, offices, desks.
Everything is a lot smaller.
Paper size and notebook size for schools in Japan was different than in the US.
But Hello Kitty's biggest challenge was, unlike similar brands/toy lines, she didn't have a movie, cartoon, or comic.
It's so difficult to launch a character and build a fan base with no content and no entertainment.
Oh, and no mouth.
One of the first things they notice is she doesn't have a mouth.
Interestingly, this Sanrio character seen here has no mouth.
Of course, she has a mouth.
We just didn't feel it necessary to draw it in.
We didn't draw in every single whisker.
We didn't draw in every single little detail of Hello Kitty.
She's obviously an abstraction.
Well, whatever she was, it was nothing a bit of marketing couldn't fix.
We had no marketing in the early years.
They literally went door-to-door.
"Mr.
Store manager, this is Hello Kitty.
Do you know?" "I don't know Hello Kitty.
" "You don't know Hello Kitty? Very, very famous cute Japanese cat character, okay? So you buy.
" "I think that's kinda cute.
" "I write order for you.
Minimum order $300.
Sign here.
" And it worked.
It really worked.
It did work on part of the population.
Mainly, Japanese, Chinese and Korean people.
She became a symbol for Asian-Americans, as something that was theirs.
It was like the boys had Bruce Lee We girls had Hello Kitty.
Hello Kitty would scratch his eyes out.
I wouldn't put it past her.
With modest sales at best, Papa Tsuji pushed on and expanded around the country, and the team kept knocking on doors, but those suitcases were starting to get pretty heavy.
Our tagline, when we were out knocking on doors, was that we would have at least 100 new items every single month.
What separates Sanrio is that one company might bring out 100,000 units of one particular item.
Sanrio will bring out 1,000 units of 100 different items.
It was a new concept.
People hadn't seen all this little stuff before.
It's a lot of product.
And a lot of doors.
Business was tough.
Coming into the US market, Papa Tsuji adopted a new motto.
If I make the company and it goes bankrupt, it'll be a problem, so I wanted a company that could not go bankrupt.
Hmm.
This is, undeniably, a very good business strategy.
However, the best door-to-door salesman in the business, Andy Toyama, really needed to come clean with the Papa about the Kitty.
Frankly speaking, Sanrio didn't have a profit.
We had a couple of warehouses in South San Francisco that were just chock-full of inventory, but it was killing us.
It was just absolutely killing us.
She was really an unknown in the toy industry.
So, when parents were looking at things on the shelf, they picked all the Disney characters, the Sesame Street, and the characters they knew their child knew and liked.
Who is this great big cat with no mouth? To help answer that question, Papa Tsuji deployed the Sanrio team to harness the marketing know-how of Sesame Street's toy company, Child Guidance.
So, we helped to launch Hello Kitty into toys in the United States, and it was a dismal failure.
Papa Tsuji's no bankruptcy policy was not going well.
Naturally, he was not very happy.
I thought that we were at the brink of having the parent fold up our tent and ship it all back to Japan.
We got close to that happening.
As Sanrio in the US was hobbling about in ill-fitted flip-flops, back in Japan, Sanrio was leaping around the market like an agile cat, or a penguin, or a puppy, or any number of the other Sanrio characters that came out in the '70s, none of whom would appeal to girly girls as much as Hello Kitty.
Uh-oh.
My Melody appeals more to girly girls.
She's very sweet, and her fan base tends to be either young or more adult women.
Young or adult.
Kinda covers everyone.
Yes.
Well, she is cute.
And, not only that, My Melody sported two eyes, a nose and a mouth.
Hello, My Melody, and goodbye, Hello Kitty.
How cute is that? Pretty cute.
But it was too early for a victory dance.
My Melody herself faced yet more competition from with inside the Sanrio stable of animals and stuff.
- There was a delightfully formal penguin.
- Tuxedo Sam.
He had 365 bow ties.
Hello Kitty only had one, and she wore it in the wrong spot.
There was Little Twin Stars, Cheery Chums, Goropikadon, and the Vaudeville Duo.
It was one big happy Sanrio family.
The Sanrio characters, they're all in different families.
Oh.
Friends, then.
They're not friends.
Frenemies? They're not frenemies.
They're strangers.
They don't interact in Hello Kitty's world.
The only time they're together is if there's a celebration.
So, they can get together? They can, like when there's an anniversary or a party.
But not every Sanrio character was invited to that party.
I know the one character that bombed was Spottie Dottie.
There were more.
Lovee Days' days were numbered.
A cat and mouse pair that appeared only from the rear.
There was Syrup, a friend of Pompompurin from the '90s, who also appeared from the rear.
Of the more than 400 characters that Sanrio has created, they've had some successes with about a dozen of those characters.
In the late '70s, there was a good chance Papa Tsuji might lose his kitty.
But Papa Tsuji wasn't shedding any tears.
He was surrounding himself with a multitude of cuteness, and he took his expansive world back to the drawing board, as in, like, animation.
Sanrio now had an animation studio, and the first film it produced Not even close.
It was called Little Jumbo.
On this idyllic island paradise, the trees provide clean, fresh air and a bedside feeding service.
The Japanese kids were eating it up, too, as Sanrio's sales continued to grow.
But, in the late '70s, Hello Kitty was fast becoming lost in the rabbit hole of the creative wonderland that is Papa Tsuji's mind.
Mmm.
Hello Kitty was not smiling.
Well, we assume.
The question was, "Could she claw her way out of the kitty litter?" Of course she would, with the help of her mama.
- Yay! Apple pie! - Not that mama.
This one.
Yuko Yamaguchi, back then, the winner of sauce pans, and fishing rods, and that stuff.
But now, she's known as Kitty Mama.
She started at Sanrio in 1978.
When I came to Sanrio, I wasn't a big fan of Hello Kitty myself.
She noticed that all those interesting personality traits they deliberately designed to create longing within Japanese girls weren't being maximized.
Kitty wanted to be a professional pianist.
But there wasn't a single picture of her.
I thought, "That's not right.
" So, I drew a picture of the family's love, surrounding the grand piano, and told them that story.
Right there and then, the head of the division asked me to be the creator for Hello Kitty from that point on.
And thus, in 1980, Yuko Yamaguchi won the greatest prize of all.
She became the Hello Kitty chief designer and immediately began dressing her feline daughter in all manner of new outfits.
She always wore the same ribbon, same outfit.
I wanted to give her a lot of clothes, just like I had a lot.
But this innocent-sounding idea sounded the alarm at Sanrio.
