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National Geographic

How Hello Kitty helped post-WWII Japan conquer the world

(The U.S. forced them into internment camps. Here's how Japanese Americans started over.) Rebranding a nation is no easy feat, especially when the scars of war mar its reputation. Japan's reputational rebirth began partly at a shoe company in the 1970s when designer Yuko Shimizu's drawing of a white cat with a bow on her ear changed the course of Japanese history. Hello Kitty was created in 1974 by designers at Sanrio Inc., a Japanese company known then for cutesy, flower-adorned rubber sandals. The character rocketed toward meteoric success in the '70s and '80s–especially in the West, with crazed American fans, brick-and-mortar Sanrio stores opening in the United States, and thousands of products on the market. The beloved character ushered kawaii (which roughly translates to 'cute' or 'adorable') culture into global consciousness and opened the floodgates for a new Japanese identity. 'Kawaii is easy to use as an empty sign and inject it with your own views as a brand. Its mechanism is to affect emotion and inspire people to feel nurturing towards it–so it's a convenient stealth vehicle to soften the image of companies and brands,' says Hui-Ying Kerr, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, whose research has focused on Japanese consumer culture. Kawaii, with roots in Japanese 'girl culture,' is known for a visual aesthetic of simplicity, hyper-cuteness, and childlike innocence. It was originally a space of safety and empowerment for disenfranchised groups in Japan. Student activists in the 1960s and '80s female shōjo fans used the playful subculture to rebel against rigid, nationalist hierarchies of aggression, explains Clemson University Japanese language professor Kumiko Saito. This early version of kawaii was radical—an act of resistance wrapped in sweetness. But the emotional pull of kawaii didn't go unnoticed. Watching closely, Japanese business and government institutions discovered a lucrative opportunity. A grassroots aesthetic became a national strategy: a soft power mechanism that leveraged kawaii's inviting innocence to reframe Japan's global image. Hello Kitty—expressionless, apolitical, and endlessly adaptable—was the perfect ambassador. The global influence of kawaii culture A Hello Kitty–themed Haruka express train rolls between Kansai International Airport and Kyoto. Photograph by Leopold von Ungern, Stockimo/Alamy Stock Photo World War II solidified deep political and cultural tensions between the United States and Japan. Yet by 1983—less than four decades after the war's end—Hello Kitty had become UNICEF's official children's ambassador to the U.S. By the early 2000s, the Japanese government had fully embraced kawaii as a strategic tool of soft power. Its 'Cool Japan' initiative leveraged popular culture—including anime, fashion, and kawaii icons like Hello Kitty—to 'strengthen the ties between Japan and other countries.' Through this campaign, Hello Kitty was named Ambassador of Tourism to Taiwan and South Korea—two nations that had experienced brutal occupation under Japanese imperial rule just decades earlier. The kawaii aesthetic is so successful as a soft power tool because it provides a cloak of gentle innocence for Japan. 'It's about storytelling, flexibility, and the ability to tell adaptive stories about who you are as a people. Bureaucrats and politicians sought to recreate what Japan is,' says Dan White, a cultural anthropologist and research affiliate at the University of Cambridge, of Japan's unique transformative capabilities. Kawaii became not just an aesthetic, but Japan's global persona. From Sanrio's multibillion-dollar merchandise empire to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' 2008 appointment of 'Cute Ambassadors,' young women in kawaii fashion were deployed as cultural mascots at international expos. In an interview, ambassador Aoki Misako described her kawaii apparel as 'combative clothing…[that] can save one from images of a negative self.'