Hello Kitty - despite having a name that’s 50 percent devoted to the term that refers to a young cat - is no feline. She is, rather, a little girl, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“She’s never depicted on all fours,” Christine R Yano, an anthropologist with the University of Hawaii who is curator of a Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in October, told the newspaper.
It’s not a matter of opinion, either, Yano said. When she was preparing written texts for the museum’s exhibit, she made the mistake of referring to Hello Kitty as, well, a cat.
“I was corrected - very firmly,” Yano told the Times. “That’s one correction Sanrio (the company that owns the character) made for my script for the show.”
“Hello Kitty emerged in the 1970s, when the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain,” Yano told the Times. “They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealised childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time.”