In Sanrio, at the time, to change someone else's original design was unthinkable, but Yamaguchi was brave enough to do it.
And the bold moves from Kitty Mama weren't over yet.
But we made it that Kitty especially liked teddy bears, just like little girls in Japan or America.
During the '80s, as Kitty White evolved under the watchful eye of Kitty Mama, so, too, did Japan's kawaii culture.
And nowhere was this more personified than in the emerging Japanese pop music scene, and the very first genuine J-pop idol, Matsuda Seiko.
A mere teenager, she wore frilly, childlike clothes and giggled for the camera.
She defined what it meant to be a pop idol for generations of Japanese fans.
And, clutching her teddy bear, Kitty rode the new wave of Japanese pop culture, right to the very top of Sanrio's cast of characters and stuff.
And in the '80s, the Japanese population started to ask themselves a very valid question.
Yeah.
Why can't adults like kawaii things? In the '70s, adults couldn't say they were kawaii.
They were supposed to think the characters were childish.
Go find my friend, Mogu! But in the '80s, things changed.
And Japan was becoming quite comfortable with its kawaii-ness.
Kawaii things started to gain a place in the culture.
At the same time, back in the USA, the closest thing to kawaii were probably these guys, or these guys.
I thought your Papa Smurf would be here by now.
But Papa Smurf was no match for Papa Tsuji, as Sanrio made their second attempt at muscling in on the biggest market in the world.
Why do I have the feeling I'm not anywhere near home? And they wouldn't be knocking on doors this time.
No, no, no.
Sanrio created a design department in the US, so Sanrio could appeal to what would be popular with fans here.
At Sanrio, we design happiness for the world.
Small gift, big smile! And finally, a big payoff for Papa Tsuji, as Sanrio Gift Gates swung open throughout the malls of America.
Kids couldn't believe their eyes.
A child walking into that store was in heaven.
You could purchase so much different product.
I remember when Sanrio opened its first store at the Beverly Center mall.
My sister and I went in there, and it was a Hello Kitty dream.
It's a whole world.
They have just everything.
Lunchboxes, cups, stickers.
You could walk around the store, pick three things and pay for it with your dollar.
It's the coolest place.
They were cool by design.
Store displays were perfect for luring children in.
They were getting an experience.
They touched it all.
It was like, "I don't know what I want.
I want everything.
" "Mom, look at this! I want to buy it.
I want to buy that.
This, too.
" I love these clothes.
Everyone was Hello Kitty obsessed.
Where did this come from? It's called Sanrio.
They do a lot of different lines.
Hello Kitty is the signature red line.
It's very inexpensive.
You can take that to the bank.
And Sanrio did.
As their dominance in the American market grew, so did their profits.
That's made us happy and motivated us to go for more.
With Hello Kitty's newfound success in the US, Papa Tsuji came out of the rabbit hole and gave Hello Kitty her own series.
But what would Kitty Mama say about that? Not that one.
The real one.
She was no stranger to causing controversy around Hello Kitty.
But what the animated series planned was just too far.
The animator told me they couldn't create the animation unless she had a mouth.
Yikes! I just thought, "Oh, okay.
" Not angry.
Just disappointed.
When Furry Tale Theater hit TV screens in 1987, classic stories like The Wizard of Oz were given a Sanrio twist, if you will.
Yikes! We're falling! And Hello Kitty had a mouth.
Not just any mouth.
She had quite a mouth on her.
Cat-nabbit! I'll never get home now.
After the animation, fans said it was weird that Hello Kitty had a mouth.
They said she didn't look like Hello Kitty.
We got a lot of criticism.
This doesn't look good, guys.
We thought she had no mouth.
Then we saw an animation where Hello Kitty was upset, and she started to cry, and her mouth opened up.
Pretty much filled her face, and we're going, "Wait! She's got a mouth!" - We never knew.
- What? You're not much help.
I believe that Kitty does not have a mouth, and her fans like that.
I decided Kitty will not have a mouth.
I don't draw a mouth.
Kitty Mama put her foot down about the mouth, but the animators ignored this motherly advice, and Hello Kitty continued to mouth off.
Oh.
I can feel my neck grow.
Though she now had her own TV show, a familiar problem started to swarm Hello Kitty once again.
I like all the Sanrio characters.
- Twin Stars, Badtz-Maru.
- Keroppi, Chococat.
There's so many of them.
So many that Sanrio began assembling an official list of the year's most popular characters.
And your mouth may be agape to discover that, in 1987, Marron Cream won the title.
In both '88 and '89, Minna No Tabo.
And, in '90, Keroppi.
You wanna be cool, you gotta wear Keroppi.
At the same time Hello Kitty's popularity was going down, Sanrio's two enormous theme parks were going up.
Puroland opened in 1990 and Harmony Land in 1991.
That was Mr.
Tsuji looking at the success of Disneyland in Japan and saying, "I can do something like that.
" Mr.
Tsuji is very competitive.
Hai.
But in this tale of cat and mouse, there was one clear winner.
1990 saw the Nikkei index in Tokyo suffer heavy losses.
Due to Japan's bubble bursting and the lull in Hello Kitty's popularity, the theme parks lost money.
And they would continue to do so for decades.
However, as Japan's economy spent the coming years recovering, Hello Kitty's popularity began recovering, as well.
And Japan's exotic blend of technology, cuisine, tradition and kawaii culture was becoming more than a Japanese anomaly.
- It was becoming - Cool.
And during the '90s, the epicenter of Japanese coolness was centered around a train station in Tokyo.
Harajuku was emerging as a fashion hot spot, and kawaii cuteness came to life in a fashion subculture.
And right there on the tassels and tiaras, the queen of kawaii, Hello Kitty.
I think the whole Harajuku idea really sort of opened people's eyes to design.
It opens a whole door to a whole other world of expressivity.
Expressivity that, up until now, Hello Kitty herself hadn't really been able to do.
But that, too, was changing, if you know what I mean.
I noticed that Hello Kitty was sometimes, not always, but sometimes depicted with a wink.
And I feel that that wink then became the transition of Hello Kitty going from a straight ahead cute figure to a cute, cool figure.
It was finally official.
By the end of the '90s, Hello Kitty was cool, something that was not lost on Sanrio's marketing division.
We began to rebrand the company, and concurrent with the Hello Kitty boom happening in Japan, and rebranded around Hello Kitty.
And when I say rebranding, I mean really turning Kitty from a character into a brand and treating her more like a celebrity brand, even.
