![]() In its day, Kitten Writing was a subversive thing: It attacked a bedrock of Japanese tradition, calligraphy, and created a secret language that divided children from adults. It was a spontaneous, nationwide revolution of girly handwriting that had to be banned in schools after 55 percent of the nation’s young schoolgirls started using it. There was no magazine, pop star or television show linked to it. The weird thing is, no one knows how it started. The result of this particular trend has not gone well for Japanese signage or T-shirts abroad. Kitten writing also involved the use of English – often deliberately childlike, incorrect English – to add some hippy glamour. This style worked its way into the entire kanji alphabet and soon enough no one knew what the girls were writing. It was literally transforming every character into a cutesy, unreadable picture: Kitten faces, tiny trees, cherries, birds, caterpillars. The new alphabet – dubbed “kitten writing” – wasn’t just dotting “i’s” with hearts. (Sexism also led to the hiragana alphabet and the “ladies dialect” of softened spoken Japanese, albeit hundreds of years before). Whereas Japanese writing came from a calligraphic tradition of dense, thick brushstrokes, schoolgirls started using a simpler method of writing characters. In the 1970’s, schoolgirls started emphasizing this childishness in their writing. Kawaii is childish and innocent, traits adopted for centuries by demure Japanese women long familiar with powerless roles. Street signs show cars squinting from pain when colliding with a bicycle (The bike remains expressionless). Cities, prefectures and towns all have mascots. Road barriers are shaped like dolphins, pink rabbits or friendly bears. (“Everyone is very cute / And therefore everyone is pitiable!”) “Mina Totemo Kawaii Kedo / Dakara Totemo Kawaisou Nanda Keredo!” The word goes back to The Tale of Genji, a novel written in the 11th Century by a lady who used it to mean pitiable, though these days it means “ it makes me want to protect it.” I’ve heard fresh bread described as kawaii and I’ve heard the word “kawaii” described as “the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese.” It describes Hello Kitty, pink cakes and mops with faces, but also inept foreigners, fireworks and the Shinkansen (with or without a face). She is part of a broader embrace of cuteness in Japan called kawaii (rhymes with “ Hawaii”). Since then she’s been a motorcycle, an airplane, a bus, a coffee saucer, several ice cream bars (where you bite her cute little face off) and even kimono. I learned that Hello Kitty’s last name is “White” and her first name is “Kitty.” She’s as tall as five apples and weighs as much as three. The package encourages you to put them on your refrigerator.Ī Hello Kitty memorabilia collection rolled into the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum last month. You can even buy enormous plastic eyes with batteries that blink occasionally. There are slippers with faces on the packages. Mops have faces – decidedly malevolent faces, perhaps to inspire confidence in their dust-fighting abilities. My grocery store’s fish market has a cartoon fish looking concerned. My city’s tallest skyscraper has a mascot: it’s the skyscraper with a face. “Battle not with Hello Kitty lest ye become Hello Kitty and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you with huge eyes and a helpless disposition.” – Friedrich Nietzsche ![]()
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