Hello Kitty, Globalization, and Localization

8 December 2006, 0501 EST

I gave My final lecture for “Introduction to International Politics” today. It focused on the cultural dimension of globalization. After my daughter insisted I bring her Hello Kitty doll to work with me, I decided to use Hello Kitty as a thematic anchor for my discussion of various ways of thinking about identity, culture, and contemporary global processes.

It turns out that this makes even more sense than I realized at the time. My wife pointed me to the introductory chapter of Ken Belson’s and Brian Bremmer’s Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon. The creators of Hello Kitty, it turns out, eschewed creating any sort of a back story for the character, allowing consumers to project their own fantasies and aspirations onto her. She’s a brand qua brand; a global product with infinite possibilities for localization.* At the same time, she’s been an important vector for the spread of Japanese kawaii sensibilities into other cultures. Many American toys and cartoons, for example, now involve stereotypically kawaii elements.

*On this point, I highly recommend Patrick Jackson and Peter Mandavelle’s discussion of translation in Harry Potter and International Relations, which I assigned for the lecture. An extreme form of Hello Kitty “translation” can be found at the venerable website of the “Hello Cthulhu” cartoon.

Filed as: Globalization and Hello Kitty

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.