When we started moving in that direction and went into licensing, created a relationship with Target, we were able to go into new product categories, such as consumer electronics.
Hello Kitty bedrooms, Hello Kitty posters, Hello Kitty travel bags, Hello Kitty holidays, Hello Kitty parties, Hello Kitty for Christmas.
And for Sanrio, all their Christmases had come at once as the new millennium came with a bang.
The end of the world as we know it.
Instead of society descending into madness, a different mania gripped the world.
And now, in the new century, kawaii has the right to be appreciated.
It was after 2000 when grown-ups can openly say that they love kawaii things.
It seemed like the world was finally ready to embrace the cute as grown-ups were proudly coming out as kawaii lovers.
And Hello Kitty had an announcement of her own.
Probably don't want to talk about her boyfriend.
Oh, we most definitely do.
Kitty's fans often ask if she has a boyfriend.
But we thought, Kitty being an idol, a boyfriend would have killed her popularity.
But is calling her an idol a bit of a stretch? Hello Kitty is an idol in Japan, and Japan takes idol worship very seriously.
So, J-pop idols need to maintain a kind of childhood-type innocence.
They have cuteness.
It's not really sexuality.
Fans have this fantasy relationship with them, so they have to maintain that.
However, in 1998, in a shocking announcement, Japan's most popular idol, Namie Amuro, told the world on television that she was dating her boyfriend.
Watching it, I was shocked, since it was a time that idols never revealed about their relationships.
I was wondering what was going to happen.
Then, all of the idols started talking about their boyfriends.
Kitty, also being an idol, I thought it wasn't very good.
Kitty has to announce that she has a boyfriend.
Otherwise, she will be left behind.
In March 1999, we announced that Hello Kitty has a boyfriend, Daniel.
So, when Dear Daniel came out, everybody assumed he was her boyfriend, but they're just friends.
Daniel isn't just your friend, is he, Kitty? He's something more.
The relationship between Kitty and Daniel was clearly complicated.
He's a Taurus, she's a Scorpio, so not sure what they expected.
But the relationship fans had with the couple was riotous, to say the least.
The claws came out at some McDonald's outlets overnight, as customers were frustrated they could not get their hands on Hello Kitty dolls.
Desperately hungry fans in Singapore went McCrazy over Kitty and Daniel wedding figures, fighting in the streets, shattering glass doors, ending up in the hospital.
Welcome to the toy industry.
Hello Kitty has a lot of passionate collectors, and certainly the collectors love to get their hands on the rare things.
With the McDonald's Happy Meal promotion that happened, people were desperate to get them, and they were really angry, and were competing in the stores, just as we saw with Cabbage Patch Kids, Transformers.
People get really anxious and angry when it comes to trying to get something they think they need, but they can't get.
So, Kitty had a boyfriend.
The only thing that could make her life more complete would be a pet.
That's really weird.
And in case you're wondering, unlike Kitty, who's not a kitty Right? this kitty is a kitty.
What do you call that? Well, you could call it confusing, or you could call it Charmmy.
Hello Kitty's father gave her Charmmy Kitty for her birthday, but it's a little controversial, because Hello Kitty's a cat owning a cat.
But, really, Hello Kitty's a little girl who happens to be a cat.
And Charmmy Kitty is more like a cat and has a cat personality.
Does that make sense? Fair enough.
What is it about Kitty White that allows her to speak and behave like a human being, while Charmmy Kitty cannot? I don't know.
It's not entirely unique.
There's also that evolutionary anomaly where Goofy can ice skate and talk Gosh! yet Pluto remains - well, Pluto.
- That's another story.
Indeed it is.
Into the 2000s, the subculture that grew near a Tokyo train station had grown into the name of a dog owned by a hotel chain heiress.
This is my baby, Harajuku my Japanese chihuahua.
A sure sign that the Harajuku train had very much left the station.
Celebrities started carrying something kitsch to be fashionable.
And characters like Kitty became an icon.
And Kitty didn't mix with the B-listers.
Mariah Carey.
Santa Claus.
Lady Gaga, Katy Perry I'm a crazy Hello Kitty lady.
But, hang on.
Seeing celebs with brands/toys is nothing new.
For enough money, you can get Paris to eat this or Arnie to drink this.
But, Sanrio assures us, the only thing their celebrities drank is the Hello Kitty Kool-Aid.
Sanrio doesn't have any formal paid relationships with any celebrities.
This mirror is so cute.
You know, we're just as surprised sometimes as everyone else when we see a certain celebrity with something Hello Kitty.
They all said they love Hello Kitty.
I love this, too.
It's adorable.
Lady Gaga loves Hello Kitty so much, she once transformed into her.
And when you think everyone had done everything I wanted to do something no one had ever done, bringing her to life on a bigger scale, which is diamonds.
- Diapers? - No.
I said diamonds.
Ah, diamonds.
Hello Kitty started as a simple coin purse and became a $50,000 piece of bling.
The coin purse is probably worth more.
The original coin purse could easily be worth three to five million dollars, 'cause there's only one.
So, like the superstars who worshiped her, Hello Kitty had become a household name and, occasionally, just a house.
And the reason The reason was definitely celebrities.
Stars are one thing, but Hello Kitty's galactic rise Hello Kitty is now in space.
is due in large part to other companies putting Hello Kitty's face on, well, just about anything.
We have done things like thermometers and paper shredders.
This is one of my old phone cases.
I have a Hello Kitty makeup brush set.
- I can get it.
- No need.
- It's right here.
- I have it in my bathroom.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, or ice tray.
I have a makeup mirror.
Again, right here.
We've also done Hello Kitty wine, Hello Kitty tarot cards Hello Kitty surge protector, breast pump, Chia planter, braces, gravestone.
- You could do anything and not fail.
- Anything? We have done things like toilet paper.
We've seen it all.
We've also done adult diapers.
Wait.
You did say diapers, right? - Yeah.
- Adult ones.
Now we've seen everything.
Okay, wait.
I have Hello Kitties you've never seen.
What? Like Hello Kitty duct tape, box cutters, Hello Kitty motor oil? She sits by my tub.
Oh, Hello Kitty shampoo, right? - No.
- Oh.
Then, what? The shoulder massager.
Oh.
Wait.
They didn't do that.
Or, as reporters would refer to it, uh, the Hello Kitty vibrator.
Oh.
They did do that.
What else could I say? It's a shoulder massager, when you have pain in your shoulder.
By 2014, there were 50,000 Hello Kitty branded products all around the globe, and Sanrio was the sixth largest licensor in the world, with $6.
5 billion in retail sales.
And no matter what that popularity list might say, for Sanrio there's one clear winner.
Hello Kitty has been always number one.
Well, if Hello Kitty is a cat, and let's be honest, chances are high, then she gave birth to a kitten called Kawaii.
Kawaii! But her kitten is growing up and having a period of rebellion as Sanrio expands their list of characters and stuff to include the likes of Gudetama and Aggretsuko.
Gudetama is an egg yolk, in case you're wondering.
Kawaii culture has changed tremendously since the 1970s, when it was born as part of girl culture, in the same way that girls have changed globally.
So, if girls and kawaii are changing around the world, where does that leave Hello Kitty? In 2017, Sanrio stocks slid 10%.
In that same year, Hello Kitty turned 43.
Who knows what that is in cat years? So the question is, can this old girl keep up? I think Hello Kitty is gonna be around forever.
Hello Kitty and her friends/not friends are trying to keep up as kawaii culture evolves.
Here's Chococat being worn by Hello Kitty.
And here's Kitty as a reversible turkey.
Time will tell what Hello Kitty becomes next.
But as she transforms back into a turkey, there's no doubt that she, more importantly, transformed people's lives.
I'm from Saint Louis, Missouri, and I think she was kind of my, um, gateway to escape.
Hello Kitty was everything to me.
I don't remember not having Hello Kitty in my life.
Hello Kitty will always be something that we look up to.
From the world stage to small beginnings.
Small gift, big smile.
This company consistently emphasizing about friendship and being happy.
Sanrio has made quite much of a contribution.
With Sanrio's wholesome values, Papa Tsuji created more than just a character.
- He created - A friend.
Hello Kitty is a thing, is an object.
No, no, she's not an object.
She's like a person.
Hello Kitty is friendship and all things pure and sweet and cute.
Hello Kitty is a superstar.
Hello Kitty is all those things.
She's whatever you want her to be.
She could mean so many things to so many people.
You don't know if she's black or white.
She's white, but that's the color of her paint.
She's kind of ambiguous.
Little girls everywhere identify with Hello Kitty, and love her.
So, call it a toy.
Call it a logo.
You can call it anything you will.
It's part of that blankness that allows you to fill in whatever you want Hello Kitty to be.
She could be a newscaster at CNN.
Need a mouth for that, wouldn't she? Okay, I see the point.
To Hello Kitty's papa, she's always been something much more simple.
So, there are three messages in Hello Kitty.
First is, you should be loved, and you need to be nice to others to be loved.
And the ribbon represents human connections.
We should get along with one another.
Also, having no mouth means we need to express with our actions, not only by words.
Those are the meanings.
Whatever Hello Kitty means to you, a toy, a brand, a cat, an English pianist Hello Kitty is one thing for sure.
She's a phenomenon.
Thank you for having me today.
Hai.
The Royal Police force has come under increased scrutiny.
Charges of corruption and police brutality have forced the chief of police to take extreme measures to get his force into line.
You have shamed this uniform.
And you have shamed me.
For the last time.
Do you know what that means? That means you get the box.
And what's in the box? Pain.
Suffering.
Humiliation.
Now Put out your left arm.
I don't want to do this.
You made me do this.
Now get out of my sight! Don't ever be late to work again! Meow, meow.
The power of Hello Kitty's cuteness has shamed and delighted the world for over 40 years.
It was like Hello Kitty sensation.
Hello Kitty is a lot of things.
She's a toy, a toothbrush, a toaster.
Toys for kids, and toys for adults.
From plush dolls to passenger jets, Hello Kitty's unblinking feline face is there, watching your face go Aww.
Just looking at her can make you happy.
From the streets of Japan to the catwalks of Paris, a celebrity among celebrities.
Hello Kitty is so cute.
She's the queen of kawaii.
Kawaii! She's a toy.
She's a brand.
She's worth over $5 billion a year.
Welcome to the toy industry.
Raking in more than most toy lines could ever dream.
Hello Kitty is the most beloved cat in the world.
Hello Kitty is not a cat.
- It's not a cat? - It's not a cat! And it only gets cuter from here.
Hold onto your cats.
These are The Toys that Made Us.
Hello Kitty, one of the world's most recognizable faces, with two eyes, six whiskers, a cute yellow nose, and, well, no mouth.
She doesn't have a mouth.
They never made her with a mouth.
Or did they? To solve the controversies around Hello Kitty's occasional mouthlessness, species - She's like a person.
- country of origin Did you know Hello Kitty is British? and gender - She's a she.
- That's an easy one.
we need to travel back to Japan, in the 1960s, where a dissatisfied bureaucrat had a dream.
Hello.
I'm CEO of Sanrio Incorporated, Shintaro Tsuji.
Better known today as Papa Tsuji.
Not only did he have a dream to sell small, delightful things that make people smile, he also had a motto.
Small gift, big smile.
With this motto Small gift, big smile.
Tsuji quit his government job and put all his savings into founding a company that would ultimately become the birthplace of Hello Kitty: Sanrio.
Small gift, big smile But that motto wasn't just catchy, it was a careful strategy.
If you look at the Japanese culture, it is one of giving of small gifts upon social occasions.
So I come to meet you, and I bring a very small gift.
So, the Sanrio concept or philosophy that we call "Small gift, big smile" was at the very core of that merchandising strategy.
In the beginning, for Tsuji, it was more about small gifts than big smiles.
He was selling things like slippers.
- Flip-flops.
- Teacups Kind of basic, everyday items.
He found that by adding one little strawberry, it became such value added in terms of cuteness.
Here, I have the first hit product of Sanrio.
Papa Tsuji had made teapots and smelly, old rubber flip-flops cute, at a time when Japan wasn't really known for cuteness.
Oh, wait.
That's not entirely true.
There was traditional Japanese Kokeshi Dolls, and also something called shÅjo manga, comic books for girls.
That was pretty cute.
But Papa Tsuji saw something more in these comics.
A way to grow his business, and less strawberries.
I hired Ado Mizumori and Takashi Yanase, who were famous comic artists and illustrators back then, and created products with their art.
I put their designs on notebooks and teacups.
This worked well enough, but across the Pacific, in the US, Papa Tsuji noticed how cute and successful Peanuts merchandise had become.
So, he licensed it for Japan, and it was a great success for Charles M.
Schulz.
We had to keep paying royalties.
Pretty soon, Papa Tsuji got sick of working for Peanuts, as it were, and instead of paying licensing fees We thought it'd be better to create our own designs.
We hired in-house designers.
They created Patty and Jimmy, and Bunny and Matty.
This bear, Coro Chan, eats the croquettes on his cheeks when he gets hungry.
Aww.
Cute.
Kind of.
But definitely not a hit, and Papa Tsuji needed one, and fast.
We must make a big profit.
Otherwise, we'd be in the red.
So, he began a quest to find the world's cutest animal.
We learned, among all the animals that could be characters, the number one was a dog.
Some religions don't like dogs.
The second most popular was white cat.
Good enough.
So, in 1974, Papa Tsuji and Sanrio designer Yuko Shimizu worked on their first white cat product, a cuddly, adorable Coin purse.
And the coin purse read, "Hello," with an exclamation point.
Hello, exclamation point, white kitty.
A-ha! Hello Kitty.
Yes.
This is how Hello Kitty came to be.
Papa Tsuji gave birth to a kitten that would change the world.
Hello Kitty started from here.
The most perfect embodiment of cuteness ever created.
Hello Kitty's perfect.
But there was no steamboat kitty here.
Unlike other iconic characters, Hello Kitty then looks exactly like Hello Kitty now.
And it was that look that quickly filled Papa Tsuji's coin purse.
People like it, all the housewives or particularly, like, high school, college students.
They all have, like, files or bags, or They have everything with Hello Kitty.
As sales in Japan grew, so, too, did Hello Kitty's backstory and her height, for that matter.
According to details on early products, her real name is Kitty White.
Her parents are George and Mary White.
Her twin sister's name is Mimmy.
She's a Scorpio.
She's five apples tall and weighs three apples.
Her blood type is Red Delicious.
Just joking.
It's actually A.
She is, of course, sweet, and she loves school, loves music.
You would too if you had your own grand piano.
Kitty has a grand piano.
I wish I had one.
So, her life is set just above that of Japanese girls.
It's also set 6,000 miles away.
She's not even Japanese.
That's right.
Hello Kitty is English.
Around the time Kitty was born, England was the dream country of all the girls in Japan.
So, we fit her in English life.
When Hello Kitty took Japan by storm, in the mid-'70s, it might have been due to her enviable upper-class lifestyle.
But it's more likely because She's kawaii.
- What's that? - Kawaii.
- Kawaii.
- Once more.
- Kawaii.
- Right, kawaii.
Kawaii.
Kawaii.
It's a Japanese word that means pretty or cute.
It really isn't just cute as an American might look at cute.
It's cute with a whole different dimension applied to it.
It's a genetic trait we've evolved to help us protect our young.
Big, round heads and foreheads, big eyes lower on the face, combined with soft, squishy, round bodies, trigger an automatic Aww.
It's why we might look at a character like this one and say, "Aww.
That's pretty cute.
" But make a few changes, and we say Kawaii! Papa Tsuji had created a kawaii monster, leaving mountains of money in its wake.
Japan was devastated by cuteness.
But Hello Kitty's world domination had only just begun.
Their next target, the USA.
In 1976, Hello Kitty went to Hollywood.
Well, a bit north of Hollywood.
Further.
Yeah, further.
Welcome to Sanrio's first store, in San Jose, California.
Small gift, big smile.
More like small town, big challenge.
A lot of the product being created at the time, because the brand was based in Japan, were things like chopsticks and rice bowls.
And, you know, of course, now everybody knows what those are, but 40 years ago, Japanese culture wasn't as well-established in society in North America as it is now.
Initially, Sanrio and Hello Kitty really didn't seem to fit in.
Because, in Japan, everything is much smaller.
Houses, offices, desks.
Everything is a lot smaller.
Paper size and notebook size for schools in Japan was different than in the US.
But Hello Kitty's biggest challenge was, unlike similar brands/toy lines, she didn't have a movie, cartoon, or comic.
It's so difficult to launch a character and build a fan base with no content and no entertainment.
Oh, and no mouth.
One of the first things they notice is she doesn't have a mouth.
Interestingly, this Sanrio character seen here has no mouth.
Of course, she has a mouth.
We just didn't feel it necessary to draw it in.
We didn't draw in every single whisker.
We didn't draw in every single little detail of Hello Kitty.
She's obviously an abstraction.
Well, whatever she was, it was nothing a bit of marketing couldn't fix.
We had no marketing in the early years.
They literally went door-to-door.
"Mr.
Store manager, this is Hello Kitty.
Do you know?" "I don't know Hello Kitty.
" "You don't know Hello Kitty? Very, very famous cute Japanese cat character, okay? So you buy.
" "I think that's kinda cute.
" "I write order for you.
Minimum order $300.
Sign here.
" And it worked.
It really worked.
It did work on part of the population.
Mainly, Japanese, Chinese and Korean people.
She became a symbol for Asian-Americans, as something that was theirs.
It was like the boys had Bruce Lee We girls had Hello Kitty.
Hello Kitty would scratch his eyes out.
I wouldn't put it past her.
With modest sales at best, Papa Tsuji pushed on and expanded around the country, and the team kept knocking on doors, but those suitcases were starting to get pretty heavy.
Our tagline, when we were out knocking on doors, was that we would have at least 100 new items every single month.
What separates Sanrio is that one company might bring out 100,000 units of one particular item.
Sanrio will bring out 1,000 units of 100 different items.
It was a new concept.
People hadn't seen all this little stuff before.
It's a lot of product.
And a lot of doors.
Business was tough.
Coming into the US market, Papa Tsuji adopted a new motto.
If I make the company and it goes bankrupt, it'll be a problem, so I wanted a company that could not go bankrupt.
Hmm.
This is, undeniably, a very good business strategy.
However, the best door-to-door salesman in the business, Andy Toyama, really needed to come clean with the Papa about the Kitty.
Frankly speaking, Sanrio didn't have a profit.
We had a couple of warehouses in South San Francisco that were just chock-full of inventory, but it was killing us.
It was just absolutely killing us.
She was really an unknown in the toy industry.
So, when parents were looking at things on the shelf, they picked all the Disney characters, the Sesame Street, and the characters they knew their child knew and liked.
Who is this great big cat with no mouth? To help answer that question, Papa Tsuji deployed the Sanrio team to harness the marketing know-how of Sesame Street's toy company, Child Guidance.
So, we helped to launch Hello Kitty into toys in the United States, and it was a dismal failure.
Papa Tsuji's no bankruptcy policy was not going well.
Naturally, he was not very happy.
I thought that we were at the brink of having the parent fold up our tent and ship it all back to Japan.
We got close to that happening.
As Sanrio in the US was hobbling about in ill-fitted flip-flops, back in Japan, Sanrio was leaping around the market like an agile cat, or a penguin, or a puppy, or any number of the other Sanrio characters that came out in the '70s, none of whom would appeal to girly girls as much as Hello Kitty.
Uh-oh.
My Melody appeals more to girly girls.
She's very sweet, and her fan base tends to be either young or more adult women.
Young or adult.
Kinda covers everyone.
Yes.
Well, she is cute.
And, not only that, My Melody sported two eyes, a nose and a mouth.
Hello, My Melody, and goodbye, Hello Kitty.
How cute is that? Pretty cute.
But it was too early for a victory dance.
My Melody herself faced yet more competition from with inside the Sanrio stable of animals and stuff.
- There was a delightfully formal penguin.
- Tuxedo Sam.
He had 365 bow ties.
Hello Kitty only had one, and she wore it in the wrong spot.
There was Little Twin Stars, Cheery Chums, Goropikadon, and the Vaudeville Duo.
It was one big happy Sanrio family.
The Sanrio characters, they're all in different families.
Oh.
Friends, then.
They're not friends.
Frenemies? They're not frenemies.
They're strangers.
They don't interact in Hello Kitty's world.
The only time they're together is if there's a celebration.
So, they can get together? They can, like when there's an anniversary or a party.
But not every Sanrio character was invited to that party.
I know the one character that bombed was Spottie Dottie.
There were more.
Lovee Days' days were numbered.
A cat and mouse pair that appeared only from the rear.
There was Syrup, a friend of Pompompurin from the '90s, who also appeared from the rear.
Of the more than 400 characters that Sanrio has created, they've had some successes with about a dozen of those characters.
In the late '70s, there was a good chance Papa Tsuji might lose his kitty.
But Papa Tsuji wasn't shedding any tears.
He was surrounding himself with a multitude of cuteness, and he took his expansive world back to the drawing board, as in, like, animation.
Sanrio now had an animation studio, and the first film it produced Not even close.
It was called Little Jumbo.
On this idyllic island paradise, the trees provide clean, fresh air and a bedside feeding service.
The Japanese kids were eating it up, too, as Sanrio's sales continued to grow.
But, in the late '70s, Hello Kitty was fast becoming lost in the rabbit hole of the creative wonderland that is Papa Tsuji's mind.
Mmm.
Hello Kitty was not smiling.
Well, we assume.
The question was, "Could she claw her way out of the kitty litter?" Of course she would, with the help of her mama.
- Yay! Apple pie! - Not that mama.
This one.
Yuko Yamaguchi, back then, the winner of sauce pans, and fishing rods, and that stuff.
But now, she's known as Kitty Mama.
She started at Sanrio in 1978.
When I came to Sanrio, I wasn't a big fan of Hello Kitty myself.
She noticed that all those interesting personality traits they deliberately designed to create longing within Japanese girls weren't being maximized.
Kitty wanted to be a professional pianist.
But there wasn't a single picture of her.
I thought, "That's not right.
" So, I drew a picture of the family's love, surrounding the grand piano, and told them that story.
Right there and then, the head of the division asked me to be the creator for Hello Kitty from that point on.
And thus, in 1980, Yuko Yamaguchi won the greatest prize of all.
She became the Hello Kitty chief designer and immediately began dressing her feline daughter in all manner of new outfits.
She always wore the same ribbon, same outfit.
I wanted to give her a lot of clothes, just like I had a lot.
But this innocent-sounding idea sounded the alarm at Sanrio.
In Sanrio, at the time, to change someone else's original design was unthinkable, but Yamaguchi was brave enough to do it.
And the bold moves from Kitty Mama weren't over yet.
But we made it that Kitty especially liked teddy bears, just like little girls in Japan or America.
During the '80s, as Kitty White evolved under the watchful eye of Kitty Mama, so, too, did Japan's kawaii culture.
And nowhere was this more personified than in the emerging Japanese pop music scene, and the very first genuine J-pop idol, Matsuda Seiko.
A mere teenager, she wore frilly, childlike clothes and giggled for the camera.
She defined what it meant to be a pop idol for generations of Japanese fans.
And, clutching her teddy bear, Kitty rode the new wave of Japanese pop culture, right to the very top of Sanrio's cast of characters and stuff.
And in the '80s, the Japanese population started to ask themselves a very valid question.
Yeah.
Why can't adults like kawaii things? In the '70s, adults couldn't say they were kawaii.
They were supposed to think the characters were childish.
Go find my friend, Mogu! But in the '80s, things changed.
And Japan was becoming quite comfortable with its kawaii-ness.
Kawaii things started to gain a place in the culture.
At the same time, back in the USA, the closest thing to kawaii were probably these guys, or these guys.
I thought your Papa Smurf would be here by now.
But Papa Smurf was no match for Papa Tsuji, as Sanrio made their second attempt at muscling in on the biggest market in the world.
Why do I have the feeling I'm not anywhere near home? And they wouldn't be knocking on doors this time.
No, no, no.
Sanrio created a design department in the US, so Sanrio could appeal to what would be popular with fans here.
At Sanrio, we design happiness for the world.
Small gift, big smile! And finally, a big payoff for Papa Tsuji, as Sanrio Gift Gates swung open throughout the malls of America.
Kids couldn't believe their eyes.
A child walking into that store was in heaven.
You could purchase so much different product.
I remember when Sanrio opened its first store at the Beverly Center mall.
My sister and I went in there, and it was a Hello Kitty dream.
It's a whole world.
They have just everything.
Lunchboxes, cups, stickers.
You could walk around the store, pick three things and pay for it with your dollar.
It's the coolest place.
They were cool by design.
Store displays were perfect for luring children in.
They were getting an experience.
They touched it all.
It was like, "I don't know what I want.
I want everything.
" "Mom, look at this! I want to buy it.
I want to buy that.
This, too.
" I love these clothes.
Everyone was Hello Kitty obsessed.
Where did this come from? It's called Sanrio.
They do a lot of different lines.
Hello Kitty is the signature red line.
It's very inexpensive.
You can take that to the bank.
And Sanrio did.
As their dominance in the American market grew, so did their profits.
That's made us happy and motivated us to go for more.
With Hello Kitty's newfound success in the US, Papa Tsuji came out of the rabbit hole and gave Hello Kitty her own series.
But what would Kitty Mama say about that? Not that one.
The real one.
She was no stranger to causing controversy around Hello Kitty.
But what the animated series planned was just too far.
The animator told me they couldn't create the animation unless she had a mouth.
Yikes! I just thought, "Oh, okay.
" Not angry.
Just disappointed.
When Furry Tale Theater hit TV screens in 1987, classic stories like The Wizard of Oz were given a Sanrio twist, if you will.
Yikes! We're falling! And Hello Kitty had a mouth.
Not just any mouth.
She had quite a mouth on her.
Cat-nabbit! I'll never get home now.
After the animation, fans said it was weird that Hello Kitty had a mouth.
They said she didn't look like Hello Kitty.
We got a lot of criticism.
This doesn't look good, guys.
We thought she had no mouth.
Then we saw an animation where Hello Kitty was upset, and she started to cry, and her mouth opened up.
Pretty much filled her face, and we're going, "Wait! She's got a mouth!" - We never knew.
- What? You're not much help.
I believe that Kitty does not have a mouth, and her fans like that.
I decided Kitty will not have a mouth.
I don't draw a mouth.
Kitty Mama put her foot down about the mouth, but the animators ignored this motherly advice, and Hello Kitty continued to mouth off.
Oh.
I can feel my neck grow.
Though she now had her own TV show, a familiar problem started to swarm Hello Kitty once again.
I like all the Sanrio characters.
- Twin Stars, Badtz-Maru.
- Keroppi, Chococat.
There's so many of them.
So many that Sanrio began assembling an official list of the year's most popular characters.
And your mouth may be agape to discover that, in 1987, Marron Cream won the title.
In both '88 and '89, Minna No Tabo.
And, in '90, Keroppi.
You wanna be cool, you gotta wear Keroppi.
At the same time Hello Kitty's popularity was going down, Sanrio's two enormous theme parks were going up.
Puroland opened in 1990 and Harmony Land in 1991.
That was Mr.
Tsuji looking at the success of Disneyland in Japan and saying, "I can do something like that.
" Mr.
Tsuji is very competitive.
Hai.
But in this tale of cat and mouse, there was one clear winner.
1990 saw the Nikkei index in Tokyo suffer heavy losses.
Due to Japan's bubble bursting and the lull in Hello Kitty's popularity, the theme parks lost money.
And they would continue to do so for decades.
However, as Japan's economy spent the coming years recovering, Hello Kitty's popularity began recovering, as well.
And Japan's exotic blend of technology, cuisine, tradition and kawaii culture was becoming more than a Japanese anomaly.
- It was becoming - Cool.
And during the '90s, the epicenter of Japanese coolness was centered around a train station in Tokyo.
Harajuku was emerging as a fashion hot spot, and kawaii cuteness came to life in a fashion subculture.
And right there on the tassels and tiaras, the queen of kawaii, Hello Kitty.
I think the whole Harajuku idea really sort of opened people's eyes to design.
It opens a whole door to a whole other world of expressivity.
Expressivity that, up until now, Hello Kitty herself hadn't really been able to do.
But that, too, was changing, if you know what I mean.
I noticed that Hello Kitty was sometimes, not always, but sometimes depicted with a wink.
And I feel that that wink then became the transition of Hello Kitty going from a straight ahead cute figure to a cute, cool figure.
It was finally official.
By the end of the '90s, Hello Kitty was cool, something that was not lost on Sanrio's marketing division.
We began to rebrand the company, and concurrent with the Hello Kitty boom happening in Japan, and rebranded around Hello Kitty.
And when I say rebranding, I mean really turning Kitty from a character into a brand and treating her more like a celebrity brand, even.
When we started moving in that direction and went into licensing, created a relationship with Target, we were able to go into new product categories, such as consumer electronics.
Hello Kitty bedrooms, Hello Kitty posters, Hello Kitty travel bags, Hello Kitty holidays, Hello Kitty parties, Hello Kitty for Christmas.
And for Sanrio, all their Christmases had come at once as the new millennium came with a bang.
The end of the world as we know it.
Instead of society descending into madness, a different mania gripped the world.
And now, in the new century, kawaii has the right to be appreciated.
It was after 2000 when grown-ups can openly say that they love kawaii things.
It seemed like the world was finally ready to embrace the cute as grown-ups were proudly coming out as kawaii lovers.
And Hello Kitty had an announcement of her own.
Probably don't want to talk about her boyfriend.
Oh, we most definitely do.
Kitty's fans often ask if she has a boyfriend.
But we thought, Kitty being an idol, a boyfriend would have killed her popularity.
But is calling her an idol a bit of a stretch? Hello Kitty is an idol in Japan, and Japan takes idol worship very seriously.
So, J-pop idols need to maintain a kind of childhood-type innocence.
They have cuteness.
It's not really sexuality.
Fans have this fantasy relationship with them, so they have to maintain that.
However, in 1998, in a shocking announcement, Japan's most popular idol, Namie Amuro, told the world on television that she was dating her boyfriend.
Watching it, I was shocked, since it was a time that idols never revealed about their relationships.
I was wondering what was going to happen.
Then, all of the idols started talking about their boyfriends.
Kitty, also being an idol, I thought it wasn't very good.
Kitty has to announce that she has a boyfriend.
Otherwise, she will be left behind.
In March 1999, we announced that Hello Kitty has a boyfriend, Daniel.
So, when Dear Daniel came out, everybody assumed he was her boyfriend, but they're just friends.
Daniel isn't just your friend, is he, Kitty? He's something more.
The relationship between Kitty and Daniel was clearly complicated.
He's a Taurus, she's a Scorpio, so not sure what they expected.
But the relationship fans had with the couple was riotous, to say the least.
The claws came out at some McDonald's outlets overnight, as customers were frustrated they could not get their hands on Hello Kitty dolls.
Desperately hungry fans in Singapore went McCrazy over Kitty and Daniel wedding figures, fighting in the streets, shattering glass doors, ending up in the hospital.
Welcome to the toy industry.
Hello Kitty has a lot of passionate collectors, and certainly the collectors love to get their hands on the rare things.
With the McDonald's Happy Meal promotion that happened, people were desperate to get them, and they were really angry, and were competing in the stores, just as we saw with Cabbage Patch Kids, Transformers.
People get really anxious and angry when it comes to trying to get something they think they need, but they can't get.
So, Kitty had a boyfriend.
The only thing that could make her life more complete would be a pet.
That's really weird.
And in case you're wondering, unlike Kitty, who's not a kitty Right? this kitty is a kitty.
What do you call that? Well, you could call it confusing, or you could call it Charmmy.
Hello Kitty's father gave her Charmmy Kitty for her birthday, but it's a little controversial, because Hello Kitty's a cat owning a cat.
But, really, Hello Kitty's a little girl who happens to be a cat.
And Charmmy Kitty is more like a cat and has a cat personality.
Does that make sense? Fair enough.
What is it about Kitty White that allows her to speak and behave like a human being, while Charmmy Kitty cannot? I don't know.
It's not entirely unique.
There's also that evolutionary anomaly where Goofy can ice skate and talk Gosh! yet Pluto remains - well, Pluto.
- That's another story.
Indeed it is.
Into the 2000s, the subculture that grew near a Tokyo train station had grown into the name of a dog owned by a hotel chain heiress.
This is my baby, Harajuku my Japanese chihuahua.
A sure sign that the Harajuku train had very much left the station.
Celebrities started carrying something kitsch to be fashionable.
And characters like Kitty became an icon.
And Kitty didn't mix with the B-listers.
Mariah Carey.
Santa Claus.
Lady Gaga, Katy Perry I'm a crazy Hello Kitty lady.
But, hang on.
Seeing celebs with brands/toys is nothing new.
For enough money, you can get Paris to eat this or Arnie to drink this.
But, Sanrio assures us, the only thing their celebrities drank is the Hello Kitty Kool-Aid.
Sanrio doesn't have any formal paid relationships with any celebrities.
This mirror is so cute.
You know, we're just as surprised sometimes as everyone else when we see a certain celebrity with something Hello Kitty.
They all said they love Hello Kitty.
I love this, too.
It's adorable.
Lady Gaga loves Hello Kitty so much, she once transformed into her.
And when you think everyone had done everything I wanted to do something no one had ever done, bringing her to life on a bigger scale, which is diamonds.
- Diapers? - No.
I said diamonds.
Ah, diamonds.
Hello Kitty started as a simple coin purse and became a $50,000 piece of bling.
The coin purse is probably worth more.
The original coin purse could easily be worth three to five million dollars, 'cause there's only one.
So, like the superstars who worshiped her, Hello Kitty had become a household name and, occasionally, just a house.
And the reason The reason was definitely celebrities.
Stars are one thing, but Hello Kitty's galactic rise Hello Kitty is now in space.
is due in large part to other companies putting Hello Kitty's face on, well, just about anything.
We have done things like thermometers and paper shredders.
This is one of my old phone cases.
I have a Hello Kitty makeup brush set.
- I can get it.
- No need.
- It's right here.
- I have it in my bathroom.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, or ice tray.
I have a makeup mirror.
Again, right here.
We've also done Hello Kitty wine, Hello Kitty tarot cards Hello Kitty surge protector, breast pump, Chia planter, braces, gravestone.
- You could do anything and not fail.
- Anything? We have done things like toilet paper.
We've seen it all.
We've also done adult diapers.
Wait.
You did say diapers, right? - Yeah.
- Adult ones.
Now we've seen everything.
Okay, wait.
I have Hello Kitties you've never seen.
What? Like Hello Kitty duct tape, box cutters, Hello Kitty motor oil? She sits by my tub.
Oh, Hello Kitty shampoo, right? - No.
- Oh.
Then, what? The shoulder massager.
Oh.
Wait.
They didn't do that.
Or, as reporters would refer to it, uh, the Hello Kitty vibrator.
Oh.
They did do that.
What else could I say? It's a shoulder massager, when you have pain in your shoulder.
By 2014, there were 50,000 Hello Kitty branded products all around the globe, and Sanrio was the sixth largest licensor in the world, with $6.
5 billion in retail sales.
And no matter what that popularity list might say, for Sanrio there's one clear winner.
Hello Kitty has been always number one.
Well, if Hello Kitty is a cat, and let's be honest, chances are high, then she gave birth to a kitten called Kawaii.
Kawaii! But her kitten is growing up and having a period of rebellion as Sanrio expands their list of characters and stuff to include the likes of Gudetama and Aggretsuko.
Gudetama is an egg yolk, in case you're wondering.
Kawaii culture has changed tremendously since the 1970s, when it was born as part of girl culture, in the same way that girls have changed globally.
So, if girls and kawaii are changing around the world, where does that leave Hello Kitty? In 2017, Sanrio stocks slid 10%.
In that same year, Hello Kitty turned 43.
Who knows what that is in cat years? So the question is, can this old girl keep up? I think Hello Kitty is gonna be around forever.
Hello Kitty and her friends/not friends are trying to keep up as kawaii culture evolves.
Here's Chococat being worn by Hello Kitty.
And here's Kitty as a reversible turkey.
Time will tell what Hello Kitty becomes next.
But as she transforms back into a turkey, there's no doubt that she, more importantly, transformed people's lives.
I'm from Saint Louis, Missouri, and I think she was kind of my, um, gateway to escape.
Hello Kitty was everything to me.
I don't remember not having Hello Kitty in my life.
Hello Kitty will always be something that we look up to.
From the world stage to small beginnings.
Small gift, big smile.
This company consistently emphasizing about friendship and being happy.
Sanrio has made quite much of a contribution.
With Sanrio's wholesome values, Papa Tsuji created more than just a character.
- He created - A friend.
Hello Kitty is a thing, is an object.
No, no, she's not an object.
She's like a person.
Hello Kitty is friendship and all things pure and sweet and cute.
Hello Kitty is a superstar.
Hello Kitty is all those things.
She's whatever you want her to be.
She could mean so many things to so many people.
You don't know if she's black or white.
She's white, but that's the color of her paint.
She's kind of ambiguous.
Little girls everywhere identify with Hello Kitty, and love her.
So, call it a toy.
Call it a logo.
You can call it anything you will.
It's part of that blankness that allows you to fill in whatever you want Hello Kitty to be.
She could be a newscaster at CNN.
Need a mouth for that, wouldn't she? Okay, I see the point.
To Hello Kitty's papa, she's always been something much more simple.
So, there are three messages in Hello Kitty.
First is, you should be loved, and you need to be nice to others to be loved.
And the ribbon represents human connections.
We should get along with one another.
Also, having no mouth means we need to express with our actions, not only by words.
Those are the meanings.
Whatever Hello Kitty means to you, a toy, a brand, a cat, an English pianist Hello Kitty is one thing for sure.
She's a phenomenon.
Thank you for having me today.
Hai.